The Printed and the Built: Architecture, Print Culture and Public Debate in the Nineteenth Century 9781350038417, 9781350038400, 9781350038387, 9781350038370

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Contributors
Introduction: A Storehouse of Ideas Mari Hvattum and Anne Hultzsch
PART ONE: Architecture and Print Culture in the Nineteenth Century
‘The Public Square of the Modern Age’: Architecture and the Rise of the Illustrated Press in the Early Nineteenth Century Barry Bergdoll
The Past in Print: Ancient Buildings Represented by Engraving, Etching andLithography in Early-Nineteenth-Century England Stephen Bann
Architecture’s Print Complex: Palloy’s Bastille and the Death ofArchitecture Maarten Delbeke
Imprinting Patriotism: Etruria and Egypt in Papal Rome(1834–41) Richard Wittman
X-Screens: Röntgen Architecture Beatriz Colomina
PART TWO: Printed Places
Bibliotopography Victor Plahte Tschudi
Cablegram Mari Lending
Cartoon Michela Rosso
Colour Mari Hvattum
Column Anne Hultzsch
Criticism Christina Contandriopoulos
Description Adrian Forty
Encyclopedia Helge Jordheim
Exhibition Léa-Catherine Szacka
Feuilleton Marit Grøtta
Fiction Emma Cheatle
Handbook Petra Brouwer
Libel Timothy Hyde
Masthead Anne Hultzsch
Movables Tim Anstey
Murder Mari Hvattum
Pamphlet Irene Cheng
Paratexts Helen Smith
Past Sine Halkjelsvik Bjordal
Review Wallis Miller
Sex Barbara Penner
Silhouette Richard Taws
Street Views André Tavares
Tidings Mathilde Simonsen Da
Xylography Iver Tangen Stensrud
Index

Citation preview

The Printed and the Built

The Printed and the Built Architecture, Print Culture and Public Debate in the Nineteenth Century

EDITED BY MARI HVATTUM ANNE HULTZSCH

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2018 Editorial content and introductions © Mari Hvattum and Anne Hultzsch, 2018 ‘X-ray visions’ © Beatriz Colomina ‘Street-view’ © André Tavares Mari Hvattum and Anne Hultzsch have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. Cover design by Eleanor Rose Cover image: Le Palais de l’exposition universelle de 1867, Detail of the building of the circular grand hall, L’Illustration, 25 August 1866 © L’Illustration (www.lillustration.com) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hvattum, Mari, 1966- editor. | Hultzsch, Anne, editor. Title: The printed and the built: architecture, print culture, and public debate in the nineteenth century/[editors] Mari Hvattum and Anne Hultzsch. Description: New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2018. Identifiers: LCCN 2017049018 | ISBN 9781350038417 (hardback: alk. paper) | ISBN 9781350038400 (pbk.: alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Mass media and architecture–History–19th century. | Architecture and society–History–19th century. | Visual communication–History–19th century. | Communication and culture–History–19th century. Classification: LCC NA2543.M37 P75 2018 | DDC 720.1/03–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017049018 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-3841-7 PB: 978-1-3500-3840-0 ePDF: 978-1-3500-3837-0 eBook: 978-1-3500-3839-4 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Contributors 

VII

Introduction: A Storehouse of Ideas  Mari Hvattum and Anne Hultzsch 

1

PART ONE:  Architecture and Print Culture in the Nineteenth Century 

25

‘The Public Square of the Modern Age’: Architecture and the Rise of the Illustrated Press in the Early Nineteenth Century  Barry Bergdoll  27 The Past in Print: Ancient Buildings Represented by Engraving, Etching and Lithography in Early-Nineteenth-Century England  Stephen Bann  51 Architecture’s Print Complex: Palloy’s Bastille and the Death of Architecture  Maarten Delbeke  73 Imprinting Patriotism: Etruria and Egypt in Papal Rome (1834–41)  Richard Wittman  97 X-Screens: Röntgen Architecture  Beatriz Colomina  121

PART TWO:  Printed Places 

143

Bibliotopography  Victor Plahte Tschudi  Cablegram  Mari Lending  Cartoon  Michela Rosso  Colour  Mari Hvattum 

145

151 157

165

Column  Anne Hultzsch 

171

Criticism  Christina Contandriopoulos 

177

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CONTENTS

Description  Adrian Forty 

183

Encyclopedia  Helge Jordheim 

189

Exhibition  Léa-Catherine Szacka  Feuilleton  Marit Grøtta 

201

Fiction  Emma Cheatle 

205

Handbook  Petra Brouwer  Libel  Timothy Hyde 

211

219

Masthead  Anne Hultzsch 

225

Movables  Tim Anstey 

231

Murder  Mari Hvattum 

237

Pamphlet  Irene Cheng 

245

Paratexts  Helen Smith 

251

Past  Sine Halkjelsvik Bjordal  Review  Wallis Miller  Sex  Barbara Penner 

259

265 271

Silhouette  Richard Taws 

277

Street Views  André Tavares 

283

Tidings  Mathilde Simonsen Dahl  Xylography  Iver Tangen Stensrud 

Index 

301

195

289 295

Contributors Tim Anstey is an architect and architectural historian; professor at The Oslo School of Architecture and Design where he directs the school’s PhD programme. He also directs the research project Things That Move, soon to materialize as a book. Stephen Bann is an art historian and cultural historian; emeritus professor and senior research fellow at Bristol University. His writings include several books on nineteenth-century historical and visual culture, from The Clothing of Clio (1984) to Distinguished Images: Prints in the Visual Economy of Nineteenth-Century France (2013). Barry Bergdoll is Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University and served as chief curator of architecture and design at MOMA, New York, from 2007 to 2013. His books include Léon Vaudoyer: Historicism in the Age of Industry (1994) and European Architecture 1750–1890 (2000). He has organized numerous exhibitions, including Henri Labrouste: Structure Brought to Light (2012). Sine Halkjelsvik Bjordal has a master’s in rhetoric from the University of Oslo. She is presently a PhD student in cultural history at the same institution and part of the research project The Printed and the Built. Architecture and Public Debate in Modern Europe. Petra Brouwer is an assistant professor of architectural history at the University of Amsterdam and editor-in-chief of Architectural Histories. Journal of the European Architectural History Network (EAHN) since 2017. Specializing in nineteenth-century textbooks, Brouwer’s World Histories of Architecture (ed. w/Martin Bressani and Christopher Drew Armstrong) is forthcoming in 2018. Emma Cheatle is a postdoctoral research fellow at Newcastle University Humanities Research Institute. Interested in creative critical forms of architectural writing, Cheatle currently researches the architecture of maternity from 1750 to 1880. Her book Part-Architecture: The Maison de Verre, Duchamp, Domesticity and Desire in 1930s Paris was published in 2016. Irene Cheng is an architectural historian and assistant professor at the California College of the Arts. Her current book project, The Shape of Utopia: The Architecture of Radical Reform in NineteenthCentury America, explores architectural projects affiliated with anarchist, socialist, abolitionist, free love, spiritualist and other radical antebellum movements. Beatriz Colomina is a professor of architectural history and theory at Princeton University where she directs the program Media and Modernity. Author of Privacy and Publicity: Architecture as Mass Media (1994), Domesticity at War (2007) and numerous other books, she is a pioneer in the study of architecture and mediation.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Christina Contandriopoulos is a professor of architectural history at Université du Québec à Montréal. Specializing in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century architecture, her recent work examines the utopian tradition in architecture. Contandriopoulos edited Architectural Theory: An Anthology from 1871 to 2005 (w/H.F. Mallgrave, 2008) and The Companion to the History of Nineteenth-Century Architecture (w/Martin Bressani, 2017). Mathilde Simonsen Dahl is an architect and PhD student at The Oslo School of Architecture and Design with a thesis on ephemeral architecture in nineteenth-century Oslo. She is affiliated to the research project The Printed and the Built. Architecture and Public Debate in Modern Europe. Maarten Delbeke is a professor of architectural history at ETH, Zurich, and until 2017 editorin-chief of Architectural Histories. The Journal of the European Architectural History Network (EAHN). Delbeke specializes in seventeenth- to nineteenth-century architecture and art. His recent publications include The Art of Religion. Sforza Pallavicino and Art Theory in Bernini’s Rome (2012). Adrian Forty is Emeritus Professor of Architectural History at The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. His books include Objects of Desire. Design and Society since 1750 (1986), Words and Buildings. A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture (2000), and Concrete and Culture: A Material History (2012). Marit Grøtta is an associate professor of comparative literature at the University of Oslo. Her research interests include visuality in modernist literature (Proust, Kafka, Woolf) as well as nineteenth-century visual culture. Her recent book Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics: The Gaze of the Flâneur and Nineteenth-Century Media was published in 2015. Anne Hultzsch is a postdoctoral fellow at The Oslo School of Architecture and Design and a teaching fellow at The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. Her recent publications include the monograph Architecture, Travellers and Writers: Constructing Histories of Perception 1640–1950 (2014). Mari Hvattum is a professor of architectural history and theory at The Oslo School of Architecture and Design, and leader of the research project The Printed and the Built. Architecture and Public Debate in Modern Europe. She has written, for example, Gottfried Semper and the Problem of Historicism (2004), and Heinrich Ernst Schirmer (2014). Timothy Hyde is an architectural historian and is the Clarence H. Blackall Associate Professor at the MIT Department of Architecture. He is the author of Constitutional Modernism: Architecture and Civil Society in Cuba and a forthcoming book on British debates on architecture, ugliness and aesthetic judgement. Helge Jordheim is a cultural historian and professor at the University of Oslo. His research interests include the synchronizing of time and the structuring of knowledge. His recent publications are The Body and Its Images in Eighteenth-Century Europe (ed. w/Sabine Arnaud, 2012) and Civilizing Emotions. Concepts in Nineteenth-Century Asia and Europe (ed. w/Margrit Pernau, 2015).

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ix

Mari Lending is a literature scholar and architectural historian; professor of architectural history and theory at The Oslo School of Architecture and Design. Her books include Plaster Monuments: Architecture and the Power of Reproduction (2017); A Feeling of History (w/Peter Zumthor 2017) and Modelling Time (w/Mari Hvattum, 2014). Wallis Miller is the Charles P. Graves Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Kentucky, specializing in nineteenth- and twentieth-century German and European architecture. Her writing focuses on architecture exhibitions and museums, topics explored in her forthcoming book Architecture on Display: Exhibitions, Museums, and the Emergence of Modernism in Germany. Barbara Penner is a professor of architectural humanities at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. Her work consists of interdisciplinary investigations of how architecture mediates between private and public lives. She is the author of Bathroom (2013) and Newlyweds on Tour: Honeymooning in Nineteenth-Century America (2009). Michela Rosso is a professor of architectural history at Politecnico di Torino, specializing in modern architectural culture, criticism and historiography in Italy and Europe at large. She has recently done extensive research on the public reception of architecture through humour, satire and wit – the topic of her forthcoming book Laughing at Architecture. Helen Smith is Professor in Renaissance and Early Modern Literature at the University of York. Specializing in book history, her publications include Grossly Material Things: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (2012) and Renaissance Paratexts (ed. w/Louise Wilson 2011). Iver Tangen Stensrud is a historian of technology and PhD student at The Oslo School of Architecture and Design where he is part of the research project The Printed and the Built. Architecture and Public Debate in Modern Europe. His thesis explores architecture in the nineteenth-century Norwegian illustrated press. Léa-Catherine Szacka is a lecturer in architectural studies at the University of Manchester. Her research focuses on the theory and history of architectural exhibitions, mostly intersecting with the history of postmodernism. Her recent book Exhibiting the Postmodern – The 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale came out in 2016. André Tavares is an architect and editor, currently postdoctoral research fellow at ETH, Zurich. He has been editor-in-chief of the magazine Jornal Arquitectos and co-curator of the Lisbon Architecture Triennale 2016. His recent book The Anatomy of the Architectural Book (2016) addresses the crossovers between book culture and building culture. Richard Taws is a reader in art history at University College London, specializing in eighteenthand nineteenth-century French visual culture. He is the author of The Politics of the Provisional: Art and Ephemera in Revolutionary France (2013), and editor, with Genevieve Warwick, of Art and Technology in Early Modern Europe (2016).

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CONTRIBUTORS

Victor Plahte Tschudi is a professor of architectural history at The Oslo School of Architecture and Design. A specialist on the baroque, Tschudi has a special interest in the transmittance and transformation of buildings in prints and models. His most recent book is Baroque Antiquity: Archaeological Imagination in Early Modern Europe (2017). Richard Wittman is an architectural historian at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Wittman is the author of the pioneering study Architecture, Print Culture, and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France (2007), and is currently completing a cultural history of the centurylong reconstruction of San Paolo fuori le mura in Rome.

Introduction: A Storehouse of Ideas Mari Hvattum and Anne Hultzsch

The beautiful machinery of Mr. Applegath

Applegath’s printing press in the Crystal Palace. Illustrated London News, 31 May 1851. Private collection.

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Issue number 489 of the Illustrated London News, published on Saturday 31 May 1851, came into being in an unusual way. Instead of in its usual print shop on 198 Strand, this particular issue was printed inside the Moving Machinery Court of the Crystal Palace, the spectacular home of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations which had opened its doors only weeks before. In fact, the issue included a supplement dedicated entirely to the exhibition, making the choice of production locale doubly appropriate. The editors celebrated the happy match, boasting of how ‘the beautiful machinery of Mr. Applegath’ had been ‘erected at a great cost, for printing the ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS within the walls of the Crystal Palace’.1 Under the banner ‘The ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS Printing Machine’, the astounded public could see the magazine materialize from the midst of its own content. The image of the printing press inside the Crystal Palace was rotated at 90 degrees on the page so that readers had to turn either heads or pages to take it in. In it, in a tense simultaneity, the printing press and the building produce each other’s image, while the public – be it as in situ spectators or as readers – look on in admiration. The choice of building was, of course, no coincidence. Built to exhibit as well as to symbolize industrial progress, the Crystal Palace represented a modernity that the new illustrated press was very much a part of. The matryoshkalike configuration of the printing press inside the palace inside the magazine points to the dense entanglement of architecture and printed media in this period. The Illustrated London News had followed the Great Exhibition from the very beginning, and had taken a particular interest in the exhibition building. It was in the Illustrated London News that Joseph Paxton published his design proposal in the summer of 1850, securing the public enthusiasm that in the end swayed even a sceptical Royal Commission.2 The magazine had documented every step of the construction process, publishing detailed wood engravings of everything from the first cast iron element arriving in Hyde Park to the lavish opening ceremony. It was a symbiotic relationship. As the Economist wrote after the exhibition’s opening: The Great Exhibition itself … is performing the office of a large illustrated newspaper … Like sun painting, it speaks all tongues … the illustrated paper, without which it is doubtful if it could itself have ever existed, comes to its aid, dispenses the knowledge so scientifically gathered and arranged, and so graphically displayed in Hyde Park, over all the nations of the earth.3 The Great Exhibition relied on the illustrated press for publicity, and the illustrated press in turn relied on the exhibition for material. The success was measurable for both parties: between 1850 and 1851, sales of the Illustrated London News rose to well over 100,000 weekly copies, while the Great Exhibition attracted more than six million visitors – approximately one-fifth of the entire British population.4 The Illustrated London News’ image of its own printing press inside the Crystal Palace constitutes a self-conscious comment on the reciprocity between architecture and print culture in the nineteenth century. As such, it is a suitable opening to a book that examines the relationship between the printed and the built. In the following, twenty-eight scholars from many fields investigate the way architecture was depicted, debated and displayed in newspapers, popular and professional journals, magazines, books and a host of other printed media in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe and the United States. A marked shift in architectural publication took place in this period, in which the classical treatise was challenged by genres capable of efficiently

INTRODUCTION

3

disseminating visual and textual information to large audiences beyond the academies. The new public press, and in particular the illustrated magazine, opened up a new and heterogeneous field of architectural expression and deliberation to the general public. At the same time, a proliferation of professional magazines and handbooks, pattern books and manuals of various kinds diffused professional knowledge to new audiences, challenging established modes of architectural production and reshaping the identity of the profession itself. Together with an array of product catalogues, museum inventories, penny novels, stationary, pamphlets, ladies’ magazines and advertisements, these new kinds of publications altered both the preconditions for and the selfconception of modern architectural culture. Like publication history in general, scholarship on architectural publications has prospered in recent years. Yet, while groundbreaking work has been done on architecture and printing in the Renaissance (Mario Carpo) and the Enlightenment (Richard Wittman), and while we witness a veritable explosion of scholarship on twentieth-century architectural publications (pioneered by Beatriz Colomina, Hélène Jannière and Stephen Parnell, to mention but a few), the nineteenth century has received surprisingly little attention.5 Given that the modern architectural publication was invented in this period, this omission is all the more curious, constituting a palpable gap in the understanding of architecture’s publication cultures. This is the gap that The Printed and the Built sets out to fill.

Architecture in the popular press Publication historians have described the early nineteenth century as a ‘second print revolution’ due to the explosive increase in printed matter of all sorts: newspapers, books, stationary, forms, pamphlets and catalogues, not to mention magazines and journals.6 Serials began to dominate the markets for fiction and non-fiction, including the news, a phenomenon that press historian Laurel Brake has called the ‘litany of periodicity in the mid- and late nineteenth-century’.7 The figures are indeed staggering: between 1836 and 1854 the circulation of English newspapers trebled from 39 million to 122 million. The Times, for instance, increased its output twentyfold over the century, from around 5,000 daily copies in the first decades to 100,000 by the end. The more low-brow Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper went from 21,000 copies in 1845 to 96,000 in 1855, a fivefold increase in only ten years.8 Several factors, both political and technological, contributed to this extraordinary growth. New techniques of paper production and printing; iron presses and steam-powered rotary presses capable of printing thousands of copies per hour; tax reform and a gradual easing of censorship in several European countries – all of these changes led to a marked surge in journals, illustrated magazines, newspapers and books during the 1830s and 1840s.9 Image technology underwent particularly dramatic changes. Lithography, invented in the 1790s, allowed for high-quality printed images, making it a favourite for illustrated books of all kinds. Xylography became even more influential, however, at least quantitatively speaking. As Iver Tangen Stensrud explains in more detail in Part Two, xylography is a wood engraving technique using the end-grain of boxwood, providing precise and durable print blocks that could easily be integrated with type and thus allowed very large print runs. It became the technique of choice for the penny press and other illustrated mass media, including the Illustrated London News. From being a rare and costly commodity, printed images suddenly became available to practically everyone.10

4

THE PRINTED AND THE BUILT

Skilling-Magazin showing the Crystal Palace, 31 May 1851. National Library of Norway.

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England led the field, first with the Penny Magazine published by the Society for the Dissemination of Useful Knowledge in 1832 and quickly copied all over Europe.11 In the 1840s a second generation of illustrated periodicals emerged, far more upmarket, like the Illustrated London News and its likes. These were publications geared towards a rapidly growing middle class,

The first issue of the Illustrated London News, 14 May 1842, showing the conflagration of Hamburg. The creation of this wood engraving was shrouded in controversy with many doubting its authenticity, claiming flames had simply been added to an existing engraved view of Hamburg. © The British Library Board. All rights reserved. Reproduced with kind permission of The British Newspaper Archive (www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk).

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publishing weekly illustrated articles on art, literature, politics, technology, science, history and natural wonders – in short, pretty much everything. Just like the Penny Magazine, the Illustrated London News was emulated all over the world, with L’Illustration (Paris, 1843), Illustrirte Zeitung (Leipzig, 1843), Illustreret Nyhedsblad (Christiania, 1851), Illustrerad Tidning (Stockholm, 1855), Harper’s Weekly. A Journal of Civilization (New York, 1857) or La Ilustración Española y Americana (Madrid, 1869) being but a few examples.12 It is a staggeringly global world one encounters on the pages of these publications. Not only were they published in a remarkably similar form all over the world, even down to reproducing the same images; they also brought tidings from absolutely everywhere.13 Drawings of Indian temples are placed next to a prospect of Constantinople or a street scene from Copenhagen; a bird’s eye view of Piazza del Popolo flanks sketches from a recent earthquake in the West Indies or riots in New York. Reports on ancient cultures and far-away archaeological digs are interspersed with local and national history, as if to underscore the cross-geographical and trans-historical scope of modern publishing. As the editors of the Illustrated London News stated in their very first issue in 1842: the broad and palpable delineations of wood engraving … will now be brought to bear upon every subject which attracts the attention of mankind … The literature, the customs – the dress – nay, the institutions and localities of other lands, shall be brought home to you with spirit, with fidelity, and, we hope, with discretion and taste.14 Architecture played a prominent role in these publications. Filled to the brim with images and descriptions of buildings, cities, streetscapes and landscapes, illustrated journals and newspapers constituted an entirely new arena for communicating architecture. The titles were often headed by elaborate mastheads depicting iconic urban scenes, such as St Paul’s reigning over the busy river Thames in the Illustrated London News – a topic further explored in Part Two. Covering

‘The “Illustrated London News,” Published Every Saturday. Thirty Engravings. Price Sixpence’. Illustrated London News, 14 May 1842. © The British Library Board. All rights reserved. Reproduced with kind permission of The British Newspaper Archive (www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk).

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everything from African huts to medieval cathedrals and from ancient Chinese palaces to recent railway constructions, the nineteenth-century illustrated press presented architecture across time and space. In some cases, the printed architecture would prove more durable than the buildings themselves, for, as Léa-Catherine Szacka demonstrates in Part Two, the illustrated press had a particular fascination for exhibition buildings and other ephemeral structures. Integrating words, images and buildings – real or imaginary – in entirely new ways, the illustrated press contributed to shape a new public discourse on architecture and to propel architecture into the public realm as part of a novel visual culture.15 As Richard Wittman has pointed out, the modern public sphere manifested itself architecturally not only in the form of buildings, but also as debates, programs, reactions and negotiations in and over public space.16 The spatial practices of the modern city were negotiated in print, making the new press key to understanding the city, its architecture and its public life. ‘Is not the press in fact the public square of the … modern age?’ wrote the French critic Hippolyte Fortoul in 1836 – a statement quoted in Barry Bergdoll’s opening chapter of this collection.17 Fortoul’s likening can be read both metaphorically and literally. Taken in a Habermasian sense, it suggests that public debate was now played out, not only on squares or in coffeehouses, parliaments or clubs, but in print; removing the need for what John B. Thompson has called the ‘co-presence’ of debaters. A reading public emerged, which was, to use Thompson’s words, ‘not localized in space and time’

Earthquake on the Antilles, with two views, a map and a plan. The draftsmen relied on existing architectural drawings to represent the crumbling buildings. Illustrirte Zeitung, 8 July 1843. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München 4155697 2 Per. 26-1, p. 39, urn:nbn:debvb:12-bsb10498693-2.

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The Illustrated London News’ offices on 198 Strand. Illustrated London News, 24 May 1851. © The British Library Board. All rights reserved. Reproduced with kind permission of The British Newspaper Archive (www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk).

but instead fixed on the printed page.18 Reading (and writing), as Peter Fritzsche has argued, thus contributed to the emergence of the modern metropolis with its partly intangible public sphere.19 But the press also contributed to public space in a more literal sense. The print shop itself, and especially its shop windows, became a public place: a locus of information exchange where the sheets of newspapers were displayed the moment they left the press. The Economist reported on the commotion created by the Illustrated London News on the Strand: Any one passing along the Strand, between Friday and Tuesday, except on Sunday, must have seen, opposite the church of St Clement’s Danes, and at the corner of Milford lane, a crowd of men and lads shoving and struggling, and heard them joking and bawling as they fought their way up to a side door, and every now and then a man or a lad emerging from the crowd bearing aloft in triumph, as if snatched from some rival, a quire or two of newspapers. Around the front of the house, too, the passer by would observe people stopping to gaze into the windows of the shop hung with pictures. This is the publishing office of the Illustrated London News, which … keeps, for half the week, that part of the Strand in a tumult while the operation of distributing the papers is going on.20

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If the new press impacted the public realm, it also affected the private. The penny press and illustrated journals allowed you, from the comfort of your living room, to experience far-away cities, exotic monuments and everyday life in all corners of the world. A copy of L’Illustration or the Illustrirte Zeitung made it possible to bring the events of the day home and to savour them at leisure in your own parlour. The expansion came with an additional twist, however. The world was brought home to your living room, certainly, but the living room was also brought

‘A Christmas at Home’. Illustrated London News, 23 December 1843. © The British Library Board. All rights reserved. Reproduced with kind permission of The British Newspaper Archive (www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk).

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out to the world. Domestic space was subject to an increasing interest by the illustrated press, be it linked to scandal, celebrity or national interest. Part Two of this collection explores two particularly salacious examples of this: sex and murder. Though favourite topics of the press at all ages, these issues took very particular forms in the bourgeois space of early illustrated journalism. The domestication of the global and globalization of the domestic is but one of the fascinating reciprocities at work in the nineteenth-century press. Presenting both the private home and the public monument as matters of profound cultural importance, the popular press constituted an important new arena for architectural dissemination.

The professional press and the invention of the architectural magazine The fast-expanding public press in the nineteenth century brought architectural images, descriptions and debates to an entirely new audience, bringing architectural discourse from out of the academy and into the public. But equally profound changes took place in the professional and semi-professional press. New genres such as the pattern book, the manual and the architectural history handbook allowed for an unprecedented dissemination of professional knowledge to a vastly expanded readership and to every corner of the world. An example from the outskirts of Europe: in 1842, when the inexperienced architect Heinrich Ernst Schirmer was sent to Trondheim to plan the reconstruction of the city’s thirteenth-century cathedral, a kind friend – knowing that the neo-classically educated Schirmer had no clue about gothic architecture – sent him Friedrich Hoffstadt’s Gothisches ABC-Buch (1840) as a ‘useful pointer’.21 Schirmer was grateful. In the periphery, knowledge came largely in the form of print. Hoffstadt’s ABC-Buch is representative of a genre that came into its own in the midnineteenth century, ranging from global world histories of architecture to manuals on specific styles. As Petra Brouwer shows in Part Two, the success of such books was founded on their affordability as well as portability – financial and spatial economies had become the new paradigms of architectural publishing. Alongside the handbook came an array of architectural books of all sorts, prompted by new printing technologies as well as by the steady increase of potential buyers among professionals and laymen alike. And while there were plenty of disgruntled experts complaining that the plethora of architecture books led to superficiality and degeneration of taste, they did so – tellingly – in print.22 A particular innovation of the nineteenth century is the architectural periodical. The earliest to fit the name is the German Allgemeines Magazin für die bürgerliche Baukunst, launched in 1789 by Johann Gottfried Huth, professor of physics and mathematics in Frankfurt an der Oder. As Marc Saboya has pointed out, this was the first time that ‘all issues relevant for the art of building were joined in a magazine’.23 In France the Journal des bâtiments civils et des arts emerged under the Consulate in 1800.24 However, both of these magazines, and other contemporary ones, were almost entirely unillustrated. It was the influence of the popular illustrated press that would change this, as professional publications gradually started to adopt the cheap and efficient xylography technique from the penny press.

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Friedrich Hoffstadt, Gothisches ABC-Buch, 1840. Heidelberg University Library, GF 424 SK, title page – CC-BY-SA 3.0.

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THE PRINTED AND THE BUILT

Title page of the German Allgemeines Magazin für die bürgerliche Baukunst, 1789. University Library Bielefeld.

In Britain, the emergence of the genre can be dated very precisely to March 1834, the heyday of the Penny Magazine, when the Scottish gardener, architect and editor John Claudius Loudon published the first issue of The Architectural Magazine, and Journal of Improvement in Architecture, Building, and Furnishing, and in the Various Arts and Trades Connected Therewith in London. Architecture had long been a subject in general-interest periodicals such as the Gentleman’s Magazine (1731–1907), the Athenaeum (1828–1921) or the Penny Magazine (1832– 45), all illustrated titles. With journals such as the Mechanics Magazine (1823–73), aiming at

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the education of the working classes, specialization took hold. However, while medical and other professional journals were already widespread, the British architectural profession lagged behind. Incidentally, the Institute of British Architects in London was established too in 1834 (and given its royal charter in 1837), but unlike Loudon, the institute’s founding fathers did not see the potential of printed debate. (R)IBA’s Transactions (1836) initially contained for the most part minutes of meetings and transcriptions of lectures, without images, delivered at their regular gatherings. Loudon’s project profited from his long experience, together with his wife Jane Webb Loudon, in the publishing business. He had already published the liberally illustrated Encyclopœdia of Cottage, Farm, and Villa Architecture and Furniture (1833) as well as a long list of educational tomes on natural history, gardening, agriculture and design. Now, he wanted to try his hand at architectural journalism. Issues of forty to fifty pages in octavo format, with as many images as Loudon’s finances allowed, followed in monthly intervals until he finally ran out of funds in the beginning of 1839. The circulation was not huge; generally 1,000 copies were printed, with reprints of 250 as and when needed.25 In comparison, the Penny Magazine sold up to 200,000

Title page of John Loudon’s Architectural Magazine, vol. 1, 1834. Private collection.

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copies per issue during its first decade. Nonetheless, the Architectural Magazine is significant, for, in the English-speaking world at least, it is the first of its kind. Published at a time when most professions and disciplines were beginning to make use of periodicals to further their causes and stimulate debate, the Architectural Magazine took the form of a curated storehouse of words and images, describing and debating everything and anything to do with architecture. In the preface to the first bound annual volume, Loudon appealed to all architects, and others connected with the building arts, who are desirous of advancing their profession; and our readers generally, who wish to promote the progress of architectural taste, and the universal diffusion of architectural comforts; to aid us with their contributions and their advice.26 The tone of the magazine was for the most part didactic. Loudon often addressed architectural students directly, giving recommendations on how to further their education. The editorial taste leaned towards a pragmatic neoclassicism, but Gothic Revival architects were also given space for their argument. Loudon assembled an impressive range of writers around himself, including the critic William Henry Leeds, architects I.J. Fowler and E.B. Lamb, as well as John Ruskin who wrote under the pen name ‘Kata Phusin’ (Greek for ‘according to nature’).27 Besides advising students, Loudon’s overall ambition for the Architectural Magazine was to strengthen the discipline’s scholarly rigour while at the same time opening it up to a wider audience. As he outlined on the opening pages of the first volume: The Object of the Architectural Magazine is to second the effect produced by the Encyclopædia, by improving the public taste in architecture generally, by rendering it a more intellectual profession, by recommending it as a fit study for ladies, and inducing young architects to read, write, and think, as well as to see and draw.28 Sections such as ‘The Philosophy of Architecture Popularised’, Ruskin’s ‘The Poetry of Architecture’ and Loudon’s own ‘Practical Architecture and Building’ which included articles on ventilation, heating, furniture or engineering were meant to introduce readers – female and male – to intellectual perspectives and positions, enabling them to participate in an informed architectural debate. The magazine was aimed not only at professional architects, students and tradesmen, but also at clients and the well-informed public. Readers found frequent extracts from daily newspapers such as the Morning Chronicle as well as the occasional foreign title, most often commented on and put into perspective. In a sense, the Architectural Magazine, by fostering a public architectural debate in printed form, strove to be that ‘public square’ that Fortoul evoked; a place where professionals and the interested public met. In this, the magazine had something in common with eighteenthcentury architectural monographs such as James Gibbs’s A Book of Architecture, Containing Designs of Buildings and Ornaments (1728) or William Chambers’s Designs of Chinese Buildings (1757); both aiming at a wide and diverse readership. Yet the Architectural Magazine had a more complex scope. If Gibbs, Chambers and numerous other architects from Palladio onwards had used publications to promote their own work, Loudon, instead, provided a platform for exchange, inviting contributions from readers regardless of their position, profession or writing skills. And

INTRODUCTION

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First page from Cesar Daly’s Revue générale de l’architecture et des travaux publics, 1840. Hathi Trust, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000639736.

while the debate was steered by Loudon as editor, it was free and accessible to anyone from the architectural public or profession. Loudon’s early pursuits of the architectural magazine – resulting in five annual volumes – were well received, and many followed his lead. His successors tended to be more narrowly specialized, however. The Civil Engineer and Architect’s Journal (1837–67), while well illustrated, was interested primarily in the technical aspects of architecture rather than aesthetic or social

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issues. The Builder, perhaps the most famous of Victorian architectural magazines, brought out its first issue on 31 December 1842, yet its success came only after George Godwin took over its editorship in 1844, steering it more towards the architect rather than the builder. It was perhaps a sign that Loudon’s idea of an all-inclusive architectural discourse had been too optimistic – a suspicion confirmed by the division that gradually developed between the building trade and the architectural profession.29 Over the remainder of the nineteenth century, the architectural magazine became what it is today: the architect’s. Through publications such as the French Revue générale de l’architecture et des travaux publics, launched by Cesar Daly in 1840; the Swedish-Finnish Tidskrift för praktisk byggnadskonst (1848); German titles Zeitschrift für Bauwesen (1851) and Deutsche Bauzeitung (1867), or the American Architect and Building News (1876), the profession took ownership of its own press.

A storehouse of ideas When Loudon chose to call his new publication a ‘magazine’, he was undoubtedly aware of the architectural metaphor he evoked. Stemming from French ‘magasin’, Italian ‘magazzino’ or Arabic ‘makzan/makzin’, the term entered the English language sometime in the sixteenth century. It was used to describe a building: a storehouse of some kind, of either civic or military use. The sense still survives today when speaking about military depots as ‘magazines’, usually of ammunition. Over the last two centuries, however, the term has come to refer primarily to an edited, serial print publication, often illustrated, and usually aimed at a specific group of readers. The magazine in the sense of a publication emerged only in the eighteenth century with the Gentleman’s Magazine or Trader’s Monthly Intelligencer from 1731 as an early example. The editors, knowing that they used the term in an unfamiliar way, felt they owed an explanation to their readers. The Gentleman’s Magazine, they wrote, is ‘a Monthly Collection to treasure up, as in a Magazine, the most remarkable Pieces on the Subjects abovemention’d’.30 A few decades later, no explanation was needed. ‘Magazine’ gradually became synonymous with ‘periodical’, seen in publications such as the Lady’s Magazine (1770) and later in the Magasin Pittoresque (1833); the Pfennig-Magazin (1833); Harper’s Magazine (1850) and innumerable others. The term’s architectural origins continued to reverberate, however. ‘Museum’ and ‘magazine’ were often used interchangeably – the Lady’s Magazine was renamed in 1832 as the Lady’s Magazine and Museum, while the Mechanics Magazine from 1823 was described by its editors as a ‘museum, register, journal, and gazette’. The nineteenth-century magazine brought together things from different times and disparate places; criticism, news, descriptions and instructions, all huddled together in the same storage space. Just like our nineteenth-century editor colleagues, we, the editors of this book, understand our publication as a storehouse for ideas and debates. The Printed and the Built. Architecture, Print Culture, and Public Debate in the Nineteenth Century is indeed a ‘magazine’: a store of things printed and built, ranging from overarching analyses of the role of the press in nineteenthcentury architecture (and vice versa), to tightly focused micro-histories of a single image, title or event. Like a magazine, too, this collection is episodic rather than systematic. We do not attempt

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The Gentleman’s Magazine, May 1759, showing St. John’s Gate where the magazine was printed. https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gentleman%27s_Magazine#/media/File:The_Gentleman%27s_Magazine, _May_1759.jpg.

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to provide a comprehensive overview of nineteenth-century architectural publications, let alone architecture in publication. Rather, we present episodes in the interrelated histories of architecture and print media, hoping that each little episode will elucidate larger issues. The magazine metaphor does also, perhaps, reveal our partiality for periodical publication. For while architecture books are certainly discussed in this collection, the main emphasis is on architecture in the periodical press, be it professional or popular. In that sense, this collection is but a part of a large, ongoing effort to map and understand modern architecture’s publication cultures. The collection is organized in two parts. The first consists of five seminal chapters on architecture and print culture in the long nineteenth century, while the second presents a cornucopia of short texts, each dealing with a particular medium, genre or phenomenon that captures the relationship between architecture and print culture in particularly poignant ways. Part One opens with Barry Bergdoll’s chapter ‘“The Public Square of the Modern Age”: Architecture and the Rise of the Illustrated Press in the Early Nineteenth Century’. Evoking Hippolyte Fortoul’s statement, Bergdoll investigates a circle of French architects, writers and publishers of the 1830s and 1840s for whom architecture, public space and the printing press came together in a powerful alliance. This period corresponded to revolutions in both printing and building technology, but also to fundamental political change, a relationship thoroughly explored by Bergdoll. Barry Bergdoll is followed by another authority on nineteenth-century print culture, Stephen Bann. Looking at material both popular and scholarly, Bann argues that the distribution of architectural prints played a formative role in the construction of a national past. Studying prints from, for example, Francis Stevens’ Domestic Architecture A Series of Views of Cottages and Farm Houses in England and Wales (1815), Bann shows how prints and printmakers contributed to a new sense of history and nationhood in early-nineteenth-century England. The construction of the past is a topic pursued also by Richard Wittman. With the example of the reconstruction of San Paolo fuori le mura in Rome after the 1823 fire, Wittman explores the ‘imprinted patriotism’ of the nineteenth-century Catholic Church. He shows how the Church used architectural debates in journals and newspapers to forge historical continuities for the modern age: an important strategy in the Church’s ‘battle for souls’. In Maarten Delbeke’s chapter, the battle over historical memory is also on, if in a slightly different form. Using the dismantling of the Bastille and the subsequent turning of its stones into printing blocks for commemorative images of the Bastille itself, Delbeke tackles the printed and built entanglements head on. Modern architecture relies on mediation and became, as Beatriz Colomina has pointed out, modern only with its engagement with the media.31 This was true for text-based media such as the newspaper and the magazine, but also other media technologies such as xylography, chromolithography, daguerreotype, photography and X-ray. In the last chapter of Part One, Colomina explores the relationship between modern architecture and some of these technologies, uncovering in the process the complex entanglement between the visible and the invisible in the domain of architecture. Being a storehouse of ideas, The Printed and the Built collection has more than one room. Part Two opens the door to an altogether different way of storing and presenting knowledge. In a series of twenty-five alphabetically ordered and beautifully illustrated mini-chapters, Part Two brings a rich material to the fore. Spanning from ‘bibliotopography’ to ‘xylography’, via entries as diverse as ‘colour’, ‘masthead’, ‘sex’ and ‘silhouette’ (to mention but a few), a group of eminent scholars delve into a wealth of genres, techniques, concepts and phenomena. Most of the material relates

INTRODUCTION

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to the nineteenth century, but we also get glimpses into earlier worlds of print, most notably in Victor Plahte Tschudi’s entry on Renaissance bibliotopography and Helen Smith’s contribution on early printed paratexts. By means of tightly focused, original examples, the authors of Part Two demonstrate the reciprocal relationship between the printed and the built. ‘Column’ is a good example. Indispensable for ordering buildings and printed pages alike, the column epitomizes the issue at the heart of this book. Other entries may seem more surprising. Who would think, for instance, that the cablegram had architectural repercussions? Yet Mari Lending shows that the telegraph was a key factor in the nineteenth-century circulation of monuments, furnishing museums all over the world with architectural collections in plaster. Movable monuments are the topic also of Tim Anstey’s contribution, tracing the moving of Cleopatra’s Needle on the pages of the illustrated press. If architecture is usually considered relatively sedate, Anstey’s mini-thriller – complete with daring invention, shipwreck and disaster – shows it is anything but. Timothy Hyde takes an equally original point of departure. If nineteenth-century public opinion was constructed through the novel operations of media, he asks, what were the mechanisms regulating this process? One of these mechanisms was libel law, which became a key factor in shaping modern architectural criticism. Hyde’s argument dovetails Christina Contandriopoulos’s piece which traces the beginning of architectural criticism in the journalistic exploits of a young writer shortly before the French Revolution. Together with Adrian Forty on the architectural description, Wallis Miller on the review, Michela Rosso on cartoons, Emma Cheatle on architecture and fiction, and Marit Grøtta on the feuilleton, the contributors to Part Two explore textual genres with particular impact on nineteenth-century architectural thinking. Another important category in Part Two’s rich store are the many different kinds of publications circulating in the long nineteenth century. Petra Brouwer discusses the way the architectural handbook emerged in response to a growing need – felt by professionals as well as the general public – for practical guidance and knowledge in architectural matters. Helge Jordheim explores architecture in the encyclopedia, going back to the very origin of the genre in Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie. The many ephemeral publication types emerging in this period are also represented. Irene Cheng studies political pamphlets in nineteenth-century USA, while Mathilde S. Dahl discusses the short-lived newsletter published for the Norwegian Industry and Art Exhibition in 1883. André Tavares explores a particularly fascinating example of this kind of print, namely the peculiar address books used in nineteenth-century London, in which addresses were given in the form of drawn and annotated street elevations. With architectural historian Barbara Penner expounding on the rise and fall of the American honeymoon suite; art historian Richard Taws discussing anti-Napoleonic satire; cultural historian Sine Halkjelsvik Bjordal using three nineteenth-century prints to elucidate the changing notion of the past, and many more, this is indeed a storehouse of weird and wonderful ideas, things, mediations and materialities.

This won’t kill that In Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), Victor Hugo famously proclaimed the victory of modern print culture over architecture: ‘This will kill that: The book will kill the edifice’.32 Looking at the intricate

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relationship between printed matter and buildings in the fast-changing nineteenth century, however, one is struck – as both Barry Bergdoll and Martin Delbeke point out in their Part One chapters – not so much by the subjugation of one to the other, as by their complex and reciprocal connectedness in the public realm. Hugo’s contemporary, the English author and translator Abraham Hayward, may have better captured the sentiment of the period when he stated, in 1842, that ‘we live and move and have our being in print’.33 It is this living and moving in print that is the topic of this book. One of the most exciting things about nineteenth-century architecture is the multilayered expansion of the built realm into the realm of print and the corresponding penetration of printed discourse into the world of building. And just like the editors of the Illustrated London News were proud to present the printing press inside the Crystal Palace inside the magazine, we are excited to show the many fascinating, thought-provoking and unexpected ways in which the printed and the built feed off each other in the long nineteenth century.

Acknowledgements This book comes out of the research project The Printed and the Built. Architecture and Public Debate in Modern Europe, funded by the Norwegian Research Council in the period 2014–18. A collaboration between The Oslo School of Architecture and Design, The University of Oslo and The Norwegian National Museum, together with a wide international network, the project has allowed us to gather an enthusiastic group of researchers and to invite key international scholars into the collaboration. Many of the texts in this collection started as lectures and papers at the annual Printed & Built symposia. We are grateful to the Norwegian Research Council for this opportunity and not least for their generous funding of this book. The HERA-funded research project Printing the Past. Architecture, Print Culture, and Uses of the Past (PriArc) has contributed to the book in the form of input from several of its scholars, and we gratefully acknowledge their support. Most of all, however, we thank our authors, who have so generously shared their knowledge, experience and expertise. To listen to, discuss with, read and edit the work of our favourite scholars has been a real privilege. With two dozen contributors and a complex historical material, this collection has been something of an editorial challenge. Bloomsbury’s professional staff has made the process remarkably smooth, however, and we thank James Thompson and his team for their friendly guidance.

Notes 1 ‘Applegath’s Vertical Printing Machine, Exhibited by the Proprietors of the “Illustrated London News”’, Illustrated London News, 31 May 1851, 501. 2 Illustrated London News, 6 July 1850, 13. See Edmund King, ‘The Great Exhibition at Hyde Park and Its Publications’, RSA Journal, 144.5475 (1 December 1996), 59. 3 ‘Speaking to the Eye’, Economist, 17 May 1851. 4 Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader. A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800– 1900 (Columbus: Ohio State Press, 1998), Appendix C: ‘Periodical and Newspaper Circulation’, 394.

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5 Notable exceptions are Barry Bergdoll, Léon Vaudoyer: Historicism in the Age of Industry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994); Hélène Lipstadt, ‘Early Architectural Periodicals’, in Robin Middleton (ed.), The Beaux-Arts and Nineteenth-Century French Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982); André Tavares, The Anatomy of the Architectural Book (Zurich: Lars Müller, 2016); Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); Matteo Burioni (ed.), Weltgeschichten der Architektur. Ursprünge, Narrative, Bilder 1700–2016 (Passau: Klinger, 2016); Eva Maria Froschauer, ‘An die Leser!’: Baukunst darstellen und vermitteln – Berliner Architekturzeitschriften um 1900 (Tübingen: Wasmuth, 2010); Jean-Michel Leniaud and Béatrice Bouvier (eds), Les Périodiques D’architecture, XVIIIe-XXe Siècle: Recherche D’une Méthode Critique D’analyse (Paris: Ecole des Chartes, 2001); Marc Pierre Saboya, Presse et Architecture Au Xix Siecle. Cesar Daly Revue Generale de L’architecture Travaux Publics (Paris: Picard, 2000). 6 Patricia Anderson, The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture 1790–1860 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). General histories of nineteenth-century print culture are rife. We have found the following particularly useful: Stephen Bann, Distinguished Images: Prints and the Visual Economy in Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013); Thierry Gervais, ‘Imagining the World. I’Illustration: The Birth of the French Illustrated Press and the Introduction of Photojournalism’, Mediocographia, 27.1 (2005), 97–105; Peter Sinnema, Dynamics of the Pictured Page: Representing the Nation in the Illustrated London News (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998); Jason E. Hill and Vanessa R. Schwartz, Getting the Picture. Visual Culture in the News (London: Bloomsbury, 2015); and Andrea Korda, Printing and Painting the News in Victorian London. The Graphic and Social Realism, 1869–1891 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015). 7 Laurel Brake, Print in Transition, 1850–1910: Studies in Media and Book History (Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave, 2001), 30. 8 Altick, The English Common Reader, Appendix C, 391–96. See also A. Aspinall, ‘The Circulation of Newspapers in the Early Nineteenth Century’, The Review of English Studies, 22.85 (January 1946), 29–43. 9 On paper production and printing press technology, see Lothar Müller, White Magic. The Age of Paper (Cambridge: Malden, 2016) and James Moran, Printing Presses. History and Development (Berkley: University of California Press, 1978). On the political, technological and cultural factors facilitating the increase of print media in nineteenth-century Britain, see for instance Jeremy Black, The English Press, 1621–1861 (Gloucestershire: Sutton, 2001); Michael Twyman, Printing 1770– 1970, an Illustrated History of Its Development and Uses in England (London: Eyre & Spottiswood, 1970); and Andrew King and John Plunkett, Victorian Print Media (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). For other countries, the best sources are national press histories such as Kurt Koszyk, Deutsche Presse im 19. Jahrhundert. Geschichte der deutschen Presse Teil II (Berlin: Colloquium Verlag, 1966); Fabrice d’Almeida and Christian Delporte, Histoire des médias en France, de la Grande Guerre à nos jours (Paris: Flammarion, 2010); Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism: A History of Newspapers in the United States, 1690–1960 (New York: Macmillan, 1962); Hans F. Dahl et al. (eds), Norsk presses historie (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 2010), and others. 10 On the emergence and effects of wood engraving, see for instance Gerry Beegan, The Mass Image: A Social History of Photomechanical Reproduction in Victorian London (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 47–71; Richard Benson, The Printed Picture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2008), 6–25, and Brian Maidment, Reading Popular Prints 1790–1870 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 138–76. 11 Some examples of penny magazines are The Dublin Penny Journal (Dublin, 1832), Le Magasin Pittoresque (Paris, 1833), Das Pfenning Magazin (Leipzig, 1833), Skilling-Magazin (Christiania, 1834), Nederlandsche Magazijn (Amsterdam, 1834); Dansk Penning Magazin (Copenhagen, 1834), and Dwight’s American Penny Magazine, and Family Newspaper (New York, 1845). On the impact of the penny press on the European art scene, see Robert Verhoogt, Art in Reproduction (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007).

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12 An interesting (though not complete) contemporary overview of mid- to late-nineteenth-century illustrated periodicals worldwide is found in Mason Jackson, The Pictorial Press: Its Origin and Progress (London: Hurst and Blackett Publishers, 1885), 361–63. 13 Stereotyping, i.e. the duplication of print blocks by means of thin metal plates, allowed publishers to mass-produce and sell images on a large, international scale. The founder of the Penny Magazine, Charles Knight, praised the ‘literary intercourse’ that the new trade of images had given rise to (‘The Commercial History of a Penny Magazine’, Penny Magazine, 2 (1833), 471). On stereotyping and the later process of electrotyping, see James Mosley, ‘The Technologies of Print’, in Michael F. Suarez and H.R. Woudhuysen (eds), The Book: A Global History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 130–52. 14 ‘Our Address’, Illustrated London News, 14 May 1842. 15 For an analysis of architecture in the illustrated press, see Mari Hvattum, ‘Heteronomic Historicism’, Architectural Histories, 5.1 (5 April 2017), doi: 10.5334/ah.216; and Anne Hultzsch, ‘“To the great public”: The Architectural Image in the Early Illustrated London News’, Architectural Histories, 5.1 (28 December 2017), doi: 10.5334/ah.268.. 16 Richard Wittman, Architecture, Print Culture and the Public Sphere (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). 17 Hippolyte Fortoul, Le Droit, 28 November 1836, 1381. Analysed in Bergdoll, Léon Vaudoyer, 115. 18 John B. Thompson, The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), 125–26. 19 Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900. 20 ‘Speaking to the Eye’. The article was reprinted in the Illustrated London News, 24 May 1851, 451, alongside the image shown above of the crowds outside its offices. 21 Friedrich Hoffstadt, Gothisches ABC-Buch: das ist, Grundregeln des gothischen Styls für Künstler und Werkleute (Frankfurt a. M.: Siegmund Schmerber, 1840). The episode is told by Schirmer in a letter to Johan Christian Dahl, 9 June 1842, quoted in Andreas Aubert, Maleren Johan Christian Dahl (Kristiania: Aschehoug, 1920), 230. 22 See for instance Gottfried Semper, ‘Prolegomenon’ to Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten, oder praktische Aesthetik, vol. 1 (Frankfurt a. M.: Verlage für Kunst und Wissenschaft, 1860), xiv, or Semper’s tirade against the architectural press in his London lecture of 11 November 1853, reprinted in RES, Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics 6 (autumn 1983), 5–32. 23 Marc Saboya, Presse et architecture au XIXe siècle. César Daly et la Revue générale de l’architecture et des travaux publics (Paris: Picard, 1991), 60. 24 See Hélène Lipstadt and Harvey Mendelsohn, Architectes et ingénieur dans la presse: polémique, débat, conflit (Paris: CORDA, 1980), 82–87. 25 Howard Leathlean, ‘Loudon’s Architectural Magazine and the Houses of Parliament Competition’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 26.3 (1 October 1993), 146–47. 26 John Claudius Loudon, ‘Preface’, The Architectural Magazine, 1 (1834), iii. 27 John Ruskin, ‘The Poetry of Architecture’, The Architectural Magazine, 4 (1837), 505–08, 555–60; 5 (1838), 7–14, 56–63, 97–105, 145–54, 193–98, 241–50, 289–300, 347–44, 385–92, 433–42, 481–94, 533–54. 28 Loudon, ‘Preface’, iii. 29 For bibliographic information on the nineteenth-century architectural press in Britain, see Ruth Richardson and Robert Thorne, ‘Architecture’, in Jerry Don Vann and Rosemary T. Van Arsdel (eds) Victorian Periodicals and Victorian Society (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 45–61. Also see the entry ‘Building Press’, in Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor (eds), Dictionary of NineteenthCentury Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland (Gent and London: Academia Press, 2009), 86.

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30 ‘Advertisement’, Gentleman’s Magazine, March 1731. 31 Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity. Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). 32 The famous chapter ‘Ceci tuera cela’ was added in the 1832 edition. For a more in-depth analysis of Hugo’s statement, see Martin Delbeke, ‘A Book Accessible to All’, AA Files, 69 (2015), 118–22 as well as his chapter in this volume. 33 Abraham Hayward, ‘Advertising’, Edinburgh Review, 77 (1843), 2.

PART ONE

Architecture and Print Culture in the Nineteenth Century

‘The Public Square of the Modern Age’: Architecture and the Rise of the Illustrated Press in the Early Nineteenth Century Barry Bergdoll

T

he relationships between architecture, the printed page and self-conscious social reform were perhaps never pursued with as much determination and consequence as in the 1830s and 1840s. The period was marked not only by revolutions in both printing and building technology, but also by one of fundamental political change situated between the revolutions of 1839 and 1848 on the continent and the debates over the Reform Laws in Great Britain. Looking back at my study of nearly twenty years ago, Léon Vaudoyer: Historicism in the Age of Industry (1994),1 in which a central chapter dealt with the relationship between an architect determined to craft a new approach to architecture as a reflection not of timeless values but of a changing present and the socially committed forays into publishing of a group of former Saint-Simonians in the 1830s and 1840s, I am struck both by how self-aware the figures I want to discuss in this chapter were by their position at a moment of seminal change and by how, in retrospect, my own scholarship of that time came at a moment of equally sweeping change, namely the digital revolution brought on by the rise of the personal computer and the launching of the internet. Vaudoyer, along with his friends and contemporaries Léonce Reynaud and Albert Lenoir, understood his mission in architecture to be equally realizable in publishing historical accounts of architecture’s evolution in relationship to discernible historical laws and to creating buildings that could respond directly to an awareness of the changing nature of historical realities. The mottos of this alliance between new forms of publication – notably the illustrated popular press – and new notions of architectural expression were contained in two eloquent phrases that became veritable mantras for the nexus of artists and social reformers who conceived the French illustrated press. Architecture, exclaimed Vaudoyer’s frequent companion in arms, the literary critic Hippolyte Fortoul, has always been and will continue to

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be la veritable écriture des peuples,2 and the press in its rapidly changing forms could lay claim to being la place publique des grandes nations de l’âge moderne.3 Long before the metaphors of the internet – and more recently social media – as agora or forum, then, the technological changes of printing in the nineteenth century were viewed as dispersed versions of the places of social interchange and identity of past centuries when those possibilities were embodied in concrete places and built form. No less did my 1994 book arrive at the cusp of another great paradigm shift. Written as a doctoral thesis in the 1980s, my research notes took the form of handwritten notes on index cards and of file after file of photocopies of documents and of photographic negatives of architectural drawings. I acquired my first personal computer in 1985, which took up more than one half of my desk surface, as I was completing the dissertation, figuring that it would cost as much to hire a typist for a perfect manuscript copy following university regulations as it would to purchase a personal computer and take the time to learn word processing as I edited my text, first typed on an IBM Selectric typewriter, then on a PC in an early version of Microsoft Word. There was no e-mail to facilitate exchanges about acquiring photographs, no digital images to facilitate transfer, no computer searchable online databases even. All of that arrived fast and furious in the years following the publication of the book derived from the dissertation in 1994. An online history of the Internet traces its roots back to the 1950s – the favoured era of study of much of architectural history at the moment – but acknowledges that ‘Internet use grew rapidly in the West from the mid-1990s and from the late 1990s in the developing world. In the 20 years since 1995, Internet use has grown 100-times, measured for the period of one year, to over one third of the world population’.4 But, of course, like much on the internet it is nearly impossible to date that statement by anything but internal textual evidence – as in old written documents without a date – nor to tell when it was placed on the web and in what context, leading to a kind of timeless timeliness that is one of the characteristics of the internet. On the other hand, in comparison to research in the early 1990s, I am struck by how it is now possible to undertake types of research that were all but unimaginable two decades ago and that at a speed that makes me wonder if anyone could ever again adjust to taking handwritten notes in archives where the average delivery time of documents was three to four hours, and to the speed of trips to the library to double-check information in books that required first a trip through the card catalogue to find a call number and then often a two-day delay while the book was paged from off-site storage. Every month, it seems, brings hundreds and hundreds of newly searchable compilations of documents to the internet, and often documents of the sort that used to be relegated to the library annex or to scratchy microfilm that one could spend hours reeling through a creaky reader. Today there is no need for such fishing expeditions to see if a name ever appeared in a periodical, going by the annual indexes some published, but rather in ever more searchable scanned documents we are afforded an instant direction to the very page in question. Often the relevant passage is already highlighted in yellow. What, of course, gets lost is the context and the texture of everything from the paper of the page to the content of the overall issue or the sequence of issues in which an article appears. But there is no doubt that we are living in a period of ongoing technological change in the media, without even raising the subject of how the political landscape has changed fundamentally along with these changes. ***

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No less than the present does to us, the 1830s and 1840s felt to those living through them as decades of breathtaking change. The 1830s brought not only the first illustrated books and magazines at a price reachable by nearly the entire literate public – itself a category in rapid expansion – but also the launching of the railroad that was to transform transport of both people and goods, so that the press and the rise of architectural tourism in these years might also function under the banner of the Oslo group’s last research rubric, ‘Place and Displacement’.5 Part of that radical transformation was the speed with which news and knowledge could be transmitted, recorded and diffused. The second topic might well have been called ‘Place and Diffusion’, even though at the heart of both topics is how architecture is transmitted, not only from the place where it is to an audience at a distance, but equally from an audience of expertise to a broad public. It is not surprising that in the midst of such radical changes as those in what Eric Hobsbawm called ‘The Age of Revolution’,6 that the nature of the relationship between traditional cultural undertakings and the new conditions of working and living should give rise to vastly different prognoses, hopes and anxieties. So famous is a single line of Victor Hugo – ‘Ceci tuera cela’, ‘this will kill that’, referring to the deathly potential of the printing press for architecture, published in the 1832 edition of his best-selling novel Notre Dame de Paris, arguably the first piece of literature in which the main character is a building – that it was still being quoted out of context and creatively misinterpreted as late as the onset of the twentieth century when Frank Lloyd Wright cited it in his first major public lecture and position taking on the fraught issue of machine production, ‘The Art and Craft of the Machine’, delivered in 1901 at Hull House in Chicago. And, of course, it is cited over and over again today in architectural debates by many who have never read the novel from which it is drawn.7 Hugo was describing, however, not the then-present anxiety around great changes afoot in the wake of the July Revolution that had instituted the constitutional monarchy in France and in the newly created nation state of Belgium, but rather a moment of anxiety around an earlier revolution in communications with the invention of printing in the fifteenth century – notably with the Gutenberg Bible of 1456. As is now well known, Hugo proposed that since the printing press made the multiplication of copies of a text possible, it had nearly infinitely increased chances of survival compared to the singular building. For Hugo, then, history bore witness also to the progressive transfer from one cultural medium to another, from one technology to another, of the privileged means of creating the messages as well as the embodiment of the character of an era. What brought the quote into the architectural history of the July Monarchy in France, and into what was thought of at the time as the romantic movement in French architecture, was the discovery by Neil Levine in the 1970s of the close relationship between the poet and novelist and his near-exact contemporary the architect Henri Labrouste, with whom Hugo had shared the chapters dealing with architecture, notably the chapter describing Notre Dame, the medieval physiognomy of Paris, and the dramatic scene of ‘This will kill that’. While Labrouste had some impact on turns of phrase in Hugo’s novel, which added these chapters only in a later edition, it is not at all clear that the prognosis did anything more than reinforce Labrouste’s conviction half a decade later when he was commissioned to create a new building for a library that went back to the Middle Ages – the old monastic library of Ste. Geneviève – that a building could endow the printed word with aura even as the printed word could serve as constituent element of the architecture of a library. Indeed, the library seems almost the counterproof to the argument that architecture would be supplanted by the

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The interior of the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève showing the reading tables arranged as originally on the long axis. From Edward Edwards, Memoirs of Libraries: Including a Handbook of Library Economy (London: Trübner & Co., 1859). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

printed word. Rather it would need to adapt in many ways, most dramatically to the notion that knowledge was not fixed but an expanding network. Although with rapid changes in printing and in postal delivery – much of it taking advantage of expanding railroads, which were often the subject of lengthy coverage in the very magazines they were transporting – it was possible to distribute newspapers and even the newest appearance that is my subject here – illustrated newspapers and magazines – into the home for reading alone or among family members, maybe even aloud. Labrouste was interested in the public space that was the library, the place where members of the public read alone and silently together. If in the original monastic library the primary readers were the members of a monastic community who knew one another, shared values and read from the same canon of books, now the public library was open to people of very diverse backgrounds, interests, purposes, people who would sit next to people they very likely did not know to read books that the other might never read. Here is one of the radical acts of Labrouste, imagining the reading room as a place that not only optimized the quality of reading – much of the research into soaring height, new materials and the new technologies of gas lighting went into creating the optimal lighting for

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reading off white pages without reflections and shadows. But at the same time, the arrangement of readers in the Bibliothèque Sainte Geneviève originally facilitated this sense of being alone in public, with only a few readers visible, rather than the vast sweep that is the reading room today where the tables have been turned perpendicular to the main axis of the long space.8 Originally one saw only the reader sitting across from one; now there is a crowd on view as the reader lifts his or her head from the page, or the computer screen. But it seems clear now that a much greater impact on the architectural thinking of the circle around Labrouste was the interactions between the literary historian and critic Hippolyte Fortoul and the publisher Edouard Charton, both of whom had been formed in the crucibles of SaintSimonianism in Paris in the late 1820s, and the group of romantic rebel architecture students – Labrouste, Vaudoyer, Félix Duban, Louis Duc9 chief among them, who had made common cause first in their critiques of established academic notions about architecture and then in their radical redefinition of what the writing architect’s relationship was not simply to a profession but to a citizenry readership. It was Fortoul who coined the phrase l’architecture est la véritable écriture des peoples (architecture is the veritable writing of peoples) and the architects Léon Vaudoyer and Albert Lenoir who took it up as a motto in their regular contributions to one of the longest lived of the period’s illustrated modestly priced weekly newspapers/journals, Le Magasin Pittoresque.10 Fortoul also penned the words that perhaps best summarized the philosophy of the group centred on a series of figures who had passed through the utopian socialism of the first generation of Saint-Simonians: ‘The Press is the Public Square of the great nations of the modern age, of the nineteenth century’. Architecture, public space and the printing press were here brought into a powerful alliance rather than a proto-Darwinian struggle for survival of the fittest as in ‘ceci tuera cela’. And it is striking that as much as Hugo’s phrase was to be debated in the following century for its prognosis for architecture, the phrase does not seem to have been a preoccupation of the architectural press, itself reborn in these years with the revolutionary changes between printing and the reproduction and dissemination of images. For now, I know of no place where it was printed or discussed in an architectural context; although that research remains to be done. As does a study of the interrelated networks of illustrated newspapers and journals that began to emerge within a few years of one another across Europe from Britain, the epicentre, to France, the German states, Spain, the United States, Brazil and beyond. This wave gained force over the course of the early 1830s, followed a few years later by another wave of new specialized architecture magazines.11 What they all had in common was that they were illustrated. While the rise of the illustrated architectural volume accompanies the rise of historicism in architectural practice and culture – which we might define as the belief that all phenomena are determined by underlying historical laws of development which make both the past a visible record of the unfolding of progress and the present guidable through the extension of that knowledge – into the 1820s with the widespread adoption of new techniques of wood engraving, notably engraving on the hard grained end of the block which allowed for more refined images, the illustrated books remained luxury items confined to the elite of the architectural profession, to institutions and to subscribers. To be a subscriber to a book like Stuart and Revett’s Antiquities of Athens in the 1750s was to be part of an elite, even to have one’s name printed in the list of subscribers at the front of the volume, in this case a list that started off with the name of the king himself. It was also to be patient; to wait months, sometimes years, for the next installment,

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which in turn would be taken to a bookbinder to create lavish folio volumes to be consulted in your library, and often that would be a specially designed room, perhaps even by Stuart or by the Adam brothers.12 Your name moreover was known to all who consulted the volume, perhaps in one of the earliest private libraries which began to appear in the eighteenth century. Eighty years later to be a subscriber to The Penny Magazine, whose first weekly issue appeared on 31 March 1832, was to receive an illustrated collection of articles in the most diverse fields of knowledge delivered to you by mail on a weekly basis, either to be discarded, stacked, or if you liked bound in due course to place among the handful of books you might have in your modest dwelling. And, of course, we will never know who the subscribers were exactly. The Penny Magazine was created by a fascinating figure – Charles Knight – to serve the ends of the British Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, itself an organization that has been much studied in relationship to the issues of the rise of science, of public literacy, and to the history of the book. Its relationship to issues of architecture has been scarcely addressed.13 But it is clear from the very first issue of The Penny Magazine that issues of art, architecture and public spaces of the city were an important part of the editorial matrix. Within the first year the magazine achieved a circulation of 200,000, a vast number then and even now. And on the first page of the first issue appeared both a somewhat crude wood engraving of the medieval monument at Charing Cross and a text that made it clear that the awareness of architectural history as the embodiment of a shared national history and issues of public space in the city were interrelated. After recounting the history of the monument to sensitize the public to realizing its historical resonances, to turn them into readers of the city and not simply of the magazine, the article turned to current events. ‘This place has been recently greatly improved by clearing away decaying houses and enlarging the space for the public convenience, and for the display of newly erected handsome building’.14 This is, of course, a remarkable – if unaware – echo of Voltaire’s cry some three quarters of a century earlier for the clearing away of parasitic urban fabric from the great East Façade of the Louvre in Paris, Claude Perrault’s great colonnade, arguing for both the legibility of France’s history in the monumental fabric of Paris and the creation of public space ennobled by the backdrop of architecture.15 But the difference now was between pamphlets that circulated in limited numbers in the 1750s and 1760s, to a limited reading public, and publications running in the tens of thousands of copies distributed rapidly nationwide via the penny post and the railroad. The first issue of The Penny Magazine went on to inaugurate as well a policy of using the texts to help build a broader constituency for new institutions of culture that were changing the landscape of London. Articles were devoted to the recently opened zoological gardens, opened in 1828 in London, as well as to the newly opened British Museum. While throughout the nineteenth century tensions between the democratization of culture and the taste culture of an educated middle class would play out in subtle ways, notably in the cues that museums instituted to create class comforts and discomforts; The Penny Magazine set out to counter precisely these codes. In its first year it began a series offering a guide to the riches contained in the British Museum, especially the collections of antiquities; and addressed head on the current debate over the access of the working classes to these new temples of culture. ‘The characteristics of the English populace – perhaps we ought to say people for it extends to the middle classes – is their propensity for mischief. The people of most other countries may safely be admitted into parks, gardens, public buildings and galleries of pictures; but in England it is necessary to exclude them, as much as

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Charing Cross Monument as illustrated on page one of the first issue of the Penny Magazine, 31 March 1832. Hathi Trust.

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possible, from all such places’. This is a sentence which The Penny Magazine quoted from the last published number of the more mainstream and established Quarterly Review.16 ‘Severe as it is, there is much truth in it’. But they went on: We hope to do something, speaking generally, to excite and gratify a taste for intellectual pleasure … We wish to point out many inexpensive pleasures, of the very highest order, which all those who reside in London have within their reach; and how the education of themselves and of their children may be advanced by using their opportunities of enjoying some of the purest gratifications which an instructed mind is capable of receiving. Having learnt to enjoy them, they will naturally feel an honest pride in the possession, by the Nation, of many of the most valuable treasures of Art and of Science; and they will hold that person a baby in mind – a spoilt, willful, mischievous baby – who dares to attempt the slightest injury to the public property, which has been collected together, at an immense expense, for the public advantage.17 And they continued: We will suppose ourselves addressing an artisan or tradesman, who can sometimes afford to take a holiday, and who knows there are better modes of spending a working day, which he some half-dozen times a year devotes to pleasure, than amidst the smoke of a tap-room, or the din of a skittle-ground. He is a family man; he enjoys a pleasure doubly if it is shared by his wife and children. Well, then, in Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury, is the British Museum; and here, from ten o’clock till four, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, he may see many of the choicest productions of ancient art, Egyptian, Grecian, and Roman monuments … You are upon safe ground here. You are come to see your own property. You have as much right to see it, and you are as welcome to see it, as the highest in the land. There is no favour in showing it you. You assist in paying for the purchase, and the maintenance of it; and of the very best effects that could result from that expense would be to teach every Englishman to set a proper value upon the enjoyments which such public property is capable of affording.18 Finally in the very next issue an article on the library turned not to public buildings – it had included an illustrated article on Somerset House – but to the idea of a home library, and in it expressed clearly the main aim of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, one that was to lead to great controversy over publisher and author’s rights, as the society sought ways to provide very inexpensive editions of new books as well as to creating miscellanea of topics in the weekly Penny Magazine. The cheapest of all enjoyments by far is that which is derived from books. We hold a library, therefore, to be among the fittest furniture of even the poorest man’s cottage. A most important and cheering consideration in reference to this sort of furniture is, that the more the demand for books shall grow and extend itself the cheaper are they sure to be sold. The price even of many new books, owing to the large sale upon which the publisher can now count by the increase of readers, is now so low, that for a few pounds expended, in the course of as many years ... almost as many volumes may be purchased ... 19

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But the magazine, of course, cost only a penny, and not surprisingly an article in an early number was devoted to ‘the Value of a Penny’, a deliberate play too on the social differences between those who talked of pence and pounds, and those who spoke of guineas. Articles were not confined to museums – an introduction to the National Gallery of Art ran in parallel to the British Museum series and sought to explain how to look at a painting as something greater than mere illustration. Not only architectural history would enter in, for instance, in an article on the history of the obelisk published as discussion began on the placement of the Egyptian obelisk the nation had received from the Pasha of Egypt, and most importantly a lengthy article on the history of the site of the Palace of Westminster in the wake of the fire of 1834 which opened a debate on style and the appropriate expression of an architecture of national identity. For this too Knight and the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge had answers. Not least because increasingly architecture was seen as a key subject of public knowledge, not only in the articles of The Penny Magazine but more importantly in the entries of the volumes of the Penny Cyclopedia, which began to appear in 1833, but took a decade to complete. Happily as it starts with A, an architectural philosophy began to be articulated in the second volume, already in 1834: The architecture of a people is an important part of their history. It is the external and enduring form of their public life; it is an index of the state of knowledge and social progress. Some speculators, indeed, would regard the noble monuments which decorate our own country, only as the slavish submission to a hierarchy. But it may safely be asserted that the progress which man has made in the arts is mainly due to the influence of religious systems; and that the great improvements which have thus been gradually effected have at last descended to the humblest dwellings … We have considered that the architecture of a country is inseparable from its history ...20 The article then promises a breakdown of articles on architecture coming in future volumes, offering no single historical article of great development but rather various categories, interestingly reflecting then-current historical researches but excluding most European architectures outside the British Isles and Italy: Babylonian, Celtic, Chinese, Egyptian, English, Etruscan, Gothic, Greek, Hindoo [sic], Italian, Mexican, Norman, Pelasgian, Persepolitan, Peruvian and Roman. By 1838 plans for a separate article on English architecture have fallen by the wayside and the discussion of the national style will await the article on ‘Gothic Architecture’. This came by the end of the year in volume 11, an article that is fascinating in its lively and cogent discussion of topics that are being debated in other places, notably in the publications of such antiquarians as Thomas Rickman, whose work is both summarized and critiqued. Pugin is never mentioned by name but it is clear that the Cyclopedia is in dialogue with him, and with much of the current debate of the emerging Battle of the Styles. As for the term, they begin by explaining: Yet although originally used in a contemptuous sense, no meaning of the kind is now attached to it; and however ill-chosen the epithet Gothic may be, however arbitrary the acceptation thus connected with it, the term is now so established, not only in our own but in other European languages, that is useless to attempt to explode it … The term ‘Christian architecture’ for

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instance besides being affected, is also inaccurate, because that would equally well suit any other style, whether earlier or later, prevalent in the religious edifices of Christian countries, Saxon, Norman or Lombardic. It would further seem to imply that the style so denominated had its rise together with Christianity itself, and was derived by its first professors in opposition to Pagan architecture; consequently, instead of correcting error, the adoption of such a name would be merely the inconvenient substitution of a new fangled-mistake in lieu of an inveterate and firmly-rooted one.21 And they even have pointed words on the whole issue of adopting historical styles to modern needs, walking a thin tightrope between non-partisan reporting on both Greek and Gothic architecture while clearly advancing the cause of the Gothic: In all probability the perplexity arising from the great diversity of examples, and the difficulty of reducing them to any kind of compendium system, had no small share in leading the ‘revivalists’, as they are termed, readily to adopt the antient Roman orders, as infinitely more simple, and to decry Gothic as altogether capricious and arbitrary, destitute of any fixed principles and proportions, and incapable of being reduced to any settled standard. The difficulty of becoming familiarly acquainted with it in all its bearings and modifications no one will dispute; at the same time no one who any real feeling for architecture can deny its extraordinary powers and resources, or fail to be struck with admiration at its extraordinary copiousness and flexibility. Compared with this style the architectural system of the Greeks is exceedingly limited and confined in expression, and incapable of much expansion without appearing more or less evidently to be wrested from its original propriety.22 Much else about this article is fascinating and worthy of analysis, and to my knowledge no one has analysed it, although the article ‘London’, in vol. 14 published in 1839, is a no-holds-barred article of criticism of the contemporary building of the British capital building and on the commentary in William Henry Leed’s Illustrations of the Public Buildings of London, which had appeared in 1838.23 Much work remains to be done on the circulation of ideas, texts and images between these popularizing publications and the professional press – Leeds became editor of the Civil Engineer’s and Architect’s Journal in 1839 – and between vulgarization and models. Indeed the discussion of Oriental and Byzantine models in the Penny Cyclopedia’s entry on ‘Gothic Architecture’ is remarkably anticipatory of many of the arguments Ruskin would advance over a decade later in The Stones of Venice. As is well known, France and the German states emulated the new popularizing illustrated press and books of England with great rapidity. I am not able to speculate much on the example of the Pfenning Magazine founded by J.J. Weber in Leipzig in 1833 on the model of The Penny Magazine, but rather want to focus on the group who came together around the joint projects of the Revue Encyclopédique, the Magasin Pittoresque and the Encyclopédie Nouvelle, of whom the key personage was Edouard Charton, a great admirer of Knight in London. In France the key difference was that the cauldron in which the illustrated press and its ideology was prepared was stirred by a culture of applied science in the realm of polytechnicians and their overlap with the intense social science theorizing of the utopian socialists, Saint Simonians and the various splinter groups into which they divided in the mid- to late 1820s and early 1830s. It was Emile Barrault in

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his 1830 Saint-Simonian call to artists, Aux Artistes, who coined the vocation of the artists as the ‘preceptor of humanity’ shortly in the wake of the group’s coining of the term ‘avant-garde’ as an artistic stance and ethos around 1828.24 In technological terms the ground had been prepared by the immigration of English illustrators to Paris in the wake of the Napoleonic defeat and the reopening of French markets to the English. Wood engraving, pioneered in England in the opening years of the century, was exported to France around 1817 when the Englishman Thomson established a school in Paris that trained a large number of English and French engravers, who, subsequently, worked for Parisian printers, notably for Didot. The new technique allowed for more detailed and less linear illustrations, but most importantly it allowed for the production of images that could be printed together with the text, allowing for precise images of architecture to accompany words since so rarely did word portraits of buildings succeed without illustration. And even more importantly this integrated text and image could be printed at low cost and in great numbers. In the eighteenth-century engraving on wood – famously associated with the German Renaissance and with the proliferation of religious imagery in the Reformation – had been abandoned for other materials such as copper and steel which allowed for greater detail but also required separate printing of type and image. With new techniques of using burins on the hard ends of wood – pioneered in England – text and image could be brought together and impressions of tens of thousands were possible, whereas copper gave out relatively quickly. Printing costs fell sharply as numbers printed skyrocketed. While the Saint-Simonian breakoff group around Jean Reynaud, philosopher and brother of the architect Léonce Reynaud, and Pierre Leroux formed the Revue Encyclopédique in 1831 to debate philosophical, political and technical issues for an intelligentsia, it was the activism of a younger ex-Saint-Simonian, Edouard Charton, who combined utopian socialist belief in an emerging new positivist era of technological advance and of rational science as an engine of both progress and lessened social inequality with the advances of the English penny press to create one of the most long-lived and influential illustrated periodicals of the nineteenth century, Le Magasin Pittoresque.25 Charton was active in the Société pour l’instruction élémentaire as well as the Société de la morale chrétienne, both new philanthropic organizations dedicated to the spreading of knowledge to the increasingly literate working classes. He quickly expanded the innovations of the English press under Charles Knight – whom he greatly admired – into a veritable SaintSimonian philosophy of visual literacy and popular pedagogy. From the outset he forged an alliance with three engravers who had trained in Thomson’s workshop – and who have yet to be fully studied – Jean Best, John Andrew and Isidore Leloir. At first they were not able to keep up with the volume of what Charton had in mind for a weekly magazine, admitting that they were not able to provide four engravings per week, since Charton from the first imagined the imagery playing a much more prominent role in Magasin Pittoresque than in The Penny Magazine. So for the first issues the team agreed to reuse stereotypes – a method of creating a plaster mould of the original plate – brought over from London, which was a serious constraint for the authors Charton had begun to assemble from his extended circle of Saint-Simonian sympathizers. Not surprisingly, given these Saint-Simonian connections, the Magasin Pittoresque had a much greater focus on science and technology than its English counterpart, but as of yet no systematic comparison of content of the two, or their other European equivalents, has been undertaken. Even more importantly, Charton formulated the idea of a need for a national education in the

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history of national architecture. Architecture was thus to go hand-in-hand with other realms of human knowledge and endeavour as Charton had spelled out in the pages of the magazine: ‘Toutes les sciences, toutes les études, toutes les idées qui font l’orgueil de notre civilisation seront mises à la portée de tout le monde, et seront présentées toujours par le côté qui s’adresse directement à la moralité humaine, et dans le rapport qu’elles ont avec le bonheur des individus et le progrès de la société’.26 While articles in the Encyclopédie nouvelle – which began life as the Encyclopédie pittoresque à deux sous – were signed with, for example, the architects Léon Vaudoyer and Léonce Reynaud, writing more than a dozen between 1834 and 1836; in the Magasin Pittoresque, as in the English penny press, virtually none of the articles was signed. But we know from references inside the Magasin Pittoresque itself, decades later, that the series ‘Etudes d’Architecture en France’, which began as a serialized and heavily illustrated series on the history of French architecture, was jointly penned by the young architect Léon Vaudoyer and by Albert Lenoir.27 It is interesting to note that this series would run parallel to Vaudoyer’s activities in another place of popular education, the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, where Vaudoyer would serve as architect for the transformation of the former monastery of St Martin des Champs on the right bank into a national institute of technology and manufacture as well as a museum which extended an idea pioneered during the French Revolution of popular demonstrators, forerunners of what we would call museum docents.28 Lenoir, the son of the founder of the Musée des Monuments Français, disbanded in 1816, had been at work since 1833 on the project for a national Museum of Antiquities, that would open in 1844 during the run of the series as the Musée de Cluny. The relationship between the creation of novel museums and the rise of the popular illustrated press went hand-in-hand. While I have studied Vaudoyer and Lenoir’s text there is much more to be done to understand this influential enterprise. Precisely how the illustrations were chosen and how they were created by the team of Best, Andrew and Leloir is now better known thanks to the researches a decade ago by Marie-Laoure Aurenche and to the publication of Charton’s correspondence. The key role also that Vaudoyer played as part of a network of suppliers of drawings or watercolours to be copied by a veritable machine of engraving is also now studied in detail. This was a period of an enormous proliferation of images. Lenoir, of course, was involved in the production of the Statistique Monumental de Paris, and his vast collection of drawings for that purpose were found about a decade ago in an uncatalogued archive at the Bibliothèque Nationale.29 Vaudoyer had, like all of his contemporary pensionnaires at the French Academy, produced countless drawings during this five years away from Paris in Italy, both of monuments in Italy as those encountered in France along the way to and from the Roman sojourn, some of which ended up being engraved in various publications although the prime aim was to serve as a visual encyclopaedia for the students in his atelier. In the 1830s as well he would join the cadre of architects who began working for the young Commission des Monuments Historiques as well as the Service des Edifices Diocésains. Both would require graphic records of buildings, as the practice in archaeological recording and hypothetical ‘restoration’ studied before the antiquities of Rome were now extended to the inventorying, maintenance and restoration of French monuments. Vaudoyer’s drawings

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would find their way not only into displays at the Salon and the Expositions Universelles, but into very fine steel engraving for the lavish publications of César Daly, above all the Revue Générale de l’Architecture et des Travaux Publics, at the opposite end of the spectrum from the wood engravings entrusted to Leloir, Best and Andrew for the Magasin Pittoresque.30 During the nearly fifteen years of the series ‘Etudes d’architecture en France’, the technologies of illustration changed radically, most notably the invention of photography announced in the same year that the series began. But despite these revolutions in image making, the role of printing remained relatively unchanged for the nearly half century of the Magasin Pittoresque. But what did change was the notions of what could be seen and shown, as the public was taken on voyages they might never have expected. While travel, ethnography and natural history loomed large in all of Charton’s publications, and in none more than the very popular La Tour du Monde (projected as early as 1853 but published for the first time in 1860), the explorative imagery of allowing people to see what was rarely made available became ever more daring. While showing the hard to visit Sistine chapel in 1858 seems fairly canonical, it was still a place few had ever visited. Vaudoyer and Lenoir’s series is striking by the dominance of exterior views – even though we still don’t know who picked more than a handful of them or who drew them for the engravers. But soon the imagery followed both the imagination, in the work of J.J. Grandville and others, and new viewing devices. In 1849 the magazine reported on the use of the so-called Fantascope and the creation of rooms called Phantasmagoria rooms, made possible by the popular entertainments promoted by the new use of projecting devices and magic lanterns. These were also becoming mainstays of the popular science lectures at the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers, where Vaudoyer was the architect. The Magasin Pittoresque kept regular tabs on changes in photography (1863) – even if, unlike César Daly in the professional press, it doesn’t seem to have challenged the relationship between photography and print making, as when Daly published a print of a perspective view of the exterior of Labrouste’s new Bibliotheque Sainte-Genevieve that was in fact – as Neil Levine has recently shown – drawn from a photograph taken from an elevated view point at the end of the square.31 As construction of the library was coming to a close, Labrouste even prepared a series of drawings for a monographic publication never made, emphasizing the architectural section that allowed understanding of the very close relationship between interior spaces and exterior composition in the building. At the same time, Charton turned for the first time to the motif of the section of the Paris apartment houses that had begun to recast the streetscape of the capital in the July Monarchy, notably in the creation of whole new streets cut through dense urban quarters like the rue Rambuteau at the edge of Les Halles, the first of several sections of an apartment house, with its revelation of the interior life of families separated only from one another by a single floor, and from the public by a stone façade. The first of these was in 1847, the most elaborate in 1883. Increasingly, both optical devices and the magazine would take people into places that transgressed the lines of privacy, such as a detailed pictorial analysis of the vulva in 1875. And soon, with microscopes and other devices, the readers would be led into the world of the invisible, following, for instance, Jules Verne, one of the great authors of the revolution of inexpensive illustrated printing and a huge inspiration for Viollet-le-Duc when he turned to writing popular novellas for adolescents.

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‘Études d’architecture en France’, Magasin Pittoresque, 1 (1839). Hathi Trust.

If the first wave of illustrated publications opened whole new cartographies of the relationship between erudition and public education, between democratization on the one hand and the notion of a shared culture on the other (e.g. Frankish Costumes in the fourth century, created by Wattier in 1842), a second wave in the 1840s turned to the question of reporting the news with images. This was to change public perception of everything from distant warfare to the questions of the evolution of public spaces and public institutions and their architectural embodiment. While Richard Wittman has studied the birth of architectural criticism in the eighteenth century and the recent near-monoculture of studying post-war architecture in the twentieth century has worked on networks both personal and electronic that emerged through print and televised culture, the nineteenth century remains largely uncharted territory. The internet is changing its accessibility; the project launched in Oslo has opened up many new avenues towards the history yet to be synthesized, of the productive role of illustration in the dream of an educated populace in the nineteenth-century penny press. The only challenge is that the materials and physicality of the original publication, its

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‘Études d’architecture en France. Monuments Chrétiens – Style Roman, Deuxième époque’, Magasin Pittoresque, 33 (1839). Hathi Trust.

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A cross section of a Parisian apartment building. Magasin Pittoresque, 15 (1847). Hathi Trust.

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A cross section of a Parisian apartment building. Magasin Pittoresque, 23 (1883). Google books.

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crudeness or luxuriousness, its price point, its range of access and so on are largely equalized in the process of digitization. Observations on these aspects of the periodicals that convened information and images is vital to establish both the internal dynamics and the circulation set up nationally and internationally by an exploding press. In the wake of the illustrated magazines, and competing encyclopaedias in the 1830s, the 1840s was the decade of the illustrated weekly news journals. These were often of considerably higher quality of production and thus higher in cost. Here again in France Charton was a leader, founding in 1843 L’Illustration on the model of the Illustrated London News, launched one year earlier. When it comes to the question of ‘ceci tuera cela’, it seems to me that the core group around Charton always worked on the assumption that there was a symbiosis between the printed document and built and lived space. There is little evidence of a first act in the drama we have been living for the last generation of whether or not the internet is killing public space and the public realm. Take just one example, centred on the role of exemplary Grands Hommes in public space, a theme first launched of course during the French Revolution. Throughout the 1830s the press complained that the great reworking of the pediment of the Paris Pantheon was hidden by scaffolding, that this work of public sculpture on a square that was just now being completed in its form projected in the 1750s by Soufflot with the completion of a district town hall (Mairie d’arrondissement) on the south side was not exhibited to the public for fear of the political resonances of the figures chosen by the sculptor David d’Angers, himself a great Republican much influenced by Saint-Simonianism. ‘Finally the government has allowed us to discover the great portico of the Pantheon … this beautiful page of history written under the inspiration of the people’, Fortoul wrote in the Saint Simonian La Nouvelle Minerve in 1837.32 Already at the end of 1830, the Minister of Public Instruction, Guizot, had approved the choice of figures to be included in the fourth pediment to be inserted in the building in less than fifty years. The Magasin Pittoresque reported on David d’Angers himself: ‘After having given up for several days the chisel for the rifle, he took up again his chisel and sculpted the pediment of the Pantheon, an enormous and beautiful work, which is enough to establish his grand reputation’.33 Three allegorical figures flanked by ‘grands hommes’, those very figures refused in the 1820s. On the left Voltaire, Rousseau, Mirabeau and Malesherbes; figures from the church, but also from Science. Manuel and La Fayette, with artists as well, Jacques Louis David as revolutionary artist, Bichat, Cuvier, Monge; and the students, like those who had accompanied Foy, Manuel and Constant to the Père Lachaise cemetery.34 During the whole evolution Fortoul and David were comparing notes on their interests in the philosophy of history, both profiting from trips to Germany, where they were interested not only in the effects of the ideas of Hegel on the polity but also on the function of historical representation in architecture and public representation in sculpture. Fortoul would defend at once David d’Angers’s effort to render legible the great meaning of the Pantheon, a building frozen in a denuded idealism of eighteenth-century neoclassicism, what his group considered the nadir of a vacant formalism, even while within a year of the unveiling another hero of the group Henri Labrouste would create a pendant on the north side of the square. ‘The pediment’, Fortoul writes, was the veritable face of the building, just as the forehead is on the face of a man where one reads his thought, the thought that directs him, the sentiment which animates his being,

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so on the front of a temple one should be able to read the soul that animates its life. The pediment wasn’t simply an ornament and a preface, it was the legible summary of the temple, it was the place where religious idea to which one sacrificed victims in the sanctuaries was to be unveiled before the eyes of the crowd. M. David understood thus the pediment of the Pantheon. Commissioned to decorate the face of a temple in which there is neither a sanctuary, nor an image, nor an altar, he felt in an even more vivid way that it was necessary to put on the pediment everything that was missing on the interior: and his chisel, so elegant and so energetic at the same time, engraved here the admirable character that the people have given to the mission of this monument.35 Unfortunately Charton’s plan to publish an engraving of the pediment figures to accompany his text was thwarted by David d’Angers’s critique of the quality of the engraving which he refused to allow to be printed.36 No less would Fortoul be the interpreter of the efforts of the Romantic architects to translate that task of public education into architecture, whether it be in Duban’s picturesque grouping of fragments at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Vaudoyer’s deployment of historical and new buildings at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, a true popular institution, or in the most synthetic building of all, the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève which dialogued with the former church of Ste. Geneviève across the northern flank of the place du Pantheon. Here, from 1838 to 1850, Henri Labrouste strove to create a monument that was the veritable crucible of the stylistic evolution of architecture. But inscribed onto this building which eschews all monumental figurative sculpture are nonetheless the words of printing. Here is played out even more powerfully the relationship between the capacity of architecture to represent larger forces, being as Fortoul said ‘the veritable writing of peoples’ and the role of individuals. Is it a surprise that Gutenberg should play such an important role for both Labrouste and David d’Angers?37 David d’Angers turned in 1839 to a commission from the city of Strasbourg for a monument to Gutenberg in historic costume with his first printed sheets, inaugurated in 1840 in the presence of David d’Angers for the 400th anniversary of printing. Below were a series of bas reliefs of the benefits of printing in America, Africa and Asia: for the USA we see Benjamin Rush, Lewis, Morris, Jefferson, LaFayette, George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, who holds the Declaration of Independence, as well as Simon Bolivar, who is greeting a black man. In Africa we see the end of slavery; blacks are freed from their chains by Wilberforce, Clarkson, Condorcet and the Abbot Grégoire; and in Asia we see Mohammed.38 In 1875 as his last design Labrouste would erect a monument to the early Parisian printer Ulrich Gering in the vestibule of his first library. In short, it would seem that the creation of public institutions, public space and the honing of public taste in the decades following the launch of the Magasin Pittoresque were seen as modern enterprises in productive sympathy. This – or the printing press – would in the end compound, expand and collaborate – not kill – the work of architecture.

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The Gutenberg Monument in Strasbourg as engraved in the Magasin Pittoresque, 8 (1840). Hathi Trust.

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David d’Angers, the Gutenberg Monument in Strasbourg (1839), bronze relief on the base showing the printing press in America. © Coyau/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 3.0.

Notes 1 Barry Bergdoll, Léon Vaudoyer: Historicism in the Age of Industry (New York; Cambridge, MA: The Architectural History Foundation: MIT Press, 1994). 2 Hippolyte Fortoul, De l’art en Allemagne, 2 vols. (Paris: Jules Labitte, 1841), vol. 1, 177, but used repeatedly in other contexts including in the Magasin Pittoresque, see Bergdoll, Léon Vaudoyer, 109. 3 Hippolyte Fortoul in Le Droit, 28 November 1836, 1381. 4 http://www.academia.edu/29682355/About_The_Internet. Accessed 27 July 2017. 5 See Thordis Arrhenius, Mari Lending, Wallis Miller and Jérémie Michael McGowan (eds), Place and Displacement: Exhibiting Architecture (Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2014). 6 Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962). 7 It would seem that the scholarly interest in this quote begins with Neil Levine’s insightful and provocative essay on Henri Labrouste’s relationship to Victor Hugo, ‘The Book and the Building: Hugo’s Theory of Architecture and Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Ste-Geneviève’, in Robin Middleton (ed.), The Beaux-Arts and 19th Century French Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), 138–173. This spawned an entire literature, perhaps most productive being Marteen Delbeke, ‘Tot de dood hen scheidt: architectuur en het boek van Hugo tot Koolhaas’, DWB 16, no. 3 (2008): 392–401. Thematical issue ‘Architectuur en literatuur’, guest editor with Christophe van Gerrewey.

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8 See Martin Bressani and Marc Grignan, ‘The Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève and “Healing Architecture”’, in Barry Bergdoll, Corine Bélier and Marc Lecouer (eds), Henri Labrouste: Structure Brought to Light (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2013), 94–123. 9 It is clear from Charton’s correspondence that neither Labrouste nor Duc was not as closely involved in the publication projects as Vaudoyer, Reynaud and, sometimes, Duban. Labrouste’s name does not appear in the correspondence and Duc is mentioned impersonally. See the letter of Charton to his wife dated 29 June 1839 referring to a dinner with Vaudoyer, Fortoul, Jean and Léonce Reynaud ‘et l’architecte de la Bastille que nous fera voir la colonne de Juillet’, Édouard Charton, Correspondance Générale (1824–1890), edited and annotated by Marie-Laure Aurenche, 2 vols. (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2008), vol. 1, 267. 10 Both Fortoul’s diary and Charton’s correspondence have been published: Geneviève Massa-Gille (ed.), Journal d’Hippolyte Fortoul, 2 vols. (Geneva: Droz, 1979–82); and Charton, Correspondance Générale (1824–1890); and there is now a substantial secondary literature on Charton, although Fortoul awaits a synthetic study. See in particular: Marie-Laure Aurenche, Édouard Charton et l’invention du Magasin Pittoresque (1833–1870) (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2002); and Annie Lagarde-Foquet and Christian Lagarde, Édouard Charton (1807–1890) et le combat contre l’ignorance (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2006). 11 On the architectural press, see Hélène Lipstadt, Harvey Mendelsohn and I. Frazer, Architecte et ingénieur dans la presse: polémique, débat, conflit (Paris: CORDA/Eierau, 1980); Anne Van Zanten, ‘Form and Society: César Daly and the Revue Générale de l’Architecture et des Travaux Publiques’, Oppositions 8 (1977): 137–45; Marc Saboya, Presse et architecture au XIXè siècle, César Daly et la Revue Générale de l’Architecture et des Travaux Publiques (Paris: Picard, 1991); and Jean-Michel Leniaud and Béatrice Bouvet (eds), Les Périodiques d’architeture XVIII-XIXe Siècles, Recherche d’une méthode critique d’analyse (Paris: Ecole des chartes, 2001). 12 See Eileen Harris, assisted by Nicholas Savage, British Architectural Books and Writers 1556–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 13 See Patricia J. Anderson, ‘Pictures for the People: Knight’s “Penny Magazine”, an Early Venture into Popular Art Education’, Studies in Art Education, 28, no. 3 (Spring 1987): 133–40. 14 ‘Reading for All’, and ‘Charing Cross’, The Penny Magazine, 31 March 1832, 1. 15 See Voltaire, ‘“Des embellissements de Paris” (1749) and “Sur le Louvre”’ (1749) in M. Waddicor (ed.), les oeuvres completes de Voltaire (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1994), 199–233 and 529–32. See also Richard Wittman, Architecture, Print Culture and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France (New York; London: Ashgate, 2007). 16 ‘British Museum’, Penny Magazine, no. 2, 7 April 1832, 13. 17 Ibid., 14. 18 Ibid. 19 ‘The Library’, Penny Magazine, no. 3, 15 April 1832, 21. 20 ‘Architecture’, in The Penny Cyclopedia of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (London: Charles Knight, 1833ff), vol. 2 (1834), 283. 21 ‘Gothic’, Penny Cyclopedia, 11 (1838): 318. 22 Ibid., 319. 23 ‘London’, Penny Cyclopedia, 14 (1839): 109–29. 24 Emile Barrault, Aux Artistes. Passé et avenir des beaux-arts (Paris, 1830). 25 See note 9. 26 Editor’s note to vol. 5 of the Magasin Pittoresque, 31 December 1837. 27 See the article on Vaudoyer’s Marseille Cathedral, Magasin Pittoresque, 44 (1885): 210.

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28 See Bergdoll, Léon Vaudoyer, especially chapter 6. 29 See Institut National d’Histoire d’Art (INHA), Albert Lenoir, Historien de l’architecture et archéologie (Paris: INHA, 2005). 30 We know that Vaudoyer provided in 1841, for instance, a drawing of Beethoven’s house for engraving for the Magasin Pittoresque, see Charton, Correspondence générale, vol. 1, 364. See also the engraving after his drawing of the sixteenth-century houses at Moret published by César Daly, ‘Deux maisons de l’epoque de François Ier’, Revue Générale de l’Architecture et des Travaux Publics, 20 (1870): 225–6, and plate 57. 31 See Neil Levine, ‘The Template of Photography in Nineteenth-century Architectural Representation’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 71, no. 3 (September 2012): 306–331. 32 Hippolyte Fortoul, ‘Fronton du Panthéon’, La Nouvelle Minerve, 10 (1837): 433–71, reprinted in B. Bergdoll (ed.), Le Panthéon: Symbole des revolutions (Paris: Picard, 1989), 313–16. 33 ‘David d’Angers’, Magasin Pittoresque, 24 (1856): 235. 34 See Barry Bergdoll, ‘Les Grands Hommes: Panthéon/Père Lachaise, l’axe de l’opposition libérale sous la Restauration’, in Catherine Healey and Karen Bowie (eds), Le Père Lachaise (Paris: DAAVP, 1998). 35 Fortoul, ‘Fronton du Panthéon’, 433–71. 36 On this see Charton, Correspondance Générale, vol. 1, 215. 37 On Gutenberg, Gehring and Labrouste, see Levine, ‘The Book and the Building’, note. 7. 38 On David d’Angers’s monument see Jacques De Caso, David d’Angers, l’avenir de la mémoire (Paris: Flammairon, 1988). The monument is described in ‘Gutenberg’, Le Magasin Pittoresque, 8 (1840): 317.

The Past in Print: Ancient Buildings Represented by Engraving, Etching and Lithography in Early-NineteenthCentury England Stephen Bann

I

t is many years since I began to write about the representation of the past in visual terms. The Clothing of Clio (1984) was my first attempt to encompass the many and various modes of representation, both visual and literary, which contributed to the new ‘historical-mindedness’ of nineteenth-century Britain and France. In that study I was concerned, in part, with examining what Roland Barthes described as the ‘reality effect’ (effet du réel) achieved through the insertion of superfluous detail into the narrative, and developed my own concept of the ‘technical surprise’. The latter was defined particularly in terms of the distinctive ‘effect of luminosity’ associated with a newly invented form of printmaking such as lithography, which was further intensified through the enhanced technical means of visual spectacles like Daguerre’s diorama.1 In a further essay published initially in 1988, I once again focused on what I judged to be the novel type of vicarious historical experience that was offered to the public in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Taking as my theme the title of an exhibition recently held in London, ‘Views of the past’, I argued that this was not in fact an appropriate way of describing the eighteenth-century material on show. The documents from the earlier period did not, in my view, justify the contention that contemporaries experienced buildings and scenes in terms of their historicity, that is, as being perceptibly ‘old’. In the case of a celebrated watercolour of the interior of Letheringham Church in Suffolk, which was on display at the exhibition, I suggested that this was not so much a ‘record of decay’, as of an ‘extreme state of mechanical disorder’.2 However I also quoted from what must have been the pioneering text in the theorization of the concept of historical-mindedness as applied to the nineteenth century: Alois Riegl’s essay on ‘The modern cult of monuments: its character and its origin’. Looking back at the century, Riegl was in no doubt that room had to be found for a new category of ‘age value’, which was quite different

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from ‘aesthetic value’ and indeed from any ‘historical value’ considered from an objective point of view. ‘Age value’ was, in his view, the result of a perception that required neither taste nor learning to support it: ‘The most simple-minded farmhand can distinguish an old belfry from a new one.’3 I will not go further into my earlier writings on the subject, except to underline that the present chapter is an attempt to examine more closely the variety of printmaking techniques that contributed, in their different ways, to stimulating the perception of ‘age value’. I do not doubt that Riegl was right to contend that a new perception had developed by the end of the nineteenth century, and I do not doubt that we can trace its emergence (whether as cause or effect is perhaps immaterial) in the proliferating print imagery that was such a striking feature of the whole period. But I will allow here for a somewhat different range of print techniques to be considered than was the case in my earlier work. This seems appropriate since I have also shifted my attention from France to Britain. In France, there is a clear evolution of technical means that involves increasingly strong ‘reality effects’ associated with luminosity: from the church interiors painted in oils by Granet to the lithographs of the Voyages pittoresques; from the Dioramas of Daguerre to the daguerreotype. In Britain, the process is certainly less obvious, and it is less appropriate to regard it from a teleological point of view. The opportunity thus arises here to examine the relative roles of the different print techniques – more precisely, those of engraving, etching and lithography – within a closely defined period of time. My analysis will therefore be concerned with three printmaking ventures which are launched in the course of ten years: John Britton’s ‘historical and architectural essay relating to Redcliffe Church, Bristol’, published in 1813; Domestic Architecture A Series of Views, a compilation whose etchings by Francis Stevens were published in 1815, with an accompanying text that appears to be from the same period; and Britannia delineata, a publication of ‘C. Hullmandel’s Lithographic Establishment’, whose earliest prints were issued in 1822. The significant difference from the French situation can already be glimpsed in the fact that nothing remotely comparable to Stevens’s etchings appeared in France during this period. By contrast (and by comparison with the extraordinary success of the ‘Ancient Normandy’ volumes of the French Voyages pittoresques in the early 1820s) my third example, Britannia delineata, was an abortive venture, which did not proceed beyond the first instalment, concerning the county of Kent.

John Britton F.S.A., An historical and architectural essay relating to Redcliffe Church, Bristol, illustrated with plans, views and architectural details … , Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, Paternoster Row; J. Taylor, High Holborn; and the author, Tavistock Place. (London, 1813) Britton announces himself proudly on the title page as ‘Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries’ of London, and his enterprise in putting together this ambitious early publication fits well with the traditions of this venerable association which can be dated back to 1707. Not being himself a man of wealth and high-ranking connections, Britton had to struggle to make his voice heard. The fact that he relied upon a network of other, quite modestly situated, provincial scholars is evident in

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the pencilled dedication in my personal copy of the book to a citizen of Malmesbury in Wiltshire, who had given him hospitality. However Britton was justified in selecting for this monographic study a medieval building which had always held a high status in respect of its architecture, and had also attracted recent attention because of its association with the tragic suicide of the young poet, Thomas Chatterton, who had grown up in its shadow. Britton indeed adds a whole appendix for the consideration of the ‘Chatterton affair’, which revolved around the accusation that Chatterton had forged a series of medieval poems supposedly found in the archives of the church. But Britton’s sagacious approach to the affair avoids delving into the psychological complexities of Chatterton’s transgressive immersion in the past. Equally, his justification for drawing attention to St Mary Redcliffe requires no affirmation that this can be a personal discovery, let alone an eyeopening experience like Goethe’s vision of Strasbourg Cathedral. On the contrary, as he admits in his opening dedication: The beauties and peculiarities of its architecture have long attracted the admiration of the antiquary, and artist, and indeed of every person of taste and science. As a whole, it is grand and imposing; and its details are curious, beautiful and elegant.4 Britton’s vocabulary evinces the wish to have his cake and eat it – at least from our present critical point of view. ‘Beauties’ and ‘peculiarities’ do not appear to belong to the same order of aesthetic judgement, and yet they are both worthy of ‘admiration’. The regime of the ‘curiosity’ could scarcely be said to infringe upon the domain of beauty, let alone of that which is ‘elegant’. Yet Britton does not seem to want to make a choice between these criteria. The reference to ‘taste and science’ is also significant, since Britton continued in his later productions to insist on defending the claim to ‘scientific’ accuracy as being the hallmark of antiquarian research, as opposed to the licence that was taken by the ‘amateur’.5 It goes without saying that Britton set a high premium on the visual aspect of his publication. The quality of the images was no doubt deemed essential from the point of view of sales, for which he himself would have been at least in part responsible, as the listing of his name in common with various booksellers on the title page reveals. The prints that accompany his text are fairly small in scale (23.6 × 15.2 cm), each being credited both to a draughtsman, who would have made an original detailed drawing, and to the engraver who transferred the design to a copper plate. How far Britton himself would have had the unaided opportunity of choosing these artists, and subsidizing his commission, it is not easy to say. But he was not backward in offering his own verdict on the success, or indeed failure, of the resultant images. His approval is given most explicitly, and most fulsomely, when he comments on the ‘View of the North Porch’ (drawn by Mackenzie, and engraved by John Le Keux): The external feature of this porch is shown in Pl.VII where the principal elevations, consisting of a curious doorway, a series of niches, with acute canopies, the upper part of a window, two triangular buttresses, part of the north transept, and a bit of tower, with modern balustrades and steps, are tastefully and faithfully displayed … Note: The engraver of this plate has at once enhanced his own reputation, and conferred an honour upon the graphic art, by the specimen before us. It is one of those rare works of the burin, which pleases the common observer, and delights the most skilful artist.6

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View of the North Porch, from John Britton F.S.A., An Historical and Architectural Essay Relating to Redcliffe Church, Bristol, Illustrated with Plans, Views and Architectural Details, printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, Paternoster Row; J. Taylor, High Holborn; and the author, Tavistock Place, London, 1813. Hathi Trust.

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The importance of featuring the porch of St Mary Redcliffe in a specially prominent way must indeed have been a high priority. This was the oldest part of the building, and it involved a ‘curious’ doorway that has continued to intrigue architectural historians in view of its uniquely non-British character. Indeed there can be no doubt that this was a superior print, well judged for such an important task. Britton’s description itemized its components analytically, but the image has reassembled them to form a ‘faithful’ and convincing whole – though not without a slight perspectival adjustment to the section of the nave on the left that becomes clear in a comparison with a modern photograph. If Le Keux’s rendering of the porch pleased Britton, the same was not the case with the plate which showed the Crossing as seen from the South Transept. This was hardly less essential to the depiction of the building since the pairing of slender transepts at St Mary Redcliffe is a rarity among British parish churches. Here, however, it was not the skilled line engraver, of Huguenot origins, who had successfully made his mark, but the English topographer J.J. Rawle, who was probably more familiar with the lighter tonal effects obtained by the etching process. Britton does not conceal his irritation at the failure of his efforts: But the chief reason for selecting this point of view is, to shew [sic] the picturesque arrangement of forms and parts; and the brilliant effect which is frequently seen in this portion of the church. Unfortunately, the engraver, after having finished two plates of this subject, has not succeeded in producing the desired effect in either.7 Britton’s readiness to trash one of the illustrations to his own book may possibly be explained by the fact that he wished to communicate his own particularly intense experience of the building’s interior. This he volunteers in a passage of allusive and highly charged prose: In 1812 I had an opportunity of observing the appearances and effects of a violent thunder storm in this edifice, which were really so awful and grand, that I conceive an attempt to describe them will neither be thought irrelevant nor unamusing. Never did I witness a scene so truly sublime. It reminded me of necromancy and enchanted palaces. Busily and intently engaged, alone, in surveying this large church, deciphering the old inscriptions, and examining the monuments, an almost sudden darkness came on: the distant pictures and columns became scarcely perceptible: the rain, accompanied by large hail stones, fell in torrents on the leaden roof; and the glass of the windows seemed to be in imminent danger of being shivered to atoms … the effect was truly sublime and awful.8 Britton is certainly not alone among the pioneers in the reappraisal of Gothic architecture to record an extreme emotional experience in the interior of a great church. Martin Bressani has underlined the significance of Viollet-le-Duc’s reaction, recalled from childhood, to the overpowering sensory richness of the interior of Notre Dame.9 Augustus Pugin’s alarming fit, which happened while he was drawing as a young man in the same location, is corroborated by the anxious letter in which his mother records the untoward event.10 But, in the case of Britton, the stakes are different. In the first place, he conceives that he owes the reader a full description of the memorable experience. But he also has no hesitation in placing it in the aesthetic category of the ‘sublime’. That is to say, he establishes a connection with the informed reader by tapping into the new category that writers

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View of South Transept, from John Britton F.S.A., An Historical and Architectural Essay Relating to Redcliffe Church, Bristol, Illustrated with Plans, Views and Architectural Details, printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, Paternoster Row; J. Taylor, High Holborn; and the author, Tavistock Place, London, 1813. Hathi Trust.

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like John Gilpin and Edmund Burke had brought to the fore in the late eighteenth century. Moreover, he extends the passage already quoted with a telling reference to the poet of ‘Paradise Lost’: At one moment the whole space was, as Milton terms it, ‘darkness visible’, when, the next instant, the vivid lightning blazed through the long ailes, and illuminated every object. It glanced on the clustered column, played around the brazen eagle, flashed on the supplicating statues: alternate gloom and dazzling glare pervaded the church. An almost incessant peal of thunder continued to accompany the reiterated flashes of lightning: it now seemed exhausted, but only to come on again with additional fury of sound and more awful crashes.11 The difference between the transmission of Britton’s experience and those of the two representatives of the succeeding generation is therefore a fundamental one. In both their cases, the event resists being put into words. It is recalled from adulthood by Viollet-le-Duc, and known by pure accident in the case of the letter written by Pugin’s mother. Britton, however, has provided his lone observation of the thunderstorm from within St Mary Redcliffe with a literary pedigree. It need not be emphasized that his experience as recounted here has little to do with the task of describing the features of the Gothic building that he has set himself. The episode dramatizes an epic confrontation between the sublimity of nature and the scenario of the empty Gothic interior. But it also brings the experience of the building to life in the way that Rawle’s pallid rendering of the Crossing could never hope to do.

Domestic Architecture, A Series of Views of Cottages and Farm Houses in England and Wales built chiefly during the dynasty of the House of Stuart, From Drawings by S. Prout; R.C. Burney; A. Pugin; C. Varley; J.J. Chalon; W. de la Motte; R. Hills; W.H. Pyne; and others. The Plates etched by Francis Stevens. M.A. Nattali, 23 Bedford Street, Covent Garden [originally published 1 January 1815 by R. Ackermann, The Strand: my edition incorporating original plates and letterpress c. 1850] The role of the illustrations in this compilation of etchings and letterpress offers a striking contrast to the relatively subordinate status that they possessed in Britton’s Redcliffe Church. Where Britton was anxious to assess the adequacy of the engravings that he had included – both positively and negatively – the Introduction to Domestic Architecture makes a general claim from the outset for the intrinsic suitability and proven success achieved by means of the etching process: This work affords a specimen of domestic architecture in every county in England and Wales: the variety of form and simplicity of design which are comprised in the subjects, the distribution

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of light and shadow, and the freedom of execution which the style of etching exhibits, it is presumed, may lend instruction to the amateur of painting, and amusement to those who delight in contemplating the rural beauties of our isle.12 Instead of focusing on one outstanding medieval monument as Britton does, Domestic Architecture embodies the ambitious project of presenting specimens of the humble architecture of the early modern period from every county in England and Wales. It is, in effect, unprecedented in its attention to the historical buildings of the earlier period which had survived as vestiges of a largely obsolete rural way of life. But another significant difference should be noted, which bears on the confusing issue of the publication dates and authorship of the work as it was produced in separate editions during the nineteenth century. The first publication was unquestionably in 1815, when Ackermann’s title page bore the simple title Views of Cottages and Farmhouses. All the original etchings were individually dated 1815, and bore the name of Francis Stevens as well as the individual British artists responsible for the original compositions.13 However the outstanding stock of prints and the letter press of the accompanying texts would presumably have been sold off to another publisher, M.A. Nattali, around the middle of the nineteenth century. Nattali provided a new title page, with the extended title citing the ‘dynasty of the House of Stuart’, which no doubt conveyed a more historical flavour to the collection. Apart from this substitution the contents of the work remained identical. Little is known about the printmaker Francis Stevens, who was born in 1781 and died in 1822/23. He evidently studied under the landscape painter P.S. Munn, who is represented in this collection by the two scenes of rural architecture from Staffordshire and Sussex which Stevens translated into etchings. He also appears to have served as a drawing master in Exeter, and also joined the Norwich Society as a member. Both the charming frontispiece to the collection, featuring a corner of a cottage yard, and at least one of the county plates appear to have been etched from his own compositions. However it is the exceptional quality of his skill as an etcher that stands out here, and provides a more than adequate complement to the running texts. What was justly acclaimed in the Introduction as Stevens’s prowess in rendering ‘the distribution of light and shadow’14 can also be extended to his remarkable ability to convey the texture and tactile qualities of building materials, and hence to provide a vivid suggestion of the antiquity of these dilapidated rural buildings. If Stevens is little-known, the author of the Introduction and extensive textual commentary to the collection is anonymous. No clue to his (or her) identity can be found in either of the editions. This poses a conundrum. These writings are well informed, as to the knowledge of contemporary British landscape painting and its traditions. They are authoritative in tone, and incorporate comments on the state of British society which suggest a strongly held, somewhat conservative point of view. They greatly enhance the visual effect of the etchings, while displaying an extremely extensive knowledge of the topography of the counties of England and Wales. Why does no name appear? It surely cannot be claimed that the views expressed are particularly controversial. A more likely conclusion is that the author desired anonymity because he (or she) had not yet embarked on a career, or adopted a particular direction as a scholar, and so adopted the convention of anonymity which was by no means unusual in the period. By the time that Nattali produced the new edition more than three decades later, any identification of the letterpress for credit would have been impractical.15 I am proposing to make my own suggestion for the authorship of these commentaries. Edward James Willson (1787–1854) became in later life a noted architect and antiquarian whose sphere

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of activity was chiefly his native city of Lincoln, but who also exercised a broader role in the activities of the ‘Gothic revival’. He is on record as having contributed an ‘Introductory Essay’ and ‘descriptions’ of a large proportion of the plates to Specimens of Gothic Architecture, published by Auguste Pugin in 1821.16 Ten years later, he performed a similar function in providing ‘descriptive letter-press’ for Ornamental Gables selected from Ancient Examples in England.17 By the time that he collaborated on this work, which was again published by the father of the more well-known A.W.N. Pugin, he was described as ‘Architect, FSA’ (Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries). Willson undoubtedly had his own decided views on antiquarian and architectural issues by the 1820s. A copy of the History of Lincoln (1816), in which his name and the date 1820 are inscribed, also contains a trenchant critique in his own handwriting on a blank page: This volume was the first account of Lincoln that appeared in a neat and respectable form and so far the publishers deserve to be recommended. In literary excellence it is sadly deficient, being a mere compilation selected from every work that could be found relating to Lincoln & the whole put together without discrimination in a puerile and conceited way.18 By the decade of the 1820s, Willson was in his early 30s. What evidence might there be of an earlier commitment to write for Domestic Architecture, which does indeed contain one plate etched by Stevens after a drawing by Auguste Pugin? In fact, the necessary clues can be found in a ‘Brief Memoir’, written after Willson’s death in 1854 by the very antiquarian whose Redcliffe Church has already been discussed here. John Britton writes of his ‘many years intimacy’ with Willson, whom he had first met in the cathedral of his native city [Lincoln]. Britton indicates that the latter was still a boy, the son of a prominent local builder, when this first meeting took place, and that it led to a joint expedition to observe the ancient churches of Lincolnshire. Furthermore, he expresses himself in moving terms on the happy consequences of this chance meeting: These journeys and this association became eminently beneficial both to the young topographer and his younger pupil, for both men enquiring and incited to study, think and act. The latter [Willson] first employed his inexperienced pen in writing accounts of these and other antiquities for the ‘Beauties of England’ which the former revised for the press.19 The series Beauties of England, listed as being ‘by Edward Wedlake Brayley and John Britton’, was published in the first years of the nineteenth century, with the volume that involves Lincolnshire appearing in 1807. Edward Willson would only have been 20 years old at that date. Yet there is surely no problem in accepting Britton’s assurance of his protégé’s precocious literary activity during these years, and it is also understandable that the name of the young scribe was never actually published in connection with the Beauties. We might also quite reasonably scrutinize the letterpress of Domestic Architecture with the expectation that, in default of any signature, Willson’s special predilection for the medieval architecture of his native city and county might show through. This is the revealing passage accompanying the plate of a Lincolnshire farmhouse that was drawn for Stevens by Auguste Pugin: The city of Lincoln is greatly esteemed by the lovers of picturesque scenery. Its commanding site, the grandeur of its cathedral seated on the high ground, the ancient buildings which form

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the ascending streets, and the river covered with vessels of commerce running at the base of the city, form a grand coup d’oeil, which has been represented in various ways by the pencils of our most admired artists. This county is rich in examples of Gothic buildings, perhaps no other exhibits so many fine specimens of ancient architecture in those elegant parts of ecclesiastical buildings, towers and steeples.20 So I would argue that there is a strong likelihood that the ‘letterpress’ of Domestic Architecture was written by Britton’s young friend and former collaborator, Edward Willson. But the way the latter’s text has been conceived in relation to Stevens’s prints could hardly be more different from my earlier examples. As has been shown, Britton judged (and on occasion was ready to deplore) the quality of the engravings depicting the exterior and interior of St Mary Redcliffe. His passionate response to the architecture manifested itself most clearly in his own description of the thunderstorm breaking around the Gothic nave, where he evokes Milton and the Sublime. Willson (as I will henceforth name the writer for Domestic Architecture) is thoroughly invested in the artistic notion of the ‘picturesque’. He refers frequently to the practice of landscape painting in Britain as it had developed over the previous century, while intimating at the same time that it

Francis Stevens (1781–1823) after Augustus Pugin (1762–1832), ‘Lincolnshire, near Lincoln’ from Domestic Architecture, A Series of Views of Cottages and Farmhouses, in England and Wales, Built Chiefly during the Dynasty of the House of Stuart, London, between 1844 and 1850. Etching. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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is through the efforts of such painters that a new interest in the ancient buildings that populate the landscape has been kindled. The passage on Lincolnshire already quoted concludes with an acknowledgement of the vitality of this tradition, and features the name of Auguste Pugin, who provided the drawing for Stevens’s Lincolnshire etching: The many fine drawings and paintings by Girtin, Pugin, Dewint, Samuel, Francia, Turner, J. Varley, C. Varley, and other painters, evince that these architectural beauties are now duly appreciated, and will perpetuate and extend the honours due to the enlightened men whose genius projected and whose industry perfected such revered structures.21

Francis Stevens (1781–1823) after Paul Sandby Munn (1773–1845), ‘Derbyshire’ from Domestic Architecture, A Series of Views of Cottages and Farmhouses, in England and Wales, Built Chiefly during the Dynasty of the House of Stuart, London, between 1844 and 1850. Etching. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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Moreover, Willson’s individual entries take care to distinguish the landscape features of each of the counties of England and Wales, with attention paid to the influence of geology and other special features on the style of building. In the case of Derbyshire, where Stevens used a composition by his own former teacher, P.S. Munn, the vertical format of the print emphasizes the precipitous nature of the country, signalling a distant peak, and also indicating that the hillside cottage is built of blocks hewn from the same stone as the bluff upon which it perches. Willson explains: ‘The cottage situated upon the verge of the rock, as represented in the plate, is characteristic of the county, which, in many parts, is composed of abrupt ground … Derbyshire offers sufficient variety of studies for every style of landscape composition. Here nature assumes all her variety of shapes, the romantic, beautiful, picturesque, and grotesque.’22 What can be added to this enumeration of the aesthetic properties of landscape painting is, indeed, the special suitability of the etching process to convey these features. Stevens’s skill enables the white page to represent the full brilliance of the effect of light on stone. In most of the scenes for this volume, the buildings chosen for depiction are mere humble cottages ‘characteristic of the county’, as in the case of Derbyshire. But Willson does not baulk at speculating on the origins of more ambitious buildings, whose present change of use points to an interesting historical derivation. This is noteworthy in the case of ‘Groby’, in Leicestershire, where the relative dilapidation of the gabled farmhouse cannot be allowed to obscure its earlier grand affiliations. Willson begins with a passage on the distinctive tradition of the English Church with regard to domestic architecture: We owe to the enlightened churchmen of old our entire obligation for their improvements in domestic architecture … The peaceful occupation of their dwellings afforded them the opportunity of bestowing attention to convenience. Hence, the domestic buildings attached to religious houses, monasteries, nunneries, colleges, &c. were the first that were designed to accommodate their inhabitants with that respectable comfort which civilization requires … This building at Groby has the character of having been an appendage to a priory, or some other religious house. Many such still remain, and are commonly in the occupation of farmers.23 Indeed the lengthy facade which Stevens has etched after a composition by W. De la Motte tells a story that is eloquent in its intimations of an earlier history. The squat tower on the left carries a perky weathercock, but the neighbouring construction is roofless and sprouting with weeds. As for the near parts of the building, the fine masonry and crisp square brackets framing the generous mullion windows must surely indicate a late medieval, or early Tudor, origin. On the other hand, the presence of the informal wicket fence and unguarded, burgeoning vegetation points to a degree of present-day neglect. Willson is moved by the historical tension that arises from these contrasts: ‘It produces no uneasy sensation, when we see venerable Gothic buildings, like these in question, kept in repair, and used to protect corn and other grain from exposure to the weather’.24 This, surely, is the burden of Willson’s message. He is aware that the artists whose work he contemplates deserve to be commended above all for their ability to study nature. At the same time, the discovery of such ‘domestic architecture’ in a rural setting inevitably brings into play the condition of the farmer’s life on the land. We hardly see any of the fields from which the grain is raised, but each scene selected to illustrate its respective county points to the continuation of a

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Francis Stevens (1781–1823) after William Alfred Delamotte (1775–1863), ‘Leicestershire, Groby’ from Domestic Architecture, A Series of Views of Cottages and Farmhouses, in England and Wales, Built Chiefly during the Dynasty of the House of Stuart (London, between 1844 and 1850). Etching. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

traditional rural way of life. The farmhouse, with its various outbuildings, forms an architectural nucleus. Yet Willson makes it clear that this is a way of life that is fast disappearing. The effects of the Industrial Revolution are making themselves felt in the steady migration of country folk to the city. The attraction of such scenes for him is thus a measure of what might be called their double historicity. Such structures as the farm at Groby vividly recall the capital influence of medieval religious houses on the development of domestic architecture. But when represented in their present state, they also testify to the flight from the land, and the creation elsewhere of a debased architecture to house the urban population. This theme comes across strongly in his commentary on a Cheshire scene, ‘Near Bartholmy’, for which Stevens has conjured up a vast and ghostly old farmhouse. Its capacious eaves and shimmering windows are the backdrop to a scene in which two boys are playing a game together in the shadow of a bush, observed by a third youth who leans nonchalantly on his staff. Willson writes: Every year diminishes the remaining number of houses of this character in almost parts of the island. Such has been the change of circumstances of those who pursue the business of agriculture, and such the change of habits of the country squire, that those manorial and

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Francis Stevens (1781–1823) after R.C. Burney, ‘Cheshire’ from Domestic Architecture, A Series of Views of Cottages and Farmhouses, in England and Wales, Built Chiefly during the Dynasty of the House of Stuart, London, between 1844 and 1850. Etching. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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hospitable dwellings which existed formerly in almost every village, have been pulled down, for the purpose of selling the materials, or using them in the building of a modern mansion. Some indeed have been pulled down, because that class of persons who heretofore led a rural life, have chosen to reside in cities or populous towns, and have left none in their deserted districts sufficiently rich to support establishments suited to the respectability of these extensive mansions. The associations connected with the times when these venerable edifices were supported with that hospitality which prevailed up to the middle of last century, are interesting to all persons of feeling. In almost every district were many families whose ancestors for ages occupied the houses in which they resided, and societies were formed by the families in their neighbourhood, when the younger branches held friendly intercourse with each other, which was of a pleasing and agreeable nature, rarely known to the youth of the present age. But a few years more and not a vestige of these mansions, the seats of ancient British hospitality, will remain; and future painters will search in vain for those subjects which occupied the pencils of the artists of the early part of the nineteenth century.25 If my reasoning is correct, these are the views of a young man of around 20 years of age who would later be recognized as one of the major proponents of the ‘Gothic Revival’ in the East of England. Edward Willson had become established as an architect by 1817, and designed the magnificent Gothic organ case for the organ in Lincoln Cathedral in 1826. In later years, he superintended the repair and restoration of several medieval churches in Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire, and was responsible for the fabric of Lincoln Castle between 1834 and 1845. He also constructed Neo-Gothic churches of his own design. Though originally a protégé of John Britton, he evinces in his approach to ‘Domestic Architecture’ a more creative and empathetic involvement with the buildings of the past, which is enriched by an extensive knowledge of English landscape arts. The superb etchings of Francis Stevens provide an ideal complement to his suggestive commentaries.

Britannia Delineata Part I, Kent. London, printed for Rudwell and Martin 4–6 Bond Street/At C. Hullmandel’s Lithographic Establishment: Lithographs by Hullmandel, J.D. Harding, S. Prout, R. Westall and others. [prints individually dated 1822/23] The three publications that are discussed in this chapter all point to the precariousness of book publishing in the early nineteenth century, especially in cases where print illustration was involved. Britton’s Redcliffe Church was essentially financed by its author, who commissioned the line engravings and the drawings that were necessary for their composition. Domestic Architecture was a venture of the print publisher Ackermann, who was at liberty to sell the plates individually as well as in the form of a bound volume. But the edition in my possession was made up at a later date by another editor, Nattali, who had purchased all the unsold plates and the letterpress. This must indicate that the original supply of prints significantly exceeded demand. In the case of

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the third publication, Britannia Delineata, we see a highly ambitious project, employing a new print medium, that simply failed to get off the ground. As the title suggests, Hullmandel’s original intention was to cover the whole of Britain, i.e. England, Wales and Scotland. His model was not the long-superseded Beauties of England, with its wordy texts and its paltry little engravings, nor indeed Domestic Architecture which offered just one of Stevens’s fine etchings for each of the counties of England and Wales. He must certainly have looked for his model on the other side of the channel, where he observed the launch of the outstanding publication entitled Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France, whose first prints began to appear in 1820. This long-running series concerned with the antiquities of the historical provinces of pre-revolutionary France had opened with the prospect of three volumes devoted exclusively to ‘Ancienne Normandie’ (1820–25).26 Hullmandel, for his part, decided to commence with the historic kingdom and county of Kent. Britannia delineata was publicized as the first in a series of volumes ‘comprising views of the Antiquities, Remarkable Buildings and Picturesque Scenery of Great Britain’. Yet only five of the planned eight parts of the Kent volume were destined to appear, and these marked the end of the project as a whole. What must have emboldened Hullmandel when he launched his great project (dedicated to King George IV) was the conviction that his own lithographic studio could be the harbinger of a revival of British topographical printmaking. He had every reason to believe that the standards which he had already achieved in perfecting the new medium of lithography were commensurate with those on the other side of the Channel. The great French painter Théodore Géricault, who was attracted like many of his peers in France to the potential of the lithographic crayon, had crossed over to London, and produced some of his most outstanding prints in Hullmandel’s studio. The fact that lithography was an unmediated process, compared with the specialized techniques of engraving and etching after an original drawing, could not be gainsaid. As Hullmandel argued in his treatise, The Art of Drawing on Stone (1824): ‘A lithographic impression is not even a facsimile of the work of an artist of eminence, but the original drawing itself. This is a feature peculiar to lithography.’27 Yet all of Hullmandel’s entirely legitimate partisanship could not mask the truth that lithography had never gained in Britain the recognition as was being accorded in France. He opened his treatise with the admission that the lithograph had ‘many enemies’ there, including ‘painters of eminence’, and was viewed in some quarters as a ‘degrading art’ which brought the ‘works of artists into contempt’.28 When he published this treatise in 1824, Hullmandel must have been looking back on the achievement, however limited, of the first part of Britannia Delineata. This emboldened him to make a direct comparison between the strengths of English lithography, as he saw the matter, and those of the French. In his view, the English certainly lagged behind in their readiness to reap the rewards of the new medium. But this was only a temporary handicap: The great superiority [in lithography] conceded to the French is granted, as far as concerns figures and heads; for in landscape, I think every unprejudiced observer will say, that we can produce finer lithographic specimens than they. The understanding, taste, and knowledge of the Fine Arts, has within the last thirty years wonderfully spread within the middling orders in France, and has also made great progress in England since a few years; and I assert that Lithography will greatly tend to develop this taste for objects of art.29

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To a certain degree, Hullmandel was justified in commending the future potential of lithography. As mentioned before, the volume Ornamental Gables, which derived from drawings by Auguste Pugin, ‘Drawn on Stone by his pupil B. Ferrey’, and included letterpress by E.J. Willson, appeared from Hullmandel’s press in 1831. Yet this was the very same year that the Penny Magazine was first published in Britain, to be followed in 1832 by the corresponding publication of the Magasin pittoresque in France. It was these so-called ‘magazines’, which exploited the unprecedented technical advantage of being able to transfer wood-cut illustrations to stereotype plates, that achieved the quantum leap from small-scale to mass circulation, thus amply facilitating the mission to spread the ‘knowledge of the Fine Arts’. However my concern here is with the distinctive character and achievement of the aborted Britannia Delineata. To what extent did this publication demonstrate Hullmandel’s conviction that English lithography was ‘superior’ in the realm of landscape? More specifically (and in accordance with my theme), how did the work succeed in representing the historical aspect of the sites selected? How well did Britannia Delineata put ‘The Past in Print’? One initial point should be noted. Both the publications already discussed could be defined as emerging from an antiquarian point of view, though in the case of Domestic Architecture this merges with the contemporary outlook of Willson’s text. But Hullmandel is attempting to transfer to the British domain what was doubtless a significant aspect of the success of the Voyages pittoresques. This was its link with the vastly improved facilities for travel across the Channel in the period succeeding the Napoleonic wars: in a word, with the burgeoning phenomenon of ‘tourism’. Britannia Delineata presented as a frontispiece James Duffield Harding’s vignette of the Crypt of Canterbury Cathedral, and five out of the twenty Kent prints in all provided additional views of this great medieval building. The letterpress, featuring texts in French translation as well as in English, focused on the attractions of Canterbury as a potential tourist destination: ‘Peu de voyageurs en traversant rapidement Canterbury, impatients d’arriver à la capitale, se doutent de l’intérêt qu’offre cette ancienne ville.’30 Yet the analogy with the Voyages pittoresques breaks down if we take account of the vastly different historical significance attached to such venerable buildings. The Voyages pittoresques vehemently proclaimed the need for France to re-establish the connection with her long-term history that had been fractured by the events of the Revolution. Charles Nodier’s introductory essay concluded on a solemn note with a reference to the assassination in 1820 of the Duc de Berry (the Bourbon heir to the throne), and was followed by a lithographic vignette of a medieval knight on guard beside an ancient cross. A Gothic church could be glimpsed in the background.31 Britannia Delineata had no such tale of national emergency to tell. Indeed the written commentary, which was doubtless compiled by Hullmandel himself, is predominantly anecdotal, with relatively little historical detail and no sign of the broader concern for the preservation of historical buildings that is a prominent feature of Domestic Architecture. In the case of Harding’s fine lithograph of St Ethelbert’s Tower, we are informed that this last remaining fragment of the great medieval abbey of St Augustine’s, Canterbury, actually collapsed on 17 October 1822, between the moment of Harding’s initial sketch and the publication date of the lithograph of 1 January 1823! This lends an adventitious interest to the image, but the text falls into bathos: ‘Thus suddenly was destroyed one of the finest specimens of the architecture of the monastic age.’32 A similar clumsiness can be noted when Hullmandel justifies his decision, in the case of another print, to modify the outline of the ancient coastal church of Reculver: ‘Two unsightly, although perhaps useful wooden steeples or signals having been erected on the top of each tower, the artist was induced to restore the view to the state it was in a few years ago.’33

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J.D. Harding (1791–1863), ‘St Ethelbert's Tower, Canterbury’ from Britannia Delineata, Comprising Views of the Antiquities, Remarkable Buildings, and Picturesque Scenery of Great Britain, printed by C. Hullmandel, London, 1822. Lithograph. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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One explanation of the plan that Hullmandel followed in his ‘delineation’ of Kent can be found in the previously cited conviction that English lithographers excelled in ‘landscape’, as opposed to ‘figures and heads’. This, however, begs the question of where ‘architecture’ belonged in that division of labour. Closer investigation of Harding’s lithograph of St Ethelbert’s Tower prompts a quick retort. This is primarily a vision of landscape, to which the tottering tower brings an appropriate touch as a medieval ruin, with the cows gathering placidly and unsuspectingly at its base. What strikes the attention is Harding’s artistic attention to the vegetation that occupies much of the scene, and in particular the noble tree that occupies the left foreground. It is hardly irrelevant to note here that Harding was John Ruskin’s drawing master, and Ruskin acknowledged him (in the section of Modern Painters entitled ‘Of Truth of Vegetation’) as ‘the main who next to [Turner] is unquestionably the greatest master of foliage in Europe’.34 The name of Turner also appears relevant in respect of the high proportion of lithographs which attempt ‘panoramic’ views of landscape in a spirit very different from the concerns of the French: Hullmandel’s ‘Chatham from the Dover Road’, Harding’s ‘Dover from Shakespeare Cliff’ and, in particular, Samuel Prout’s ‘Interior of Dover Harbour’. It could be argued that Hullmandel’s choice of scenes corresponded to the specific character of the English (and, in particular, Kentish) environment. It was certainly the case that English Cathedral Closes had retained their separate, enclosed character after the Reformation, and one of their striking features was the picturesque landscaping that framed the features of the medieval buildings. Canterbury possessed a whole plantation known as The Oaks adjacent to the East End of the cathedral, and it was their splendid foliage that framed the main subject of Harding’s print, ‘St Anselm’s Chapel, Canterbury Cathedral’. This picturesque principle could be extended to the more distant views of the great medieval buildings which valorized their harmonious placing within a natural frame. Hullmandel’s commentary on Richard Westall’s ‘Canterbury, From North Lane’ is illuminating in this respect, since it makes a firm distinction between the role of the artist and that of the antiquarian, leaving us in no doubt that Westall’s image of the full length of the cathedral rising beyond the River Stour follows the pathway of art: ‘Few places in Britain offer more objects of research and interest to the antiquarian, or a more beautiful combination of buildings and landscape to the painter, than Canterbury.’35 It was surely realistic for Hullmandel to admit to this division of labour between the artist and the antiquarian. But the broader message of the three publications discussed here is that the antiquarian concern with the past was nurtured by images, and this led in turn to the production of new images. These images were constrained by the limitations of the media through which they were transmitted; but also (to put it more positively) liberated through the extension of printmaking media that was taking place throughout this particular decade. Britton observed all too clearly the limitations of traditional copper plate engraving in respect of providing an equivalent to the intense experience of medieval architecture that drove his historical research. Stevens adopted the picturesque views of painters, yet drew on the resources of etching to create vivid renderings of fragile historical structures that were undergoing decline and decay. Willson provided an appropriate commentary which defined the status of these buildings while moving towards what could almost be seen retrospectively as a modern conservationist strategy. Hullmandel responded to the prestige of the Voyages pittoresques with a project that was devoted to bringing out the special character of the English historical environment, and he planned to do so through the medium of a new technique that virtually obliterated the division between draughtsmanship

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and printmaking. But in his particular case, and perhaps in the case of Harding, these lithographs ‘drawn on stone’ remained, essentially, drawings: that is to say, they did not fully develop the capacity of the medium to achieve a material effect more substantial than that which can be obtained by the pencil. There is perhaps one clear exception to this judgement. This is the case of Samuel Prout (1783–1852), who after the curtailment of Britannia Delineata proceeded to join the group of young lithographers who were working in France on the Voyages pittoresques. Prout’s print of ‘Barfreston’, dated January 1823 and one of the last of the Kent series, responds in an idiosyncratic but spectacular way to what is correctly described in the commentary as ‘an undoubted specimen of Norman architecture … amongst the most beautiful of the kind in England’.36 Focusing as it does on a small building lost in the Kent countryside, this print exercises to the full Prout’s proven ability to model the materiality of stone, while he traces the intricate details of a carved facade that emerges pristine from the mists of time.

Samuel Prout (1783–1852), ‘Barfreston Church’ from Britannia Delineata, Comprising Views of the Antiquities, Remarkable Buildings, and Picturesque Scenery of Great Britain, printed by C. Hullmandel, London, 1822. Lithograph. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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Notes 1 Stephen Bann, The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in NineteenthCentury Britain and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 56–57. 2 Stephen Bann, The Inventions of History: Essays on the Representation of the Past (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 127. 3 Bann, The Inventions of History, 125. 4 John Britton, An Historical and Architectural Essay Relating to Redcliffe Church, Bristol (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown; and the author, 1813), v. 5 See Stephen Bann, ‘Pugin – The French Connection’, in Timothy Brittain-Catlin et al. (eds), Gothic Revival Worldwide (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2016), 29. 6 Britton, An Historical and Architectural Essay Relating to Redcliffe Church, 24. 7 Ibid., 15. 8 Ibid., 51. 9 Martin Bressani, Architecture and the Historical Imagination: Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, 1814–1879 (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), 1–2. 10 Bann, ‘Pugin – The French Connection’, 28. 11 Britton, An Historical and Architectural Essay Relating to Redcliffe Church, 51. 12 Domestic Architecture: A Series of Views of Cottages and Farmhouses in England and Wales (London: M.A. Nattali, c. 1850), iv. 13 The preliminary drawings by Stevens, after original pictures by the listed artists, are held in the Library of Arizona State University (OCLC no. 16905573). 14 Domestic Architecture, iv. 15 There can be no doubt that the Nattali edition incorporates original letterpress from Ackermann’s edition, as both bear the imprint of L. Harrison and J.C. Leigh, 379, Strand. 16 Augustus Pugin, Specimens of Gothic Architecture Selected from Various Edifices in England Accompanied by Historical and Descriptive Accounts by A. Pugin Architect (London: J. Taylor, A. Pugin and J. Britton, 1821), vii: ‘The Introductory Essay and the description of the very Plate and subject, to p. 33, have been expressly written for this work by Mr E.J. Willson, of Lincoln, and great care has been taken to print every passage of his copy verbatim et literatim’. 17 Augustus Pugin, Ornamental Gables, selected from Ancient Examples in England (London: A. Pugin, April 1831); ‘with descriptive letterpress by Edw. James Willson, Architect, FSA’. 18 Willson is listed in the British Library catalogue as a ‘contributor’ in part for this acid comment on pages bound within his personal copy of an anonymous History of Lincoln (Lincoln: Drury and Sons, 1816). He also appends lists of the mayors of Lincoln. 19 John Britton, Brief Memoir of Edward James Willson FSA (from The Builder, 6 January 1855: printed by Cox and Wyman), 8. 20 Domestic Architecture, 18. 21 Ibid., 18. 22 Ibid., 7. 23 Ibid., 17. 24 Ibid., 17. 25 Ibid., 4.

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26 For an account of this publication in its French context, see Stephen Bann, ‘Representing Normandy’, in Distinguished Images: Prints in the Visual Economy of Nineteenth-Century France (London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), 47–65. 27 Charles Hullmandel, The Art of Drawing on Stone (London: Hullmandel and Ackerman, 1824), v. 28 Hullmandel, The Art of Drawing on Stone, ii. 29 Ibid., xiii. 30 James Duffield Harding, Charles Hullmandel, Samuel Prout, and William Westall, Britannia Delineata Part I Kent (London: Rudwell and Martin, 1822/23), opposite plate 6. 31 Bann, Distinguished Images, 54. 32 Harding et al., Britannia Delineata Part I Kent, opposite plate 7. 33 Ibid., opposite plate 12. 34 John Ruskin, Modern Painters (London: George Allen, 1903), vol. 1, 411. 35 Harding et al., Britannia Delineata Part I Kent, opposite plate 6. 36 Ibid., opposite plate 18.

Architecture’s Print Complex: Palloy’s Bastille and the Death of Architecture Maarten Delbeke

The triumph of printing

O

n 14 July 1792 the ‘Hommes du 14 juillet’ installed a printing press on the ruins of the Bastille in Paris, and drew a copy of the Déclaration des droits de l’homme. Then the press was carried to the Altar of the Fatherland on the Champs de Mars. At the Altar, the president of the National Assembly was invited to print another copy of the Declaration. When the ceremonial prevented him from doing so, other members of the Assembly hastened to perform the task in his place. The press was then carried in triumph to the Paris city hall. The next day, the mayor, Jérôme Pétion de Villeneuve, was offered two copies of the Declaration printed at the Altar. He accepted the gift, and printed another copy that he returned to the orator who had addressed him. Thus runs the account of a festive Triomphe de l’imprimerie, included in the Journal des Hommes du 14 juillet of 17 July An IV.1 The same journal published on 9 August a proposal by a certain Halleman to transform the site of the Bastille into an opulent garden, where, as in a veritable theatre of memory, people would come to remember the horrors of tyranny. The author imagines a man using his cane to point out to his children the sites previously devoted to torture and oppression, now visible only in the overgrown outlines of the all but disappeared building. At the same time, the garden would offer to the visitor ‘emblems’ of the printing press, and of the ‘freedom of printing’, ‘art funeste aux tyrans et à leurs satellites, art le plus divin après celui de la création, puisqu’il est propre à faire jouir dans l’espace de cette courte vie, de la justice et de la bienfaisance des loix tout homme vertueux’. Over the garden would tower ‘la colonne de Palloy’, ‘ce pic de la liberté’, a monument destined to be higher than the Monument in London, and crowned by means of ‘the jeweller’s art’ to reflect through the clouds the rays of the setting sun to the eyes of the citoyens.2

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The pages of the Journal des Hommes du 14 juillet stage two direct confrontations between a building and the printing press at the site of the Bastille: a festival and a garden. In both cases, the printing press emerges as a clear victor over the building, standing on its ruins during the Triumph, and casting its emblems across the garden gained by the demolition. The meaning of this victory is easy to understand: the building of the Bastille epitomized repression, and its physical destruction and subsequent substitution by the printing press and its ‘emblems’ signify the advent of freedom. Still, both instances left only limited traces in history. The garden is one of the numerous projects for the Bastille site circulated after (and before) 14 July 1789, and probably never made it beyond the pages of the Journal. The Triumph did take place on an important day, 14 July 1792, when the Fête de la Fédération was celebrated, intended to commemorate the storming of the Bastille in 1789 and to renew the vows expressed at the first festival of 1790. The Journal’s account of the Triumph refers to the ceremonial of the rituals performed on the Champs de Mars, but otherwise the account pays limited attention to the Festival or to the main ceremony on the site of the Bastille that opened the day: the laying of the first stone of the Column of Liberty, a monument designed by Pierre-François Palloy that incorporated many elements of similar proposals.3

Project by Pierre-François Palloy for a Column of Liberty on the site of the Bastille, from Pierre-François Palloy, Projet général d’un monument à éléver à la gloire de la Liberté, sur les terreins de la Bastille … Prospectus [n.p.] [1792]. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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Historiography of the French Revolution has long considered Palloy, the self-styled ‘demolisher’ of the Bastille and monumentaire of the Revolution, as a buffoon.4 Palloy’s obsession with the Bastille, which will be discussed in more detail below, was seen as a form of opportunistic selfaggrandizement. Recent historiography has sketched a more nuanced image.5 In what follows I want to revisit some of his activities as a way to reflect on the tension between the media of stone and print, of the building and the book, or what I call here architecture’s print complex.6 Palloy’s dealings with the Bastille and its remnants operated in a volatile political context, in dialogue or competition with other attempts to celebrate the Revolution and express its ideals. Richard Taws has read his actions as paradigmatic for the question of how the Revolution represented itself: the provisionality caused by the rapid and unpredictable course of revolutionary events interacted with a profound consciousness that the Revolution had upended history. As a consequence, Taws argues, both the Revolution and its meaning had to be performed in continuity, in order to link it back to crucial moments of origin, but also to define in the process what it actually meant to be revolutionary.7 In this process, architecture and print entertained an intense dialogue. Rather than an antagonistic relationship between a medium of oppression (the building) and of freedom (the print), suggested by the episodes drawn from the Journal, a complicated interdependence emerged between the two. This interdependence is partly defined by what happened at the Bastille. The prison-fortress was an ineluctable presence in the French collective imagination of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; before 1789 as a place of horror and oppression, and after 14 July of that year as a symbol of freedom – signified by the storming of the building – and of true patriotism.8 This double value raised the question of how the Bastille and the revolutionary events surrounding it should be monumentalized, especially since the meaning of the Bastille was defined by its precipitous disappearance: the demolition of the building began immediately after its fall and was largely completed within a year.9 As a consequence, the Bastille and its meaning had to be mediated by means of artefacts or actions that were somehow able to represent and authenticate both the disappearing original object and the very fact of its conquest and disappearance.10 Palloy was the main agent in this process of mediation.

Revisiting the triumph of printing The complications involved in monumentalizing the storming of the Bastille can be mapped by returning to the ‘Triumph of Printing’. The event involves different expressions of revolutionary ideals: the demolition of the Bastille; the foundation of the new monument on the site, Palloy’s column; the celebration of the printing press and, finally, the official ceremony of the Festival. These constitute different kinds of monuments: attempts to give collective expression to the ideals of the Revolution in order to commemorate and communicate them, and to invite emulation. Each of these expressions involves strategies of monumentalization, and with these strategies come varying claims about the true meaning of the revolutionary events. Between the poles of permanent and ephemeral expression, and official and marginal event, they all define a particular monumentality in relation to architecture and print. The report in the Journal presents itself as an eyewitness account of the Triumph. It suggests that the request of the Hommes du 14 juillet to print the Declaration at the Altar of the Fatherland disrupted the intended course of events. This moment of friction is contrasted with Pétion’s

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eagerness to receive the ‘Hommes’, their press and the prints of the Declaration. As such, the Triumph reflects the political position of the ‘Hommes du 14 juillet’. The ‘Hommes’ were a group who claimed participation in, and ownership of, the storming of the Bastille.11 As such, they belonged to the sans culottes who viewed the National Assembly with suspicion, and cultivated Pétion as a true revolutionary. Shortly before the Festival of the Federation, Pétion had been reinstated as the mayor of the municipality of Paris, and reports of the Festival noted the enthusiasm with which he was greeted, to the detriment of Louis XVI, present at the Festival to vow allegiance to the Constitution.12 The Triumph performed the political situation in that it literally produced the Declaration of Human Rights before the eyes of members of the Assembly: sixty of them were present at the foundation ceremony of the Column, on the site where, according to the Journal, the printing press was installed.13 With this act, the ‘Hommes’ intended to remind the Assembly of its obligations to the Declaration while drafting the Constitution, or, as the Journal of 14 July put it: ‘Etablissons enfin sur les droits de l’homme un gouvernement qui ne puisse être nuisible à la liberté’.14 The header of the Journal quotes an ‘adresse’ of the ‘Hommes’ to the Assembly of 23 April 1792, with the same message. The deep suspicion of the actions of Louis XVI (‘Louis XVI se rendra d’un air content au Champ de Mars, & il jurera tout comme un autre’15) was extended to the Assembly, which the ‘Hommes’ viewed as too compliant with the king, and blind to the dangers menacing France.16 The volatile political situation turned the Festival, and the arrival of armies and delegations from all over France to the capital, into a complicated power game that would culminate with the storming of the Tuileries on 10 August. Without going deep into the events and their consequences, some of the stakes can be gauged by looking at the different booklets that were published to communicate the intended course of the Festival to the mass of participants. The Assembly had fixed the ceremonial in its session of 12 July 1792.17 Palloy himself had petitioned the Assembly on 1 July with a description of the foundation ceremony of the column, detailing the objects that would be buried with the first stone.18 A first such booklet, the Ordre de la Marche, ‘authenticated’ by the municipality, lists the trajectory and the different sections of the procession, and the course of events on the Champs de Mars as well as its decoration.19 The Ordre concludes by mentioning that there would be a gathering on the site of the Bastille at 9 o’clock, when a deputation of the Assembly would place the first stone of the column of Liberty. The presence of Louis XVI and the Assembly in the procession is only mentioned at the very end of the text, but not their vow to the Constitution. A second ‘order’, published as an Addresse aux Fédérés, lists the ‘ceremonies fixed by the Municipality and the King’ and opens with an exhortation reminding the participants of the meaning of the Festival: a renewal of the ‘pacte fédératif’ sworn in 1790 amidst the dangers surrounding France. A battle cry to die for liberty and the constitution, the introductory sermon ends by recalling to all ‘brothers and friends’ that the ‘column of liberty that we will elevate on the ruins of slavery and tyranny will be our rallying point of honour, each time that the fatherland will be in danger; it is at its very foot that we will await the tyrants’.20 Then follows the description of the ‘order’ and the ‘ceremony’, considerably different from the Ordre, and mentioning the vows of the president and the king. Finally, the Grand détail of all ceremonies decreed by the National Assembly, a third ceremonial, is a rabid denunciation of Louis XVI and the aristocracy. It evokes the ‘spectacle’ of the confrontation

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between the ‘crowned crooks’ and the Free Nation. The first Festival of the Federation of 1790 is remembered as ‘plutôt une fête qu’un pacte national’, where people swore allegiance to laws they did not yet understand. The present festival would be devoted not to fast but to the instruction of the thousands of Federates arriving in Paris. The presence of the king in the procession is discussed in detail: he will no longer appear as an ‘idol’. ‘Annihilated by the appearance of the statue of liberty’ (mounted on a chariot in the procession), he will have to join the ranks of the Assembly. In a telling detail, the description of the trajectory of the procession lists the ‘pont de Louis XVI’ (Pont de la Concorde) as the ‘pont de la Fédération’.21 The ceremonials considered here do not mention the Triumph, nor does a summary of the Festival day read to the Assembly.22 In fact, comparison of the account in the Journal to the ceremonials suggests that the Triumph was grafted onto the official ceremonies as a marginal, radical and potentially disruptive event. As such, it constituted the kind of micro-ritual that characterized revolutionary festival culture.23 Only the radical Détail hints at the Triumph. It notes that, in the cortège, ‘avec les citoyens de Paris, figureront les braves sans-culottes, les hommes du 14 juillet, portant la presse qu’ils ont achetée, pour imprimer leur journal patriotique, dont il a déjà plusieurs numéros’.24 With their own printing press, the Détail continues, the ‘Hommes’ are able to counter the propaganda of royalist adversaries such as Thomas-Marie Royou and Michel Regnaud de Saint-Jean d’Angely.

Printing and the Revolution The wording of the Détail hints at the meaning of the Triumph, besides the obvious message conveyed by printing the Declaration on the ruins of the Bastille: the ability of the ‘Hommes’ to voice to their opinion by means of the printed word. More specifically, the Triumph seems to have celebrated the acquisition of their own printing press, ‘la presse des Hommes du 14 juillet’ as the credits of the Journal mentions.25 A manuscript note on a copy of the Declaration, issued ‘De l’imprimerie des Hommes du 14 juillet’ and kept at the BNF, states that the sheet was ‘drawn on the small press that was carried to the festival of the federation of 14 July’,26 suggesting that the press in question was indeed small and portable, less a heavy piece of machinery than a tool that could be carried into an event. As such, the Triumph exemplifies the process that Lüsebrink has described as ‘Wortergreifung’: the process by which revolutionary print culture enabled a multitude of potential authors to seize the word and participate in public debate.27 This process is part of what has been termed the revolutionary fetishism of print.28 From the middle of the eighteenth century onwards a host of authors argued that print not only enabled the intellectual emancipation of the masses, but also helped to build a collective that was empowered to voice opinions about shared information. Print would make governments and judges accountable because it would spread their decisions and reveal their motivations. As Destutt de Tracy wrote, print would also enable government by representation, as it unfettered debate from the physical limits imposed by oral culture – print would usher in the transition of the city state and feudalism to a truly scaleless democracy.29 As Elizabeth Eisenstein and others have shown, in the revolutionary period this discourse developed into a pageantry to print in which the Revolution itself was cast as the final outcome of

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Droits de l’homme et du citoyen, with manuscript note stating that the sheet was ‘tirée sur la petite presse qui a été portée à la fête de la fédération du 14 juillet 1792’. Paris: Imprimerie des hommes du 14 juillet [1792]. Bibliothèque nationale de France BNF FOL-LB39-10705.

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the invention of printing.30 In 1793 Anacharsis Cloots proposed to elevate Gutenberg to the Pantheon to acknowledge his role in the liberation of the French people from tyranny.31 Printing became part of a teleology that saw the combined epistemological and political effects of printing at work in the progressive liberation of humanity from the sixteenth century onwards up to the Revolution, a case made, for instance, by Nicolas de Condorcet in his Esquisse d’un Tableau du Progrès de l’Esprit Humain (1795). Some went even further and saw print itself as the ultimate substitute for the law: in a society where the free press disseminates the opinions of enlightened citizenry the collective would operate similar to a hive driven by a collective mind. The lawyer and deputy Joseph Lequinio hailed the new age of the publisher, and stated that just as the old regime had been the age of the Church, so the publisher would replace the politician and the priest, suggesting that the collectivity founded by print would re-establish access to a universal primitive truth.32 As we have seen, Halleman’s proposal for the garden on the Bastille site embraces this view of printing; it is cast as the ‘art funeste aux tyrans et à leurs satellites, art le plus divin après celui de la création’.33 The very title of the ‘Triumph of Printing’ espoused the same idea. The nominal victim of this triumph is the Bastille and the ancien régime it represented. But since the Hommes installed their press on its ruins, it entered at least fleetingly into competition with another building: Palloy’s column, whose construction on that same spot was to be initiated on that very day, at least symbolically.

Palloy’s column Lüsebrink develops his argument about revolutionary ‘Wortergreifung’ by means of a detailed analysis of the vicissitudes of the Vainqueurs de la Bastille, a formal association of men claiming to have participated in the 14 July 1789 and, as such, a faction of the ‘Hommes du 14 juillet’. As Lüsebrink and others have pointed out, Palloy’s relationship to the Vainqueurs is not entirely clear: there are no known documents that list him as a member, and although he insisted throughout his life to have participated in the storming of the Bastille, his own writings and reports appear to associate him with the Vainqueurs or the Hommes, rather than casting himself as one of their kind.34 The distance between Palloy and the Hommes must have been palpable on 14 July 1792. The National Assembly had granted Palloy on 16 June 1792 the right to erect his column on the site of the Bastille. Palloy had occupied the site since the days following the 14 July 1789.35 As a building contractor, he had been able to mobilize his own workforce to start the demolition of the building before any official decision on the issue had been taken. To Palloy, the approval of his project for the column – the outcome of a competition amidst a flurry of other proposals36 – must have felt like a vindication: his claim on the site had been heavily contested, and Palloy had obtained the commission to demolish the building from the Assembly only in January 1790, long after the Electors of the municipality of Paris had granted him the right.37 In the meantime, questions arose about the increasing cost of the demolition, and about the potential benefit and use of the stones that would be gained from it. The works also caused considerable nuisance in the Bastille quarter.38 In the end, the whole site was declared closed already on 27 May 1791, when most of the building had disappeared.39 Still, Palloy remained there, and he passionately defended his course of action in several addresses to the Assembly.

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Palloy’s project framed the new column in an elaborate design for the entire quarter. In his published Project général, printed and sent out to the eighty-three districts of France together with a model of the column after its approval, Palloy evoked the demolition of the prison, the reuse of its stones in the new monument, and its role as a rallying point for those defending the hard-fought freedom (words echoed in the Addresse aux Fédérés). But in general the ‘prospectus’ is rife with the commonplaces of ‘embellissement’ and regeneration: beauty would go hand in hand with utility; a range of buildings would house the programmes necessary for a modern city, and increase the land value.40 When opposing ‘useful’ to ‘glorious’ monuments the prospectus adopted ideas already voiced in connection to the different projects for ‘places royales’ and similar interventions proposed for Louis XV and XVI, now tinged with revolutionary rhetoric.41 In fact, Palloy had invested a lot of effort to enlist the support of Louis XVI for his project, gifting the king a medal representing the column at a personal audience in early July, and requesting his presence at the foundation ceremony.42 When the king did not show up, his name was erased from the foundation stone. But amongst the objects to be encased in the cedar box buried underneath were several objects celebrating the French monarchy.43 Not surprisingly, little of this transpires from the pages of the Journal des Hommes du 14 juillet. Their report of the Triumph does not describe the foundation ceremony, but includes a brief address to the legislators who performed it in the absence of the king. The tone is ominous, predicting renewed attempts of the ‘tyrants’ to destroy the column, undoing the ‘reversal’ achieved by the people of the Bastille. The legislators who had sworn ‘an immortal hate of the enemies of the people’ are now asked to swear to strike the ‘final blows’ to the Hydra of tyranny, again rearing its ugly head; after all, ‘all kings conspire the ruin of French nation … So let us swear the downfall of the conspiring kings’.44 Also Halleman’s proposal for the garden reflects a more radical reading of Palloy’s column than its designer probably intended. Rather than referring to the Column of Trajan, Palloy’s model of choice, and after evoking the ‘tyranny sous laquelle nous fait gémir Louis XVI’, he calls it the ‘pic de la liberté’, evoking the pic or peak, the weapon of choice of the sans-culottes.45 The events surrounding the Column of Liberty and its foundation ceremony suggest that the kind of monumental expression Palloy was aiming for with the project fitted ill with the circumstances of its construction. The site of the Bastille was not just a dual memorial to tyranny and its termination, but also a space of contestation about the Revolution itself. That it was literally too early to translate the symbolism of the site into a permanent architectural monument is borne out by the vicissitudes of the chest and artefacts that Palloy intended to bury for eternity underneath the column and its foundation stone. On 25 April 1793 the Convention decreed to have the chest unearthed because the ‘monuments it contains … present characters contrary to the general system of the liberty, equality, unity and indivisibility of the French republic’.46 The chest was retrieved in a solemn ceremony on 5 May. If this act underscores the provisionality inherent to revolutionary material culture, as Taws has argued, it also proves the value attached to artefacts, their permanence and their possible meanings in the present as well as the future.47 Building deposits like the chest and the objects it contained are intended as time capsules, messages to those who will unearth the foundations of a building after it has finally perished,48 and the Convention did bother to have them unearthed, disseminated and preserved. If the Revolution challenged material monumentality through the media of the festival and the printed word, as well as in acts of destruction, it did not preclude the value or importance of materiality itself.49 Quite to

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the contrary, it enhanced the significance of those objects that were selected to represent the Revolution, even when (or because) they were buried under a heavy stone. This same dynamic between provisionality, destruction and materiality plays out in Palloy’s most idiosyncratic and probably best-known actions: the sending out of miniature models and stones of the Bastille across and beyond the French territory. In a pamphlet titled Morale et devoir des françois, to be dated after 10 August 1792, Palloy identified these actions with the ideals of the Revolution. The pamphlet is composed of three prayers or invocations, and the first, ‘Principes de la liberté par les Hommes du 14 juillet’, evoke how it is the duty of these ‘apostles of liberty’ to propagate patriotism amongst those of ‘little learning’. ‘Depositing … vestiges’ – stones of the Bastille – will recall what ‘their fathers have done to become free men’, and a plan of the Bastille will reanimate their patriotism when necessary by recalling the horrors of tyranny.50 Besides suggesting that Palloy attempted to cast his own actions as fundamental to the mission of the Hommes, the poem summarizes the meaning Palloy attributed to his actions. A closer look at the actual objects and processes involved in the distribution of these objects and their reception will show how this meaning was constructed, and how it involved architecture and print.

Palloy and the stones of the Bastille From early 1790 onwards Palloy set up different campaigns with the Bastille at its physical and symbolical centre. Spurred on by a worker called Dax, who produced a model of the Bastille from a stone of the building, Palloy started to replicate the building in detailed models. A first model was paraded through Paris on 23 February 1790, and another figured prominently on the Feast of the Federation of 1790.51 Meanwhile Palloy recruited from his own social network the so-called Apostles of Freedom who were sent out to deliver the models to the new departments of France. This campaign began in October 1790 and ended with the induction of Voltaire into the Pantheon on 11 July 1791.52 Palloy would continue to distribute models afterward, for instance when new districts were added to the French territory.53 On 9–10 Thermidor an IV (27–28 July 1796) the city of Brussels, then capital of the department of the Dijle, inaugurated its model with a two-day festival.54 A missive brought by the Apostles consisted of several objects: besides the model, a stone from the detritus that would form its pedestal, a slab from the building engraved with the portrait of Louis XVI, a plan of the Bastille and an exact description, several objects gathered from the prisons, such as ‘a canon ball, a breast-plate, the base of a hat, objects found in the rubble of the Bastille, and given by the King’, as well as different documents and images relative to the storming and the prisoners of the Bastille, the king, the municipal electors and the assembly.55 These were sent out in three chests, to be opened with apposite pomp at ceremonies called ‘inaugurations’. The whole operation was costly as well as complex, and not all models or apostles received a warm welcome. Still, Palloy found it also necessary to provide all districts of France (the administrative unit below the department) with stones bearing a framed plan of the Bastille. Palloy had offered such a plan to the Assembly on 14 July 1790, to be kept in the national archives.56 These stones, too, were inaugurated and served as the centrepiece of the ‘lieu des séances’ of the district council, in order to have the Bastille present at its deliberations as a ‘monument of hate’.57

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As several commentators have noted, Palloy lost few opportunities to gift away a Bastille stone or carry one around; he would later complain that his known attachment to the stones had driven up their price when he had been forced to buy them back to cover some of the demolition costs.58 When on 12 March 1792 Palloy presented himself to the Assembly to deposit the accounts of his works, he was surrounded by Vainqueurs, Apostles and Electors, who carried a stone in their midst.59 It seems that the pace of distribution of stones increased from early 1792 onwards, when Palloy’s work at the Bastille was most heavily contested and ultimately vindicated.60 The most serious challenge to this part of Palloy’s many proselytizing activities came however later. After the events of 10 August 1792 and the beheading of the king on 21 January 1793, Palloy felt forced to revoke the slabs with the king’s portrait, and to replace them with stones carrying a print of the Declaration of Human Rights. This action is announced in a ‘circulaire’ dated 25 July 1793, and documents published over the course of the following months attest to the reception of the new stones.61 Documents discussing Palloy’s missives, such as the Procès-verbaux recording the speeches and inauguration ceremonies performed at their reception in capitals of departments or districts, routinely refer to them as ‘monuments’.62 The word ‘monument’ is generally used in the conventional sense of the word, referring to historical documents or objects that recall the memory of great events or ‘imprint’ important ‘maximes’ into the heart and soul of the beholder.63 The notion is used for both the Bastille models and the stones with the plan of the Bastille or the Declaration. The speeches delivered at the inauguration of a stone in Orléans in 1793, for instance, compare the artefact to Mosaic stone of the Law – an imperishable marker of higher truth prone to exert its beneficial influence on the world. Speakers mobilized metaphors of ‘impression’ and ‘electrification’ to describe the effect of the ‘engraved’ stone on the beholders. Still, the process by which the objects that Palloy sent out became monuments is complex and multilayered, not in the least because the objects should invite a range of contrasting emotions: hate for tyranny paired to a love of freedom, revulsion at the misdeeds of the ancien régime to admiration for those who had ended it. The mediation of these opposing values hinges on the interplay between the Bastille stones and the way they were processed, the acts and discourse at their reception, and different kinds of prints.

Processing the Bastille In order to produce monuments from the Bastille, Palloy availed himself of a range of operations. Key to the whole process is the act of miniaturization; it is at play with the stones, manageable parts of the original building, but especially relevant for the models. Time and again orators point out how, in the models, the ‘colossus’ of tyranny is now ‘reduced’ to a ‘plaything’.64 Casting the Bastille as a colossus tall enough to hover over France and instil its terror across the territory was a wellworn trope, perhaps echoing similar-size-based encomia of Louis XIV and the ancien régime. At the same time, the interior of the building was pictured as one of suffocating restraint, an impenetrable darkness where forgotten prisoners languished. By transforming the very stones of the fortress into models, this paradoxical creature was now normalized and tamed to be played or trampled with. The trope of literal belittlement occurs in numerous visual sources. As late as the year 1800 Palloy designed an allegorical medal to celebrate the 14 July (25 Messidor an VIII) showing an

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Pierre-François Palloy, Allégorie [n.p.] [n.d.] Bibliothèque nationale de France BNF FOL-Z LE SENNE-718 (15).

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armed warrior, representing the French people, treading on an overturned miniature Bastille.65 The domination of the miniaturized building was also performed. According to the legend of a print commemorating the Festival of the Federation of 1790, Palloy had devised a micro-ritual that the king should have performed on the Bastille model installed at the foot of the Altar of the Fatherland: The model of the Bastille in bas relief was carried with much pomp on the day of the Federative Pact from the streets of the Fossés St Bernard and was placed on the first landing of the Altar of the Fatherland. Since the King after the conquest of the Bastille had ordered to continue the demolition ordained by the Electors; so the Patriot Palloy brought a hammer with the intention to present it to his Majesty the moment when he had to descend from the Throne to go to the Altar in order to take the oath, moment that was chosen by him to hand him the destructive instrument, telling him: ‘Sire, you see at your feet the representation of the Monument that has been annihilated by your orders, daign to strike it in the presence of the assembled Nation. With this action worthy of a great King you will augment the trust that the peoples of this Empire have for the regenerator of France and the protector of freedom’. The Enemies of this same freedom, told of this civic project, hurried to divert the good intentions of the King, who was about to take the oath amidst his people.66

Serment Federatif du 14 Juillet 1790 [n.p.][n.d.]. Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Estampes et photographie, RESERVE QB-370 (22)-FT 4 [De Vinck, 3749].

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Striking the model with a hammer was a direct reference to the chosen demolition method of the Bastille, where the option to blow up the building with dynamite was soon abandoned in favour of a manual taking apart.67 As such, the demolition became at once a spectacle and a ritual that should also be understood as a form of chastisement, doubled in the transformation of Bastille stones in models, another violent action of hammer and chisel on stone.68 And if the act the king would have to perform with the model in 1790 was resisted, much like the intrusion of the printing press on the Festival of 1792, models remained present in revolutionary rituals. For instance, at its reception the model in Brussels was stormed by a carefully selected representation of the people.69 ‘Looking down’ on the mini-Bastille allowed one not only to dominate it, but also to examine it in great detail.70 By all accounts, the Bastille models were very refined, and they came with a description explaining all building parts.71 Together with the model came a plan, ‘dressé par Palloy’. Palloy’s printed plans are by far the most detailed measured drawings of the prison available. Their legend even claims that they were the first of their kind, and this claim may well be legitimate. The BNF holds a measured plan drawn up in 1733 that to some extent prefigures Palloy’s version.72 According to Fernand Bournon, a first detailed ‘relevé’ was made in 1767 on behalf of Larché D’Aubencour, the chief engineer of the Bastille, which probably served as the basis of the detailed engraving of the Bastille by Mathieu (1789–90), developed from Edme Verniquet’s general plan of Paris.73 During the demolition, the architect Étienne-Denis-Louis Cathala, one of six inspectors appointed by the municipality to supervise the demolition works, drew a detailed plan of the Bastille that would be engraved by Antoine Josephe Gaitte. There is good reason to believe that Palloy based his engraving on Cathala’s work. The BNF holds several prints of plans signed by Cathala, some with drawn additions, identical to those Palloy eventually distributed.74 This provenance suggests that the plan may have been used to estimate the mass of stone that the demolition would yield. But it also was part of the efforts to document the history of the Bastille now that its archive and fabric had become available for study. Like the model, the plan became integrated into more elaborate visual displays. A striking example is Palloy’s project for a Monument to the Electors, where the plan is imprinted in the socle of the contraption. As mentioned earlier, the Electors had granted permission to start the demolition immediately after the storming, and Palloy would cultivate their memory. The plan acts as both a stamp authenticating the provenance of the stones for the monument and a memory of the ‘formidable colossus’ to ‘impress’ the Electors.75 What Palloy intended to achieve with these artefacts is made explicit in the Procès-verbaux documenting the reception of the gifts: with the help of the model, the plan and the printed descriptions anyone should be able to imagine the unspeakable suffering and oppression that ruled inside the prison through what amounts to almost a spiritual exercise.76 Not only by visualizing what took place in the spaces described in word, image and model, but also by hearing the moaning and pleas of the prisoners. The stones from the Bastille included in the missive played an essential part in this imaginative process, as they had absorbed the blood, tears and cries of the prisoners. In this respect, the Procès-verbaux display a keen awareness of the difference between the models, the stones and the spoils on the one hand, and these objects and traditional sculpture on

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Pierre-François Palloy (des.), Plan dressé par Palloy, et offert par lui à l’Assemblée Constituante pour les Archives de la nation. Bibliothèque nationale de France, GE D-5929.

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Pierre-François Palloy, Monument élevé à la gloire des Electeurs de 1789. Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Estampes et photographie, RESERVE FOL-QB-201.

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the other. If the model, the plan and their explanation serve to imprint the memory of the horror that freedom needed to overcome, and to warn all future generations of the menace of tyranny, the spoils celebrated its defeat and end.77 And if the art of sculpture is prone to vainglory and the production of idols, the model and plan aim at maximum veracity, and act, like the artefacts drawn from the ruin or the printed words of the Declaration, as natural signs, touching the heart and intellect without the deception of art.78 The opposition between art and natural sign is enacted within Palloy’s campaigns when the slabs carrying the effigy of Louis XVI were replaced with stones holding the Declaration. Originally celebrated as carvings purifying the Bastille stone,79 political events reframed the portraits as idols of an enemy of the Revolution. At Orléans it was decreed upon reception of Palloy’s stone with the Declaration that a pyramid inscribed with the Human Rights and the Constitutional Act should be erected, because contrary to a statue of Liberty, these texts are ‘the living image of Liberty, they are Liberty itself’. The speaker adds: ‘in vain art will exhaust its secrets – emblematic figures will never be worth reality’.80 The ability to produce these objects bestows Palloy with a particular form of artistry, not rooted in skill, aesthetic sensibility or higher inspiration, but in patriotism. At Pau it is pointed out that ‘[Palloy’s gift] retrace à la fois le courage de ceux qui ont abattu ce monument superbe, mais affreux, de la tyrannie, & l’habilité de l’artiste Patriote, dont le projet ne peut être dû qu’à une longue & sombre méditation, au sentiment profond de l’horreur du despotisme’.81 And as natural signs Palloy’s objects fulfil their revolutionary role. At the inauguration of a model in the department of Côte d’Or it is pointed out that ‘tous ceux qui on fait quelqu étude du cœur humain connoissent combien est puissant l’empire des signes, & avec quelle force les hommes sont entraînés par leur langage. L’histoire nous retrace à chaque page les révolutions que les signes ont opérées ou maintenues’.82 The opposition between the fleeting and potentially deceptive effect of art and the natural force of the stones and models is extended to the inauguration ceremonies themselves. In his address to the people of Épernay, on 22 September 1792, Palloy stressed that ‘the inauguration of a stone of the Bastille, is not only one of those splendid ceremonies, that strike the imagination for an instant, but whose impression fades away together with the apparatus of the spectacle; the Philosopher who makes one reason & think, discovers in this ceremony a touching instruction which it is important you understand … [:] that is to explain to the Citoyens who are less learned than you, dear Sirs, that it is finally the alphabet of our emerging Freedom’.83 At the reception of a stone with a plan at Château-Thierry, it is pointed out that this gift puts an end to the ‘vile tribute’ that cities were forced to pay to the rulers of old; now ‘the veil that covered the idol’ has been ‘torn’.84 At the inauguration ceremony for a model in Versailles, the same point is made in direct comparison to the royal residence next door.85

Dismemberment From the beginning Palloy presented his work with the models as one of multiplication: ‘of one Bastille I have made eighty-three’.86 This process implies a dispersal of the Bastille facilitated by the dismemberment of the building. In this sense, Palloy’s actions recall the cult of relics, where a single body is distributed and to some extent reproduced by the veneration of its parts.87 Some speeches make this reference explicit with the metaphor of the ‘chasse’ or reliquary for the model, or the talisman for the stones, and by emphasizing the value of the stones with the

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oxymoron ‘débris précieux’.88 The identification with the relic is also enacted. The model received in Pau was paired on the Altar of the Fatherland to the ‘Berceau d’Henri IV’, a tortoise shell cradle that had become a royal cult object over the course of the eighteenth century; together they were celebrated as ‘the cradle of an adored king and the tomb of despotism’.89 But the dispersal of the Bastille of course also evokes the distribution of prints, especially the stones carrying the Declaration intended to replace the likeness of Louis XVI. Moreover, print was used to multiply the distribution of the Bastille in single stones, first by the decision to print a Procès-verbal of the inauguration pronounced at the end of each event, and second, by the reproduction of the text carried by the stones. In Orléans it was decreed that 30,000 copies of the Declaration would be printed, out of which 10,000 as ‘placards’ or billboards. Palloy himself provided these prints, so as to guarantee access of each household to the fundamental tenets of the Revolution.90 But as the speeches at the reception of the stones make clear, the remnant of the Bastille gives special value to the print attached to it. Some accounts claim in fact that the stone was inscribed with the Bastille plan or the Declaration rather than carrying a framed print, and this ambiguity is significant.91 Mounting the print on a stone simulates applying an inscription, while retaining the specific character of the printed sheet as an artefact open to endless reproduction. As such, Palloy’s distribution of the stones participated in a crucial aspect of revolutionary culture, the ambition to turn France into a territory organized according to the new administrative divisions of departments and districts for a ‘one and undivisible’ nation.92 Palloy’s missives from Paris can be considered in parallel to the establishment of identical installations or monuments across the territory to instil a sense of unity, such as the Altars of the Fatherland or the Liberty Trees. In his Discours sur les monuments publics (1791) Armand-Guy Kersaint, a member of the Assembly, proposed to erect across the territory highly similar prytaneums inscribed with the law.93 If all across France similar monuments bearing the same foundational texts emerge, repetition would convey a sense of territorial and political unity similar to the one print was claimed to achieve. The point of origin of Palloy’s missives – the disappearing Bastille – however conveyed a particular urgency and meaning to the process of unification through distribution. In his address to the people of Épernay on 22 September 1792, Palloy compared his actions to those of the biblical Levite who dismembered the body of his wife, who had been raped and murdered by a despot, and sent the body parts to the tribes of Israel as a cry for revenge.94 The comparison makes explicit the analogy between the Bastille and the human body, and between its demolition and dismemberment, first enacted on the very day of its conquest, with the violent death of De Launay, the governor of the prison, whose head was paraded on a stick.95 It also emphasizes how unity finds its origin in a double act of violence, the murder and rape of the woman (the abuse of the French people under tyranny) and the dismemberment of her body (the dismantling of the Bastille). The implicit shift in referent of the comparison, from France to the symbol of its oppression, signals the double value attached to the parts sent out across the territory, as witnesses of injustice and their transformation into a call for unity. This process of transformation can, however, only occur when the parts remain separate. Several accounts celebrate stones and models as pawns or securities that have been entrusted to the care of the cities receiving them.96 Guarding the remnants of the Bastille will not only sustain the memory of their point of origin, in terms of both the site and the actions that produced them, but also prevent any return there. The inscription on a stone offered to the Revolutionary Tribunal on occasion of the inauguration of busts of Brutus, Marat and Pelletier reads: ‘This stone, previously part of the Bastille, today is part

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of our trophies. It is to the courage of the free Frenchmen that the care is confided to prevent that the remains of this horrible monster ever come together again; so that they remain dispersed, we should remain united’.97

The architecture-print complex The two episodes drawn from the Journal at the outset of this chapter seem almost too literal illustrations of Victor Hugo’s famous declaration that the printed book killed architecture, made in the chapter ‘Ceci tuera cela’ (This will be the death of that) of his novel Notre Dame de Paris, published in the eighth edition of 1832. There, Hugo invokes the intellectual emancipation brought about by the invention of printing. Human thought (la pensée) before the era of printing found its expression in buildings; buildings were the monuments of humankind. ‘This will be the death of that’ means that: human thought, in changing its outward form, was also about to change its outward mode of expression; that the dominant idea of each generation would, in future, be embodied in a new material, a new fashion; that the book of stone [the building], so solid and so enduring, was to give way to the book of paper, more solid and more enduring still.98 Printing is the motor of revolutions, according to Hugo, and the new, free ideas are nimble, accessible and ubiquitous like the printed word, not massive, rooted and singular like the stone building. Architecture belongs to an old order; an order that knew its moments of freedom for sure, but still remained tied to the particulars of a time and a place. Printing, so Hugo suggests, aspires to a universal freedom beyond the reach of buildings; its invention signifies the death of architecture.99 Hugo’s death sentence of architecture can be read as a symptom of a ‘print complex’ of architecture, also manifest in the events described in the Journal: the uneasy relationship of architecture to printing that emerges once architecture is considered as a means of communication, and printing as a form of monumental expression. The ‘print complex’ then denotes the different ways in which architecture negotiates is own mediality with the medium of print, in an at once antagonistic and sympathetic way: while print enhances architecture’s capacity for communication far beyond the sphere of influence of the actual building, by replicating images of buildings and the ideas attached to them, it also supersedes those very buildings as a means of expression; this is one particular version of Hugo’s point.100 At the same time, Palloy’s work with the Bastille, as a liminal case in the relationship between (disappearing) buildings and (ubiquitous) prints, suggests that in order to be effective the printed substitution of a building relies on mechanisms that authorize it and give it collective meaning: an added materiality other than paper and ink, linking the print back to the building. The advent of printing may have rendered human thoughts, previously attached to buildings, as volatile as ‘a flock of birds’, to quote Hugo. But these thoughts still require some of their original weight to retain their monumental value. Unless otherwise noted, sources are in the collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF); shelf numbers are given for pieces with limited bibliographical information.

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Notes 1 The festival is described on the basis of the account in the Journal des Hommes du 14 juillet by Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink, ‘“Hommage à l’écriture” and “Eloge de l’imprimerie”: Traces de la perception sociale du livre, de l’écriture et de l’imprimerie à l’époque révolutionnaire’, in Livre et Révolution: colloque organisé per l’Institut d’histoire moderne et contemporaine (CNRS), Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, 20–22 mai 1987, edited by Frédéric Barbier, Claude Joly, and Sabine Juratic (Paris: Aux Amateurs de Livres, 1988), 134–144. The reference is: ‘Détails sur la presse portée à la Fédération – Pétion imprime les Droits de l’Homme. FETE DU CHAMPS DE MARS. TRIOMPHE DE L’IMPRIMERIE’, Journal des Hommes du 14 juillet, 17 juillet, l’an IV de la Liberté, 2–5. Lüsebrink dates the Festival to 1796 because the Journal is printed in the ‘An IV de la Liberté’. The ‘year of Liberty’, however, refers to a calendar that first took 14 July and later 1 January 1789 as the first day of the ‘era of liberty’; see Matthew Shaw, Time and the French Revolution: The Republican Calendar 1789 – Year XIV (Suffolk/Rochester, NY: The Royal Historical Society/The Boydell Press, 2011), 33–39. The use of this calendar is confirmed by numerous other documents printed in 1789–92, and the inscription on Palloy’s Monument aux Electeurs, discussed below, makes the point explicitly. Shaw points out that the new style of dating indicates that the storming of the Bastille was indeed seen as a ‘revolution’, ‘a fresh beginning in the history of the world’ (33). The Revolutionary calendar, with the designation of ‘year the Republic’, was officially adopted on 23 September 1793, and took 22 September 1792 as its beginning. 2 Halleman, ‘Projet du Jardin de la liberté, sur le terrain de la Bastille, réuni à celui du jardin de l’Arsenal’, Journal des Hommes du 14 juillet, 9 août, l’an IV de la Liberté, ‘Variété’, 5–8. 3 Rolf Reichardt, L’imagerie révolutionnaire de la Bastille, exh. cat. (Paris: Paris Musées, 2009), 174; see also below. 4 Pierre-François Palloy, Discours prononcé en présence des bataillons de volontaires & citoyens d’Épernay, le 23 septembre 1792 [n.p.] [n.d.], 10: ‘Oui je me suis fait gloire d’être le monumentaire de la révolution’. Victor Fournel, Le patriote Palloy et l’exploitation de la Bastille (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1892), 81, attributes the moniker to Anacharsis Cloots. 5 Besides literature quoted below, also Thordis Arrhenius, The Fragile Monument: On Conservation and Modernity (London: Black Dog, 2012), 26–29. 6 I owe the title of this piece to a suggestion of Mari Hvattum. 7 Richard Taws, The Politics of the Provisional: Art and Ephemera in Revolutionary France (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2013), 97–102. 8 See Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink and Rolf Reichardt, ‘La “Bastille” dans l’imaginaire social de la France, 1774–1799’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 30, April-Juin 1983, 196–234; Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink and Rolf Reichardt, The Bastille: A History of a Symbol of Despotism and Freedom [1990] (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997), esp. 147–69. 9 For the demolition process and its different aspects, see now especially Héloïse Bocher, Démolir la Bastille: l’édification d’un lieu de mémoire (Paris: Vendémiaire, 2012). 10 This point was already made at the time of the demolition, for instance by Armand Guy de Coetnempren, compte de Kersaint, Discours sur les monuments publics: prononcé au conseil du département de Paris le 15 décembre 1791 (Paris: Impr. De P. Didot l’aîné, 1792), 5, and has been discussed extensively in recent literature, besides Lüsebrink and Reichardt, The Bastille, 69–72; Taws, The Politics of the Provisional, chapter 4: ‘Pierre-François Palloy and the memory-work of the Revolution’; Keith Bresnahan, ‘Remaking the Bastille: Architectural destruction and revolutionary consciousness in France, 1789–94’, in Architecture and Armed Conflict, edited by J.M. Mancini (London: Routledge, 2015), 58–71.

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11 Victor Fournel, Les hommes du 14 juillet. Gardes-françaises et Vainqueurs de la Bastille (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1890). 12 Philippe-Joseph-Benjamin Buchez et al., Histoire parlementaire de la Révolution française, ou Journal des assemblées nationales depuis 1789 jusqu’en 1815 (Paris: Paulun, 1834–38), vol. 15, 460. 13 Ibid., 396. 14 Journal des Hommes du 14 juillet, 14 juillet, l’an IV de la Liberté, 2. 15 Ibid. 16 See also the address ‘Aux fédérés contre la tyranny’ in ibid., 5–6. 17 Buchez et al., Histoire parlementaire de la Révolution française, 396. 18 Pétition de P.–F. Palloy patriote, à l’Assemblée Nationale, Relative au cérémonial à observer pour la pose de la première pierre du monument érigé à la Liberté à l’emplacement de la Bastille, le 14 juillet 1792, fête de la Fédération, Le premier juillet 1792, l’an 4 de la liberté. Imprimée par ordre de l’Assemblée Nationale (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1792) (Petition n° 57), with a detailed description of the objects that will be buried. 19 L’ordre et la marche du cortège de la Fédération, du 14 juillet 1792, l’an 4 de la Liberté (Paris: De l’imprimerie de Trembay, 1792), with authentication on page 8. 20 Adresse aux fédérés des 83 départemens, réunis pour la Fédération du 14 juillet 1792: avec l’ordre de la marche et les cérémonies fixées par la municipalité et approuvées par le roi, les inscriptions et les chansons relatives aux cérémonies du Champ-de-Mars et de la Bastille (Paris: de l’imprimerie de Caillot et Courcier, 1792), 3. 21 Grand détail de toutes les cérémonies décrétées par l’Assemblée nationale, qui auront lieu demain, 14 juillet, sur le terrain de la Bastille, pour poser la première pierre de la colonne de la liberté, et ensuite au Champ de la fédération, où l’Assemblée nationale et le roi assisteront … (Paris: De l’imprimerie de la rue des Filles-Dieu, 1792). For the trajectory, compare Grand détail, 7 to Adresse, 5. 22 Buchez et al., Histoire parlementaire de la Révolution française, 460–466. 23 Taws, The Politics of the Provisional, 107, with reference to the work of Philip Smith. 24 Grand détail, 6. The Hommes are also mentioned on page 4. 25 Searching the catalogue of the BNF and of Gallica yields no other publications from this press than those referenced here. The Journal started publication on 13 July 1792 and ended on 10 August. 26 Droits de l’homme et du citoyen (Paris: Imprimerie des hommes du 14 juillet, 1792), BNF FOLLB39-10705. 27 Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink, ‘Die “Vainqueurs de la Bastille”: Kollektiver Diskurs und individuelle “Wortergreifungen”’, in Die Französische Revolution als Bruch des gesellschaftlichen Bewusstseins, edited by Reinhard Koselleck and Rolf Reichardt (München: Oldenbourg Verlag, 1988), 321–57. 28 Lüsebrink, ‘“Hommage à l’écriture” and “Eloge de l’imprimerie”’, 136–40. 29 Elizabeth Eisenstein, Divine Art, Infernal Machine: The Reception of Printing in the West from First Impressions to the Sense of an Ending (University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 131. 30 Ibid., 118–72. 31 Discours prononcé à la barre de l’assemblée nationale, au nom des imprimeurs, par Anacharsis Cloots, orateur du genre humain (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1792) (Pétition n° 109), also mentioned in Eisenstein, Divine Art, Infernal Machine, 151; and Lüsebrink, ‘“Hommage à l’écriture” and “Eloge de l’imprimerie”’, 133.

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32 Gary Kates, The Cercle Social, the Girondins, and the French Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 179. 33 See note 2 above. 34 Fournel, Le patriote Palloy et l’exploitation de la Bastille, 8–10; Fernand Bournon, La Bastille: Histoire et description des bâtiments – Administration – Régime de la prison – Evénements historiques (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1893), 216–226; Lüsebrink, ‘Die “Vainqueurs de la Bastille”’. 35 Bocher, Démolir la Bastille, 123. 36 For surveys of these projects, see Bournon, La Bastille, 228–33; Reichardt, L’imagerie révolutionnaire de la Bastille, 164–74. See also Loi relative à l’établissement d’un Monument sur la place de la Bastille. Donnée à Paris, le 27 juin 1792, l’an 4° de la Liberté (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1792). 37 Bournon, La Bastille, 206–211; Bocher, Démolir la Bastille, 87–97. By decree of 6 October 1790 the Assembly decides to cover the costs of the Municipality. 38 Bocher, Démolir la Bastille, 111–7. 39 Ibid., 97. 40 Pierre-François Palloy, Projet général d’un monument à éléver à la gloire de la Liberté, sur les terreins de la Bastille … Prospectus [n.p.] 1792, 1–6. 41 See Maarten Delbeke, ‘Monuments’, in Eighteenth-Century Architecture. The Companions to the History of Architecture, vol. 2, edited by Caroline Van Eck and Sigrid De Jong (London: WileyBlackwell, 2017), 753–84. 42 Fournel, Le patriote Palloy et l’exploitation de la Bastille, 125–6. 43 See the description in the Pétition mentioned in note 18. 44 ‘Détails sur la presse portée à la Fédération’, 4. 45 Halleman, ‘Projet du Jardin de la liberté’, 5, 8. For the reference to Trajan’s column, see Palloy, Projet général d’un monument à éléver à la gloire de la Liberté, 8. 46 Fournel, Le patriote Palloy et l’exploitation de la Bastille, 127, n. 1. 47 Taws, The Politics of the Provisional, 1–3. 48 See Maarten Delbeke and Minou Schraven (eds), Foundation, Dedication and Consecration in Early Modern Europe, Intersections, vol. 22 (Leiden: Brill, 2012). 49 Here it is worth noting that Palloy claims to have been ordered by the National Assembly to organize the removal of the royal statues in Paris; see Palloy, Discours prononcé en présence des bataillons de volontaires, 47. 50 [Pierre-François Palloy], Morale et devoirs des François (Paris: De l’imprimerie de Testu, [n.d.]). 51 Bocher, Démolir la Bastille, 138. 52 See the letter printed by Palloy to invite the addressee to the inauguration of a model of the Bastille after the Apothéose, in the company of the apostles returned from their mission. BNF 4-Z LE SENNE-1014 (2), available on Gallica. See, amongst others, Lüsebrink and Reichardt, The Bastille, 131–147. 53 See the feuille volante Pierre de la Bastille [n.d.], BNF LB41-4614, published by Palloy in order to explain the meaning of the stones to departments newly added to the French territory. 54 See the letter of the administrators of the Dyle department to Palloy, dated 25 Thermidor an IV, BNF FOL-Z LE SENNE-718 (12), available on Gallica; and the Procès-verbal de la célébration des fêtes de la Liberté aux 9 et 10 Thermidor, et de l’inauguration d’un modèle en relief de la Bastille (Brussels: imprimerie de Tutot, 1796) (henceforth: Brussels).

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55 Lüsebrink and Reichardt, ‘La “Bastille” dans l’imaginaire social de la France’, 227, base their description on the Procès-verbal of the reception in Pau (see infra). The Extrait des procès-verbaux des séances de l’Assemblée administrative du Département de la Côte d’Or (séance du 13 novembre 1790) [n.p.] [1790] (henceforth: Côte d’Or), 4–5, includes a similar list. There is mention of a ‘history of the Bastille by the worthy M. Dussault’, De l’insurrection parisienne; see Lüsebrink and Reichardt, The Bastille, 133. See also Palloy, Discours prononcé en présence des bataillons de volontaires, 14–15. 56 See also Inauguration dans la salle des séances de l’administration du district de Versailles, d’une pierre des cachots de la Bastille … , [n.p.] [1791], 2 (ceremony on the 16 December 1791, henceforth: Versailles), and the manuscript letter dated 6 December 1791 announcing the gift of the stones to the districts, BNF FOL-Z LE SENNE-718 (5), available on Gallica. 57 Société fraternelle des deux sexes, Extrait de procès-verbal: 12 Février, an quatrième de la Liberté (Paris: Imprimerie de la Veuve Trasseux, 1792), 10, BNF Lb40-2421, available on Gallica. 58 Palloy, Discours prononcé en présence des bataillons de volontaires, 20. 59 Procès-verbal de ce qui est passé à l’Assemblée générale des Citoyens et du Peuple réunis en la Salle de l’Évêché … relativement aux comptes du patriote Palloy. Séance du 12 Mars 1792. [n.p.] [1792], 3. The stone is ‘engraved’ with the ‘monument du Musée’, in all likeliness the Monument aux électeurs. 60 Bocher, Démolir la Bastille, 96; Fournel, Le patriote Palloy et l’exploitation de la Bastille, 113–115. 61 Pierre-François Palloy, ‘Circulaire’ dated 25 July 1793, BNF FOL-Z LE SENNE-718 (15), available on Gallica. See Jean-Pierre Babelon, ‘Les maquettes et les pierres de la Bastille’, La gazette des archives, 51, 4° trimestre 1965, 217–230, here 228. See also Fournel, Le patriote Palloy et l’exploitation de la Bastille, 178–180, with the ‘Circulaire’; Lüsebrink and Reichardt, The Bastille, 143; Taws, The Politics of the Provisional, 103. Mention of reception of the circulaire on 31 July 1793 in Rhône-et-Loire, in George Guigue, Procès-verbaux des séances du conseil général du département Rhône-et-Loire 1790–1793 (Trévoux: Imprimerie de Jules Jeannin, 1895), tome 1, 442–443. 62 A Procès-verbal typically contains several speeches by different speakers; they will be identified only when this seems relevant. 63 Procès-verbal du cérémonial, & des Discours prononcés par différens Membres des Corps Administratifs de la Ville de Château-Thierry, à l’occasion du Don qui leur a été fait d’une Pierre de la Bastille [n.p.] [1792], 9, 11 (ceremony on 17 September 1792, henceforth: Château-Thierry); Procès-verbal du directoire du district de Corbeil … concernant la réception et l’inauguration d’une pierre provenant des débris d’un des cachots de la Bastille … Séance du 25 novembre 1791 (Paris: Impr. de Monaco, 1791), 7–8 (henceforth: Corbeil); Procès-verbal du directoire du Département des Basses-Pyrénées concernant la réception & l’inauguration du modèle de la Bastille … (Pau: chez Daumon, 1790), 5 (ceremony on 2 March 1790, henceforth: Basses-Pyrénées); for the date of the reception, see Babelon, ‘Les maquettes et les pierres de la Bastille’, 221 (no. 30). Comparison of the different booklets shows that Palloy’s apostles availed themselves from standard speeches. An interesting variation occurs between the speech in Corbeil, 5: ‘Puissiezvous, Messieurs, à la vue de ce monument que je vous présente, n’oublier jamais qu’on n’est heureux qu’autant qu’on est libre’, and Côte d’Or, 10: ‘Puissiez-vous, Messieurs, à la vue de cette pierre que je vous présente, n’oublier jamais qu’on n’est heureux, qu’autant qu’on est libre’ (my italics). See for instance also La république une et indivisible, ou la mort. Extrait d’un procès-verbal des délibérations du conseil du département de Loiret. Séance publique du 10 septembre 1793 … Inauguration des Droits de l’Homme, gravés su la pierre de la Bastille, envoyée par le Patriote Palloy (henceforth: Loiret), 2. ‘ … imprimer les maximes gravées sur cette pierre’. 64 Côte d’Or, 9–10: ‘devenu le jouet des français’; ‘célébrer la réduction de la Bastille’. See also Taws, The Politics of the Provisional, 115.

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65 Pierre-François Palloy, Allégorie [n.p.] [n.d.] BNF FOL-Z LE SENNE-718 (15), available on Gallica; the date of the celebration is inscribed in the border of the medal. 66 Serment Federatif du 14 Juillet 1790 [n.p.] [n.d.], BNF, département Estampes et photographie, RESERVE QB-370 (22)-FT 4 [De Vinck, 3749], available on Gallica. 67 On the use of dynamite, see Bournon, La Bastille, 208, as part of an overview of the debate about the demolition before 1789. On the mise-en-scène of the demolition, see Lüsebrink and Reichardt, The Bastille, 72–8 and Bocher, Démolir la Bastille, 117–23. 68 Whereas the first model of the Bastille was probably cut from stone, subsequent ones are from plaster; see the discussion in Taws, The Politics of the Provisional, 110–111. This shift parallels the ambiguity about whether the stones were inscribed with the Bastille plan or the Declaration, or carried a framed print; see below. 69 See Brussels. 70 Côte d’Or, 8: ‘abaissons notre regard sur cette forteresse’. 71 The description of the model sent to Mont-Blanc (Détail de toutes les pièces composant le modèle de la Bastille) is published in Bournon, La Bastille, 320–4. 72 Plan du château royal de la Bastille, BNF, département Estampes et photographie, RESERVE QB370 (9)-FT 4, available on Gallica. 73 Bournon, La Bastille, 64–66. According to Bournon, Verniquet requested to measure the Bastille but was ordered to base himself on the earlier survey. 74 Plan de la Bastille: avec les constructions découvertes dans la démolition du bastion, levé et dessiné par Cathala, architecte et inspecteur de la démolition de la Bastille, BNF, département Estampes et photographie, RESERVE QB-370 (9)-FT 4. A similar plan, with the new discoveries drawn in red ink, is BNF GED-3577. Compare esp. the plan by Cathala under BNF GED-3280 to Palloy’s plan illustrated here (all available on Gallica). On Cathala, see Werner Szambien, ‘Les architectes parisiens à l’époque révolutionnaire’, Revue de l’Art, 83, 1989, 36–50, here 43. As Bournon, La Bastille, 230 notes, Cathala designed a project for the place de la Bastille and the surrounding quarter that in many ways resembles Palloy’s. 75 Monument élevé à la gloire des Electeurs de 1789, BNF, département Estampes et photographie, RESERVE FOL-QB-201 (129), available on Gallica. 76 Côte d’Or, passim; Château-Thierry, 7. 77 Versailles, 10: ‘ … l’image entière de la Bastille présentée aux regards & aux réflexions des Administrateurs de Département, leur retracera les crimes de la tyrannie; à nous, cette pierre nous rappellera sa défaite, & nous dira à chaque instant que le pouvoir arbitraire est détruit, & que la loi seule doit régner’. 78 Basses-Pyrénées, 6–7. On this point, see also Taws, The Politics of the Provisional, 108–13. 79 Côte d’Or, 8. 80 Loiret, 8. 81 Basses-Pyrénées, 5. 82 Côte d’Or, 12. 83 Procès-verbal du cérémonial & des discours prononcés par differens Membres des corps administratifs réunis de la Ville d’Épernay, à l’occasion du don qui leur a été fait d’une pierre de la Bastille, le 22 septembre 1792 [n.p.] [n.d.] (henceforth: Épernay), 4; also in Château-Thierry, 6. Also quoted in Taws, The Politics of the Provisional, 113. 84 Château-Thierry, 11. 85 Versailles, 5–6. 86 Côte d’Or, 4; Versailles, 5.

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87

Lüsebrink and Reichardt, The Bastille, 127.

88

Château-Thierry, 9: ‘La pierre auguste que vous apportez sera pour nous un dépôt sacré, & l’objet d’un véritable culte’, ibid., 11: ‘débris précieux’, Versailles, 10 for the talisman. Orléans, 5, for ‘vénération religieuze’.

89

Basses-Pyrénées, 11.

90

Orléans, 6–7; Lüsebrink, ‘“Hommage à l’écriture” and “Eloge de l’imprimerie”’ argues that the prints produced by and on behalf of Palloy aim at reoralization; in other words, to instigate a process where the printed word is again appropriated and localized.

91

The literature mentions stones that were inscribed with the Bastille plan (see Bocher, Démolir la Bastille, 151, about Palloy’s gift of a ‘plan incrusté’ to Louis XVI on 15 May 1791; perhaps it is such a stone that is now still walled into the city hall of Saumur). For instance the Procès-verbal for Loiret systematically speaks of an ‘engraved’ stone (see the title and for instance 5). But Babelon, ‘Les maquettes et les pierres de la Bastille’, categories B and D, describes no stones engraved with the plan or the Declaration.

92 Bocher, Démolir la Bastille, 160–2; Bresnahan, ‘Remaking the Bastille’, 67. 93 Kersaint, Discours sur les monuments publics. 94

Épernay, 3.

95

Lüsebrink and Reichardt, The Bastille, 45.

96

Château-Thierry, 9; Basses-Pyrénées, 6; Versailles, 5; Côte d’Or, 7, ‘gage d’union’. See also Pierre–François Palloy, Les XVI commandements patriotiques, par un républicain (Paris: l’Imprimerie de Renaudière, 1793) (10 Frimaire an II, 30 November 1793).

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Liberté, égalité, fraternité, raison. Gendarmerie national servant près les tribunaux (Paris: De l’Imprimerie de Belin, 1793), 22. A stone with this inscription mentioned in Babelon, ‘Les maquettes et les pierres de la Bastille’, 229, E, 1.

98

Victor Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1998), 281. My translation is adapted from Isabel F. Hapgood’s translation of 1896.

99 Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris, 290, 295. 100 See Richard Wittman, Architecture, Print Culture and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France (London: Routledge, 2007), 1–16.

Imprinting Patriotism: Etruria and Egypt in Papal Rome (1834–41) Richard Wittman

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tanding atop the ancient burial place of Saint Paul, the immense basilica of San Paolo fuori le mura was the best preserved of Rome’s Early Christian churches when, in a mere six hours one July night in 1823, it was destroyed by fire. The fire capped a long season of disasters – of Revolutionary occupations and Napoleonic domination, of desecrated sacred sites, a pope forced into exile and prison, and the Church’s own conviction of its immutable universality shaken to the core. By the time of the fire, reactionaries in Rome had come to think of the Church as a besieged hero, deserted by its friends, surrounded by enemies, and with only its own internal resources to fall back upon. In such an atmosphere, the destruction of San Paolo took on exceptional symbolic importance, and the debates about how to repair or rebuild it became supercharged with meaning. A majority of architects favoured replacing the old basilica with a new building in what they regarded as the most correct neoclassical style. Conservatives around the newly elected archconservative Pope Leo XII instead urged that the old basilica be rebuilt in its original form.1 This latter position sprang from a new and reluctant recognition that the traditional implication of universality that had long accompanied Roman Catholic classicism was losing credibility, and that the classical could now just as easily conjure thoughts of stock exchanges or Revolutionary temples. The choices posed by the fire at San Paolo helped crystalize this recognition, pushing conservatives instead towards the architectural heritage of fourth- and fifth-century Early Christianity, which San Paolo had exemplified. It was a style that architects and connoisseurs since the Renaissance had regarded as decadent and even barbaric, bearing only the most superficial relation to the true classical tradition; yet in the tragic light cast by the flames at San Paolo, it looked authentic, heroic, and unmistakably, even exclusively, expressive of a defiant Catholic

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Luigi Rossini, ‘Veduta della Rovina di San Paolo fuori le mura’ (1823). Architekturmuseum, Technical University Munich.

identity. After two years of debate, Leo XII issued his decision: San Paolo would not be rebuilt in a modern classical style, but as it had been when it was new. Work began at once and almost immediately became mired in bureaucratic paralysis. Every decision of the architect, Pasquale Belli, was subjected to endless debate and second-guessing by the artists and architects of the Accademia di San Luca, who had been charged with verifying that Belli’s work remained in conformity with the pope’s vision. In reality, these classically minded academicians proved more concerned with finding ways around that vision, and with ‘improving’ what they saw as the flaws of the original fifth-century building. As a result, these debates not only slowed work but failed completely to preserve the likeness of the original basilica. By the time of Belli’s death in 1833 approval had been given to replace the milky marble columns of the old basilica with brownish granite ones; to leave them unfluted rather than fluted; to crown them with pristine Carrara marble capitals copied from the Pantheon, which bore no relationship whatsoever to the original assortment of spolia and late antique capitals; and to transform the internal proportions by raising the floor to prevent flooding and altering the wall elevations. Belli was succeeded by his energetic young assistant Luigi Poletti. Poletti was determined not to suffer the same death-by-bureaucracy that Belli had endured, so he travelled to Castelo Gandolfo in September 1834 to talk things over directly with the new pope, Gregory XVI. Poletti presented

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Gregory with a new master plan for the entire project and pleaded to be released from the stifling oversight of the Accademia. In return, he promised that he could have at least the transept and high altar ready for consecration and use by 1840. Such a success, he argued, would restore the faith of the thousands who had contributed money for the moribund project and set the table for the second round of fundraising that would be necessary to complete the reconstruction. Gregory, more preoccupied with the continuing fallout from the failed revolution that had erupted in the Papal States in 1831–32, was happy to grant the wish. And Poletti did not disappoint, delivering the completed apse and transept for consecration in the fall of 1840.2 This chapter will deal with just two aspects of Poletti’s massive efforts during the six years between the meeting at Castello Gandolfo and the 1840 consecration: the construction of a new transept chapel dedicated to Saint Benedict, and a project to erect a new baldachin at the centre of the basilica over the Confessio where the body of Saint Paul lay. At issue here are the ways in which these two projects came to be discussed in contemporary discourse. Both projects alluded via their materials to other historical cultures and places, ancient Etruria in one case and Egypt in the other. In the contemporary context of serious political ferment, both allusions were susceptible to divergent interpretations: conservative interpretations that situated these civilizations within a Christian or more precisely Catholic telos, and a wider variety of progressive interpretations that found in them reference points for reformist or even revolutionary ambitions. The Papal States during this period was, of course, a closed society, with a ruling gerontocracy that was existentially opposed to enlightened notions of free speech and open debate. It is, therefore, surprising to discover that the descriptions and explanations of these two features of San Paolo that appeared in Roman print culture – in the heavily censored Roman press and in the typically arid publications of Rome’s learned academies – had almost nothing to do with the likely intended meanings of these elements as contrived within the ultraconservative clerical intelligentsia around Pope Gregory. Rather, they reflected themes and rhetorics common to any number of patriotic, liberal and reformist ideologies. What is more, this disjuncture seems to have passed entirely unremarked at the time – a puzzling spectacle in a society not known for political tolerance (to say the least) and one that begs for investigation. This chapter contends that the unexpected flexibility of the government in consenting to the printing and distribution of these implicitly problematic texts affords us a glimpse into the Catholic leadership’s ongoing quest to come to grips with the transformed status of the Church in the post-Revolutionary world, a quest that would compel it more and more as the nineteenth century wore on to recalculate the relative importance of winning over hearts versus that of maintaining ideological immaculacy.

Etruria Poletti’s 1834 general plan for San Paolo proposed a new Saint Benedict chapel off the south transept, and showed it with a colonnade running along each wall. In August 1835, the Special Commission for the Reconstruction – a body of clerics and antiquarians that functioned as the intermediary between the papal government and the San Paolo workshop – sent a request to Pope Gregory asking if Poletti could make use in this chapel of a set of ancient columns that were in one of the Vatican warehouses, noting that it would be ‘almost impossible’ to find other ancient columns of the required dimensions among the antiquities dealers of Rome.3 The columns

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in question were well known to Roman artists and antiquarians, having been excavated twentythree years earlier from the site of the ancient city of Veii, near Isola Farnese in the Papal States.4 Because the excavation supervisor had dug outside the approved area, the government in 1822– 24 had impounded all the excavated material, including two complete sets of columns.5 These had been transferred to the Vatican warehouses in 1826 and plans for a special exhibition room in

Luigi Poletti, plan of the Chapel of Saint Benedict at San Paolo fuori le mura, published in L'Ape italiana della belle arti IV (1837). Private collection.

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the Vatican Museum incorporating both sets of columns had at one point been drawn up by none other than Pasquale Belli, Poletti’s predecessor at San Paolo.6 The decision to employ these columns at San Paolo probably came from someone of higher authority than Poletti, as he was in general implacably opposed to the reemployment of historical features in his designs. With his strong predilection for a consistent, contemporary architectural texture, Poletti had retreated from Belli’s ambivalence about such reemployment, preferring instead to satisfy the needs of memory by cutting up surviving elements from the old basilica for more discreet use as polished veneers. The claim about locating other columns among the city’s antiquities dealers makes little sense if the plan had not been from the start to use spolia columns, but it is difficult to see such an idea originating with Poletti. The city of Veii had been one of the wealthiest of the Etruscan league from the eighth to the fourth centuries BCE, and, by the nineteenth century, was among the most legendary of Etruscan sites. In 1815 the Piedmontese Jacobin writer Carlo Botta could use it as a synecdoche for Etruria itself in his epic poem of the Roman conquest, Il Camillo, o Vejo conquistata.7 Botta’s book manifested an Etruscomania that had long percolated in learned circles in central Italy, much of it inspired by an awakening national pride that chafed against the peninsula’s domination by foreign powers. For some of these patriots, the Etruscans provided a historical basis for a common Italian identity.8 The many private excavations conducted during the eighteenth century amid the rich Etruscan tombs around Volterra, Siena, Cortona and Arezzo qualify as examples of what has been termed ‘nationalist archaeology’, which is to say, archaeology that aims to strengthen patriotic sentiments, glorify the national past or encourage resistance to foreign domination.9 This Etruscomania was not infrequently tinged with an anti-Roman local chauvinism, as, for example, in Carlo Denina’s Rivoluzioni d’Italia of 1769, which depicted the ancient Romans as thuggish warlords who had become the essentially foreign occupiers of Italy’s vibrant and varied indigenous civilizations.10 Patriotic Etruscomania gathered strength from the political tumult of the decades after 1789. Vincenzo Cuoco’s three-volume novel Platone in Italia (1804–06) internationalized the genre by transforming the Etruscans into founders of Western civilization.11 Platone in Italia took the form of a purported translation of an ancient manuscript describing the travels of an astonished Plato among the obviously superior civilizations of ancient Italy, among which the Etruscans were primus inter pares. The third volume detailed the rise to power of the less imaginative but better organized Romans, who methodically defeated these more cultivated peoples; the conclusion identified the Etruscans as the mysterious Pelasgians whom classical Greek writers had claimed as their forefathers.12 Similar claims underlay L’Italia avanti il dominio dei Romani, an explosive 1810 study by the Tuscan scholar Giuseppe Micali.13 Here too the Etruscans represent the heroic core of the original Italian nation: a collection of harmonious republics populated by freedom-loving pastoral farmers who are ultimately corrupted and conquered by the crude neighbouring race of Romulus. Little surprise that such narratives were commonly read as allegories of the Roman Catholic Church’s long domination of Italy, both directly and via foreign allies. Micali himself would not have gone quite that far, but his readers made his books into bibles of the Risorgimento.14 In 1832, Micali published his Storia degli antichi popoli italiani, which inaugurated the period of his greatest influence in Italian political thought, leading up to the 1848 national revolution.15 This interval produced such related studies as Angelo Mazzoldi’s self-explanatorily titled Delle origine italiche e della diffusione dell’incivilmento italiano all’Egitto, alla Fenicia, alla Grecia e a tutti le nazioni asiatiche poste sul Mediterraneo, but also works that carried some of the themes of this

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earlier discourse about the nation in new directions, like the profoundly influential Del primato morale e civile degli italiani, by the Liberal Catholic writer Vincenzo Gioberti.16 We shall return to Gioberti later. Needless to say, this is not how the Etruscans were seen by the conservatives who dominated Gregory XVI’s court. The Papal States contained much of what had once been ancient Etruria, and regulations from 1802 blocking the unauthorized export of antiquities had caused the papal collections to swell with objects unearthed at Etruscan sites around Perugia and Viterbo.17 As Carolyn Springer showed in her classic study of the encomial literature celebrating papal archaeology, court intellectuals were quick to integrate the Etruscans into their teleological view of the past. For them, the Roman conquest of the Etruscans, like that of the Greeks, had been a divinely ordained and historically necessary step that prepared the triumph of the Church in Rome. Springer points to several appearances of this theme in the courtly poems and discourses surrounding the 1838 foundation of Pope Gregory’s new Etruscan Museum, the first in Rome to be dedicated to art from outside the narrowly defined Greco-Roman tradition.18 Pushing back against the instrumentalization of the Etruscans by Italian patriots, these texts present the museum as redeeming Etruscan artefacts of their pagan origins and revealing their ultimate significance as part of the Church’s triumph in the Eternal City.19 The reuse of the Veii columns at San Paolo was likely intended to reference this broader historiographical-political framework.20 The salient point here is that the columns were actually not Etruscan but Roman. When they had been excavated in the 1810s the precise location of the ancient Etruscan town of Veii had still been unknown; only the site of the Roman town built after the conquest of Etruria was known, and it was from here that the columns came. What little official language we have about the chapel was unambiguous on this point: when the secretary of the Special Commission for the Reconstruction described the chapel in the official Diario di Roma he stated that the columns were from the Roman colony (the ‘Municipium Augustum Veiens’) adjacent to where ‘the Etruscan city of Veii, previously a rival of the Eternal City’ had once stood.21 Their Roman provenance was quite legible to erudite contemporaries: the antiquarian Giuseppe Melchiorri described the columns in a review as representatives of ‘the most beautiful period of Roman architecture’.22 As for the architecture of Poletti’s chapel, it had nothing Etruscan about it whatsoever but rather took the form of a Roman temple cella of the Imperial era. This is because the chapel was clearly intended to recall not Etruscan Veii but Roman Veii; more precisely, it was to restage Rome’s conquest and absorption of old Veii, and by extension of the Etruscan civilization that Italian patriots so fetishized. And by embedding this historical tableau within Paul’s new basilica, it recalled the historical necessity of Rome’s conquest in preparing the way for the ultimate triumph of the Church in Rome. The encomial texts from which this interpretation can be extrapolated were literary works read or performed in the rarefied confines of official ceremonies and elite literary academies. Their function was to affirm the apologetics of power embedded in the pope’s archaeological and museological patronage, and to explore the nuances of the Church’s political ideology. Characterized by turgid melodrama and platitudinizing, they were not aimed at persuading a readership but rather at reassuring a powerful elite about the continuity and legitimacy of its authority. When we turn now to the presentation of such matters in the more public forum of the press, we encounter a very different narrative. ***

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Chapel of Saint Benedict at San Paolo fuori le mura. Photograph by author.

The situation of the press in Rome was peculiar. Even into the 1820s, long after virtually every other major European city had at least a few competing journals, the papal authorities permitted only one news journal – the official daily Diario di Roma with its weekly supplement the Notizie del Giorno – and a small handful of strictly policed cultural journals which focused heavily on archaeological and historical matters. (This focus on the past was at least partly a result of the impossibility of commenting on the present; even an experiment with a theological journal in 1825 had lasted just a year before proving too controversial.23) A cosmetic reform had come following the suppression of the uprisings in the Papal Legations in 1830–31, when a few new journals had been authorized, including the general-interest weeklies La Voce della Ragione (1832–35) and the illustrated L’Album (1834–62), alongside the artistic papers Il Tiberino (1833–42) and L’Ape italiana delle belle arti (1835). For the uprisings in the Legations had had the effect of turning the illiberal administration of the Papal States into a matter of international concern, prompting the Great Powers of England, France, Austria, Russia and Prussia to jointly submit a set of urgent recommendations to Pope Gregory outlining how his government ought to be reformed.24 Gregory proved unenthusiastic, and the authorization of these new journals, which were subject to onerous censorship, was part of his mostly diversionary response.

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And yet when matters Etruscan were discussed in them, one finds no trace of the historiographical rationalizations current in the papal court. Instead, one is surprised to encounter language redolent of patriotic Etruscomania. The race to locate Etruscan Veii had been in the news regularly in the 1820s until Antonio Nibby and the Englishman William Gell finally discovered it and published their findings in 1832.25 In 1838, just after the Veii columns had been installed in the San Benedetto chapel, widely publicized excavations of the Etruscan necropoli at Veii were launched.26 In November of that year Il Tiberino published a poem to mark the inauguration of the Etruscan Museum that marvelled at how benighted the ancient world had been before the Etruscans materialized to share their light: once again our Italy Fills the world with its splendor, And foreigners will no longer dare to insult The Ausonian soil, the garden of Europe.27 Little sense here of conquered Etruria’s helpful contribution to the triumph of the Church. The longer description of the Museum published by the archaeologist Giuseppe Ungarelli in L’Album crowed that recent research on the Etruscans showed that ‘Italy seems to tower as the master over an age in which it was once said to have been but a disciple. We see now that Greece had a relatively minor part in our civilization, which once would not have been believed’.28 This Micalian rhapsody appealed to the reader’s sense of patriotism in language that would not have been far out of place in a Risorgimento polemic. The aforementioned review of Poletti’s chapel by Giuseppe Melchiorri registered its misgivings by means of indirection.29 For Melchiorri, publishing in his Ape italiana delle belle arti, the problem was that the chapel returned to a practice of reusing classical spolia; a practice that had once been common in Rome – much of the marble for Saint Peter’s had been harvested in this manner – but which had been largely halted more than a century earlier, and explicitly forbidden by Pius VII’s Chirograph on antiquities of 1 October 1802 and again by the Pacca Edict of 7 April 1820.30 Melchiorri expresses his ambivalence by dutifully, if half-heartedly, resurrecting the superannuated arguments in favour of the practice, while also finding a way to remind the reader that it is hardly universally approved. Thus he compliments Gregory XVI for ‘having provided that [the Veii columns] should bring honor to a Christian basilica, as they once did to a pagan one’, but then adds: There will always be those who blame this practice of converting profane monuments to the ornamentation of Christian temples. But if we leaf through our histories for a moment and visit our churches, we can only conclude that the greatest number of ancient edifices, and the greatest ornamental works of our ancestors, would not have come down to us, especially through the middle ages of barbarism, if they hadn’t been protected by the sanctity of religion, veneration for churches, and respect for the Christian basilicas.31 This old argument might once have rung true, but critical readers knew that the precedent of the ‘middle ages of barbarism’ had little relevance to the 1830s; if the recent French occupations of Rome had made anything clear it was that antiquities were probably more at risk in ecclesiastical

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settings than in archaeological or museal ones. Cocooned in plausible deniability, Melchiorri thus slyly marks his distance from the chapel’s outdated conceit. Why, then, was the fettered Roman press ignoring or critiquing this conceit rather than echoing it? One reason was because it knew that the Roman readership – a clerical, bourgeois and aristocratic readership – was not nearly as innocent about contemporary political and religious ideas as papal censorship would have hoped. It enjoyed a certain access to books and papers from beyond Rome and even from beyond Italy, which, while they could not circulate freely, were permitted to the foreigners with whom Rome was always packed; even the prominent cafés frequented by foreign patrons were allowed to receive them.32 And within the clergy the reformist Liberal Catholic school that was to gain such prominence in the later 1840s was already gaining adherents.33 Journals like L’Album and Il Tiberino, which had forfeited substantial sums to the government for the privilege of publishing, needed thus to appeal to a public that was more complex in reality than it was in theory, and that would not long have supported a journal that merely relayed the played-out historiographical rationalizations current at papal court. Luigi Poletti obviously presents a somewhat exceptional figure in this context, yet he offers a suggestive glimpse into this public. For it turns out that Poletti – a pious, successful, 44-year-old architect-engineer from northern Italy who spent his career working for high-ranking members of the Roman clergy – was also deeply committed to the patriotic interpretation of Etruscan history. In November 1836, as the Veii columns were being installed in his Saint Benedict chapel, Poletti read a long lecture entitled ‘Delle genti e delle arti primitive d’Italia’ to a joint session of the Accademia Pontificia di Archeologia and the Accademia di San Luca; this was subsequently published in the Archaeology academy’s periodical as well as separately.34 This quaveringly patriotic investigation echoed Micali’s works in its very title and aimed to fill out his thesis using architectural evidence. Densely footnoted throughout, Poletti declared that his aim was to demonstrate that Italy had been populated by indigenous people before Greece; that the arts had originated in Italy and were brought to the barbarous Greeks by the Etruscans; and that the Etruscans had civilized the Romans. It is ironic that the author of such a text can also have been the author of a chapel that seems to have been intended by its clerical patrons as an evocation of Rome’s providential conquest of Etruria. Poletti could hardly have voiced his displeasure at that – but is it a coincidence that the lecture was delivered just as the columns were being installed? Despite the fact that these various commentaries all gestured towards patriotic ideologies that Pope Gregory feared and condemned, there is no suggestion at all that they met with official disapproval or punishment; neither does one sense that their authors felt they were placing themselves in jeopardy.35 Only Melchiorri had been somewhat cagey, probably because his words implicitly criticized something specific, whereas Ungarelli and the poet in Il Tiberino had prudently enveloped their wilful misstatement of the intended significance of the Etruscan Museum in lavish praise. Poletti had still less need of caution as he was ostensibly discussing the ancient past in a scholarly context and leaving the public to fill in the implications, and he was not mistaken in this: his lecture was widely and favourably reviewed, not only in the new journals but even in the Diario di Roma.36 Before we delve any further into the significance of this emerging split between a performative, doctrinaire court literature and a more flexible printed literature aimed at a broader readership, let us first examine how a similar dynamic unfolded around Poletti’s plans for a baldachin over Paul’s tomb.

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Egypt In his 1834 general plan Poletti had proposed to transform the area around the sunken tomb of Saint Paul at the centre of the basilica. Before the fire, the high altar there had been marked by Arnolfo di Cambio’s thirteenth-century Gothic ciborium. This venerable object had miraculously survived the fire, but Poletti characteristically hoped to exile it out of sight, to a distant baptistery at the other end of the building. In its place he aimed to raise up a new baldachin of some unspecified precious material, probably to sustain the incessant parallel that made San Paolo the sister of Saint Peter’s, where, of course, Bernini’s baldachin dominated the crossing. At some point in the mid-1830s he settled on Egyptian alabaster, a rare and luminescent stone (technically a travertine) characterized by swirling tonalities of butterscotch and milk.37 Poletti’s choice evoked some historic precedents – the alabaster columns of the ciborium at San Marco in Venice, for instance – but it was triggered by his conversations with Silvestro Guidi, an Italian Egyptologist and dealer in antiquities, who had informed him that the Viceroy of Egypt, Mehmed Ali Pasha, had recently reopened the ancient alabaster quarries of Upper Egypt for use in the great mosque he was building in Cairo.38 They agreed that Guidi would enquire with the Viceroy on his next trip about purchasing some of this precious stone. This trip occurred in 1835–36. But while Guidi was away, Pope Gregory vetoed Poletti’s baldachin idea and ordered that Arnolfo’s ciborium be restored and retained in its original location.39 In any case, Guidi had no luck with the Viceroy, who told him that the reopened quarries were being exploited uniquely for his Cairo mosque. At this point, Poletti probably concluded that his idea for an alabaster baldachin was dead. But in fact the story was only just beginning. Since at least the Renaissance, scholarship on ancient Egypt had revolved around the assumption that the indecipherable hieroglyphs harboured mystical knowledge of long-lost metaphysical truths. In Rome itself, the presence of ancient obelisks had stimulated the minds of a parade of imaginative figures, most famously Athanasius Kircher in the seventeenth century.40 But during the eighteenth century the Freemasons had gotten in on the act, as Freemasonry located its origins in the Jewish exile in Egypt and counted ancient Egyptian symbology an essential point of reference. Masonic Egyptomania especially came to life during the French Revolution, informing aspects of the Revolutionary calendar as well as the Festival of the Supreme Being.41 Pharaonic Egypt thus became a problem for the Church, and a historical weapon for one of its most feared enemies. After the Revolution, and especially after the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt (1798–1801) and with the publication of the Description de l’Egypte (1809–29), a new approach to Egyptian history developed. This was facilitated by Mehmed Ali’s 1808 seizure of power there following the French withdrawal, as the Pasha not only accorded Christians new protections (which he later extended to Syria and Palestine) but also invited Europeans to come assist him in modernizing the country. Europeans were soon present in the region in record numbers, excavating and plundering its ancient remains, publishing travelogues and stimulating further interest back home.42 This activity yielded its signature accomplishment in the early 1820s when Champollion deciphered the hieroglyphs, revolutionizing the study of the Egyptian past. Catholic scholars in Rome immediately sensed an opportunity to start disentangling Egyptian history from Masonic fantasies and in 1824 the Vatican librarian Angelo Mai invited Champollion to come examine the Vatican’s collection of

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papyri.43 Champollion raved in a letter to his brother about the reception he got, noting that Pope Leo XII had told him ‘three times that I had rendered a beautiful, great, and good service to Religion through my discoveries’.44 In that same year, Champollion met a young professor of oriental languages at the University of Pisa named Ippolito Rosellini. Rosellini was to become Champollion’s first important disciple, a major collaborator and the first great Italian Egyptologist. Together they organized the 1829 FrancoTuscan Expedition to Egypt and Nubia, and following Champollion’s unexpected death Rosellini took over responsibility for the Expedition’s multi-volume report, the Monumenti dell’Egitto e della Nubia (1832–44).45 Rosellini soon made it his business to convince Gregory XVI that the new Egyptology could be an essential support to the Church’s larger mission. Despite flickers of interest, it proved an uphill battle. The only Egyptian works in the Vatican collections had entered more or less by chance, and for decades Guidi had been unable to persuade the government to purchase any of the ones he was stockpiling in his Roman warehouses.46 Conservative clerics worried about what an unlocked Egyptian antiquity might add to the mounting historical and even geological evidence indicating that the past dramatically exceeded the bounds of biblical history.47 (The Annuario Pontificio at this date still noted on its second page every year how long it had been ‘Since the Creation of the World’ and ‘Since the Universal Flood’. The 1835 edition, for instance, confidently reported them as having occurred 7,034 and 4,792 years earlier, respectively.) Champollion’s one detractor when he visited Rome in 1825 had been Michelangelo Lanci, chair in Arabic at La Sapienza.48 According to Champollion, Lanci had insinuated in one of his books that if Champollion’s system was correct, ‘it will lead inevitably to the ruin of sacred history’.49 In 1833, after publishing the first volume of the Monumenti, Rosellini visited Rome seeking papal sponsorship of the remaining volumes. Rosellini was anxious, especially knowing that Lanci was now one of Gregory XVI’s most trusted advisors. But a group of Catholic theologians and doctrinal experts had recently pronounced his research sound and ‘not without use for confirming with new evident proofs the facts narrated by the Holy Bible’, and his meeting with the pope turned out to be pivotal.50 Gregory agreed to support the rest of the Monumenti. Shortly thereafter, when Guidi tried for the umpteenth time to interest the Camerlengato in his latest Egyptian treasures, the offer was unexpectedly accepted. When he followed up with a second, much bigger offer, Pope Gregory intervened personally, ordering the surprised Camerlengato not only to make the purchase but to suspend all other purchases aside from Egyptian ones. Two months later he ordered all previously refused offers of Egyptian artefacts to be revisited and if possible accepted, and even authorized the use of his personal funds if necessary.51 This whirlwind climaxed with the opening of a new Museo Gregoriano Egizio on 2 February 1839, immediately below the new Etruscan Museum. Two days later, Ungarelli wrote to Rosellini describing the pope as ‘full of fervor for matters Egyptian’.52 This turn of events had consequences for Poletti’s baldachin. Back in October 1838, Gregory had sent some gifts to Mehmed Ali in thanks for the protections he had accorded to Catholics in Egypt and Syria. The gifts were sent via Antoine Clot, better known as Clot Bey, a French Catholic doctor who had become one of Mehmed Ali’s most respected and trusted advisors.53 Then early in 1839 Guidi’s old friend Annibale di Rossetti, the Tuscan consul in Alexandria, took it upon himself to have another crack at getting the Pasha to sell the pope some alabaster. Rossetti had no way of knowing that Gregory had rejected Poletti’s baldachin and that the alabaster was no longer needed,

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but as luck would have it, Mehmed Ali, claiming he was touched by the gifts conveyed to him by Clot Bey, now changed his mind and decided to offer six alabaster columns to Pope Gregory as a personal gift.54 Word of this reached Rome in November 1839. Despite there no longer being any specific use in mind for the alabaster, Pope Gregory – fully in the grip of his new Egyptomania – had an expedition organized to retrieve it. He also decreed that they would explore Egypt and the Holy Land, focusing on antiquities and historic sites and recording data about geology, geography, flora and fauna. And so on 21 September 1840, three ships from the Pontifical Navy – the Fedeltà, the San Paolo and the San Pietro – left Civitavecchia on what came to be known as the Pontifical Expedition to Egypt. This gallant operation lasted eleven months, left 10 per cent of the Roman crew dead from cholera and was written about in newspapers from Sydney to South Carolina. The Expedition brought the alabaster columns back successfully, though it cost the papal treasury a substantial fortune.55 Gregory’s passionate turn towards Egyptology reflected many of the same desires that underlay his sponsorship of the Etruscan Museum, namely, to assert that the Church’s vision of history was vindicated rather than threatened by new historical discoveries. In an 1845 ceremony at the Collegio Nazareno, Count Augusto Verzaglia intoned that the presence of the Egyptian and Etruscan museums in the shadow of Saint Peter’s announced ‘that Christian Rome, while it adores the true God and builds magnificent temples to him … does not fear a comparison between the madness and absurdities that [pagan works] represent and the truth of the pure and sublime religion of Christ’.56 The passage was quoted two years later by Pope Gregory’s private secretary, Gaetano Moroni, in an article about the museums in his Dizionario di erudizione storicoecclesiastica.57 Gregory himself referred to the pagan works of the museums as ‘trophies of the victory won by the Cross over idolatry and idolaters’.58 Gregory had also accepted Rosellini’s argument that the new Egyptology would provide empirical proofs for biblical history. Surprisingly enough, it was probably Michelangelo Lanci who helped persuade Gregory on this point. Lanci held unflinchingly to the iron-clad veracity of Catholic sacred history; the preface of his book La sacra scrittura illustrata con monumenti fenico-assirij ed egiziani (1827) declared that its goal was to ‘choose those parts from among the most beautiful Egyptian discoveries that are most helpful for understanding obscure passages of the Bible, and, by applying this to that, to find the truth of one through the other’.59 By the mid-1830s, Lanci’s initial hostility towards Champollion had abated into a belief that his system only needed to be ‘reformed’, since investigations into Egyptian antiquities needed to be ‘guided by good judgment and spurred by good will’.60 In other words, sacred history could only be corroborated, never questioned. Such sentiments were not uncommon in papal Rome. The Diario di Roma reported in 1838 on a recent study that had used the new Egyptology to pinpoint where the Israelites had been dwelling when Moses led them out of Egypt; Moroni’s Dizionario declared in 1843 that ‘many remote facts of Egyptian history correlate to those of Hebrew history, and add new proofs of credibility to the Holy Scriptures’.61 Even Ungarelli’s account in L’Album of the opening of the new Egyptian Museum praised Pope Gregory for recognizing that ‘the cause of religion was not extraneous to Egyptian archaeology; rather, Egyptian archaeology must be joined to the sovereign truth as new tributary and ally’.62 Gregory’s historical interest in Egypt was buttressed by his personal concern for the Catholic faithful dwelling there in the present. Before becoming pope, Gregory had been Prefect of the

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Congregation of Propaganda Fide, which had been actively working to reorganize the Church’s presence in Egypt.63 With European residents accumulating in Mehmed Ali’s Egypt, and with Alexandria in particular becoming a major Italian colony, Moroni could estimate that there were 20,000 Latin Rite Catholics in the country in 1843.64 Pope Gregory also took an interest in the country’s numerous Eastern Rite Catholics (Copts, Marionites, Chaldeans), personally appointing a Vicar Apostolic for the Copts in 1832.65 Egypt ultimately came to be so close to Gregory XVI’s heart that it was memorialized on his tomb in Saint Peter’s, where the monumental door in its base leading to the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament takes the characteristic flaring shape of an Egyptian pylon, and is framed in glowing Egyptian alabaster.66 So what are we to conclude about Gregory’s understanding of the alabaster columns at San Paolo? Since the exact nature of their deployment inside the basilica was not decided until well after the Expedition, let us confine ourselves to the mere fact of their presence. This was guaranteed to be vivid, as these exotic columns were unlike any others in the city. Their Egyptian provenance would have reaffirmed the old historical parallels between the Roman Empire and the Church by recalling precedents like the remotely sourced marbles of the Pantheon or the city’s Egyptian obelisks, which had evoked the Empire’s geographical reach. (For the small British Catholic community in Calcutta, the Bengal Catholic Expositor explained that ‘the columns sent from Egypt will support the canopy above the apostle’s tomb, and that country which furnished marbles and obelisks for the city of the Caesars, will again, in our days, under a milder and far different influence, contribute to the triumphs of the city of the apostles’.67) As indexical referents to Egypt the columns would also have carried a biblical aura, recalling not only Egypt’s role in sheltering the Holy Family but also its prominence in Old Testament Jewish history, of which the Church had always claimed to be the successor. Gregory and his circle might have thought particularly of that traditional prototype for all Christian altars, the tabernacle Moses had built in the desert, formed of precious materials that God had instructed him to bring out of Egypt (Numbers 4). The alabaster columns would lastly have also recalled the long history of Christianity in Egypt, from its role as the cradle of Christian monasticism to its current status as one of the Church’s growth areas outside of Europe; this seems to be how a pious French visitor in 1849 experienced them when he wrote that the columns called to his mind ‘the providential mission that God has confided to us for the propagation of the Faith in the world’.68 Indeed, though Paul never set foot in Egypt, it would be difficult, standing in Paul’s basilica, not to think of his evangelical voyages when reflecting on the voyage those columns had made. On its return trip to Rome, the Expedition had even made this connection explicit, pausing with the columns at tiny Saint Paul’s Island off Malta, traditionally regarded as the site of the shipwreck that delayed Paul on his voyage to Rome for his trial (Acts 28).69 *** Yet when we look beyond clerical-intellectual perspectives to the world of print, we are once again confronted with a rather different narrative. The Pontifical Expedition received substantial coverage from the press in the Papal States, which was then picked up and magnified by papers around the world. (News of the Expedition’s arrival in Alexandria was reported in The Courier of faraway Hobart, Tasmania, just five and a half months after the fact.70) But while the Diario di Roma published regular brief reports, it was L’Album that went furthest, publishing a lively four-part illustrated travelogue by the official historian of

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Front page of L’Album (Rome), 13 March 1841, containing the first dispatch from the Pontifical Expedition to Egypt. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (S85-84).

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Cover illustration from L’Album (Rome), 21 August 1841, showing the loading of the Egyptian alabasters aboard the papal ships. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (S85-84).

the Expedition, Camillo Ravioli.71 This began appearing while the Expedition was still in progress: Ravioli dispatched his first instalment from Aswan on 21 January 1841, and it appeared on the front page on 13 March beneath a half-page engraving of the Fedeltà’s arrival at the first cataract of the Nile. The image, probably from a drawing by Antonio Calvi, a young artist attached to the Expedition (later one of its cholera victims), showed the ship wending its way amid jagged rocks, framed by the crumbling Western colonnade and the first pylon of the Temple of Isis. All of Ravioli’s subsequent instalments were also published on the front page beneath a large illustration. The third instalment was sent from Alexandria in late May and published in August, while the final instalment was written in February in Rome and published in two parts in March 1842, a year after the series had begun. Ravioli’s articles stood as the definitive account of the Expedition until 1870, when he reassembled and annotated them, added some scientific tables and a long supplemental narrative, and republished it all as a book.72 Given the nature of Gregory XVI’s interest in Egypt, we might expect the Christian resonances of the Expedition to be a major theme in Ravioli’s text. They are not. At one point he mentions the Expedition’s sadness at having to abandon the project of exploring the Holy Land, at another

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he writes of meeting some Catholic missionaries at Girgeh and elsewhere he tells of being shown a site where the Holy Family had paused during the Flight into Egypt.73 Apart from this, nothing. Instead, what most characterizes his narrative is an ardent sense of Roman patriotism. He even calls the Expedition the Roman Expedition rather than the official Pontifical Expedition. Consider the passage where he describes the arrival of the Fedeltà at the first cataract of the Nile: With the anchor dropped, a twenty-one cannon salute offered our homage to our great sovereign: and then from the summit of the lateen yards seven high-spirited cries from the entire crew echoed those blasts, repeating the august name of His Holiness in gratitude and devotion. The scattered masses of granite that, amid the waves, form the barrier between Egypt and Nubia echoed again today with Roman voices after a wait of fifteen centuries. He next describes how the crew ‘went into action, animated by noble enthusiasm’, with Captain Cialdi setting off in a launch through the perilous cataract into Nubia, the Expedition’s naturalist Paolo Ruga marching off to record grasses and rocks, and young Calvi setting up to carve an inscription on one of the rock cliffs to mark the Expedition’s arrival ‘from the banks of the Tiber’. Ravioli proudly notes that they were ‘the first European boat from Europe to have reached this point’, that they were an ‘expedition composed of military men’ who hoped ‘their fellow citizens’ would be proud of them, and that they were excited to be engaged in a project that would be ‘appreciated by our fatherland’.74 None of this rhetoric remotely aligned with the self-image of the absolutist, cosmopolitan papal government, whose inhabitants were subjects not citizens, and which directed loyalties not to a fatherland but to God and to the individuals and institutions He had invested with authority. Ravioli’s second instalment began similarly: A squad of sailors with packs and rifles in good order and caps on their heads; twelve officials in hunting attire followed by dromedaries bearing provisions and geodetic and astronomical instruments; assorted Nubians following along helter-skelter; a flag – that was the gathering of people and things that one could see on 23 January, beneath a pure blue sky, on the march between the granite quarries and the dunes of the desert, between the palms and the dhum of Nubia. Meanwhile an armed launch, with sails and oars, a pivot-gun at the prow and a flag to the stern, passes through the obstacles of the cataract … Was this a detachment from those cohorts which Octavius Augustus had sent to the frontiers of the Empire under the protective wings of that eagle, queen of the universe? All this is closer by far to Rider Haggard than to papal encomia. In another context such martial language might have recalled Catholic traditions that equated Roman legions with Christian knights, but absolutely nothing in Ravioli’s wording points in that direction. In the next paragraphs he recalls the French expedition of 1832 that transported the Luxor Obelisk now in the Place de la Concorde, coolly noting that while the French had travelled only two-thirds as far as the Pontifical Expedition, they had complained twice as much.75 The passage carries a familiar flavour of contemporary nationalism. (It is perhaps not irrelevant that in 1865 Ravioli was to publish L’Italia e i suoi primi abitatori, a patriotic Micalian study of the ancient peoples of pre-Roman Italy.76) Even Ravioli’s

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puzzling decision to begin his first article in mid-journey, at the First Cataract facing Philae, makes sense when one recalls that the first volume of the Description de l’Egypte had also started at this precise location. *** L’Album was the strange fruit of Rome’s peculiar public sphere.77 It was ostensibly based on the formula recently pioneered by the abundantly illustrated and unprecedentedly high-circulation Penny Magazine of London and Magasin Pittoresque of Paris, both of which were printed on ultramodern steam-powered cylinder presses. Yet L’Album had but a fraction of the circulation of these northern periodicals and was not cheap, for it achieved its superficial resemblance to its models via a traditional flat-bed press. This required printing all the illustrated pages twice: once for the text and once for the images. It was, in short, a laboriously and expensively produced local simulacrum of the kind of mass-produced popular publications characteristic of the industrial capitalist economies of northern Europe. Just about the only thing L’Album had in common with its northern models was that it too offered its readers a regular diet of patriotic or nationalistic statements. That Ravioli should have supplied L’Album with a struttingly patriotic account of a Roman cohort returning to the edges of its old empire fits squarely into this pattern. What requires explanation is not that an editor should have intuited that this rhetoric would appeal to Roman readers, but rather that the censors tolerated it and seem not even to have regarded it as subversive. This flexibility likely reflects the beginnings of a still inchoate and certainly unarticulated awareness within the papal administration of the mounting political limitations of the Church’s traditional apologetics. Since 1815, the Church had been coming to grips with a fundamentally new reality in both the Papal States and Europe. At home, the temporal authority of the pope was under unprecedented pressure from unhappy subjects whose expectations of government had been transformed by recent events. In Europe generally, the Church struggled to gain mastery over the complex and fractured new reality that had replaced the throne and altar alliance of the old regimes, asserting its own unmediated authority over spiritual and ecclesiastical matters in the face of both governmental and occasionally clerical opposition, depending on the location.78 These shifts were transforming the economy of power by which both the temporal and the spiritual authority of the pope were maintained, and had the effect of making him more dependent than ever before on popular devotion; on the goodwill and support of the faithful. Ordinary Catholics were increasingly expected to function as the Church’s agents in European domestic politics, and their voluntary donations were more important than ever to the Church’s sustenance.79 (This latter recognition was yet another reason why the Egyptian Expedition had been authorized: because the publicity it inevitably generated was essential to ensuring a good result from the next big fundraising drive for the work on San Paolo – a drive Gregory duly delayed until just after the Expedition’s return.) The really decisive shift came only after 1850, when the Church finally opened the door to genuinely popular religiosity and embraced popular Marian devotion.80 But some of the roots of that epochal shift were sinking earlier, amid the unresolved tensions of Roman political life in the 1830s, when already the papal government recognized that powerful forces – represented to differing degrees in Rome itself, in Italy and across Europe – felt that the futures of Italy and the Church depended on the government of the Papal States forging a more liberal bond with its subjects. L’Album was directed towards this officially unacknowledged yet

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closely watched strata of society, whose middlebrow members were not hostile towards the pope and his government, but who nevertheless wanted to feel a sense of patriotic pride, and who longed for a public life that was a little more like that of Paris or London. Indeed, the pontifical government later appointed the founder and editor of L’Album, Giovanni Di Angelis, to edit the official Diario di Roma, and there is even evidence that L’Album received occasional subsidies from the government. The surprising gap between courtly and journalistic discussions of the Etruscan and Egyptian themes at San Paolo thus offers a sign of that recognition, and others emerge once one knows to look for them. Gregory founded a third new museum in Rome in 1844, the Museo Gregoriano Profano Lateranese, housing pre-Christian works from around the papal territories; in other words, a kind of national historical museum for the Papal States.81 The articles published in L’Album upon its inauguration offered fiercely nationalistic denunciations of the English and French, whose only honour, it claimed, came of stocking their museums with works stolen from more creative nations.82 Other passages pointed out the almost genetic artistic facility the Roman soil seemed always to have imparted to its inhabitants.83 This tone of wounded pride was in the air, and conservatives like Pope Gregory were very well aware that not everyone who breathed it was an enemy of the Church. Indeed, when the young Cardinal Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti left his bishopric in Imola to participate in the Roman conclave that would elect Gregory XVI’s successor in 1846, he brought in his trunk a collection of patriotic political essays – Liberal Catholic works like Gioberti’s Del primato and Cesare Balbo’s Delle speranze d’Italia (1844), but also Massimo D’Azeglio’s Degli ultimi casi di Romagna (1846) – which all proposed scenarios for Italian independence and political liberalization.84 Mastai promised a friend that he would force them upon the new pope; two weeks later he was the new pope.85 In retrospect, it is unsurprising that Gregory XVI and his agents should at least implicitly have sensed that it was unwise to forbid the pleasures of patriotic rhetoric to their subjects. Thus when ‘the celebrated Micali’ offered a gift of ancient bronzes to the new Etruscan Museum in 1837, Gregory was prudent enough to accept it, and most gratefully, as the Diario di Roma reported.86 The restored Roman Church was, in a sense, learning to operate with the flexibility of a nation.87 This ambiguous and even ambivalent papal nationalism inevitably had a very different character from the nationalisms of contemporary France or England, but it shadowed many of its forms. The Church’s embrace of its own patrimony of churches, especially the supposedly ‘decadent’ basilicas of the heroic Early Christian era, may have crystalized with the fire at San Paolo, but it extended as far back as the response to the destruction of churches by the French-sponsored Repubblica Romana in 1796–98.88 Such wounds call out for comforts unique to ‘us’ – besieged, betrayed us – rather than ones that stake a claim for universality. To this example we now add several more: the sponsorship of an internationally publicized national expedition to Egypt to stand beside those of other nations; the foundation of a new national museum, in practice if not in name; tacit encouragement of the patriotic impulse to celebrate one’s glorious race of ancient ancestors. The ambivalence of the papal government in these circumstances points to its uncomfortable position between a traditionally universalist vocation and the exclusivity and particularism imposed by its new status. Inasmuch as these tensions can be read also on the columns from Veii and from Beni Suef that found a new home at Saint Paul’s basilica during these years, they buttress the case for seeing the new basilica as one of those emblematic national buildings so often raised up by nineteenth-century nations as they sought to articulate their transformed modern identities.

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Notes 1 This chapter derives from my forthcoming book, The Reconstruction of San Paolo fuori le mura (1823–1931): Spatialities, Politics, and the Sacred. Two good existing studies of the reconstruction are: Michael Groblewski, Thron und Altar: Der Wiederaufbau der Basilika St. Paul vor den Mauern (1823–1854) (Freiburg, Basel, Vienna: Herder, 2001); and Elisabetta Pallottino, ‘La nuova architettura paleocristiana nella ricostruzione della basilica di S. Paolo fuori le mura a Roma (1823–1847)’, Ricerche di storia dell’arte 56 (1995): 30–59. 2 Cesare Campori, ‘Notizie biografiche del Comm. Prof. Luigi Poletti Modenese, architetto di S. Paolo di Roma’, Memorie della reale accademia di scienze, lettere ed arti in Modena 6 (1865): 104–7. 3 Special Commission for the Reedification of the Basilica of San Paolo, ‘Memoria per la Santita’ di N[ostro] S[ignore]’, 4 August 1835 (Archivio della Basilica e Monastero di San Paolo fuori le mura, Rome: 6c, Basilica 1834–35). 4 On the Veii excavations: Paolo Liverani, Municipium Augustum Veiens (Rome: ‘L’Erma’ di Bretschneider, 1987); Filippo Delpino, Cronache veientane: storia delle ricerche archeologiche a Veio (Roma: Consiglio nazionale delle ricerche, 1985). 5 Ronald T. Ridley, ‘In Defence of the Cultural Patrimony: Carlo Fea Goes to Court’, Xenia Antiqua 5 (1996): 143–58; Carlo Fea and Vincenzo Poggioli, Replica antiquario-legale alla sec. scrittura del sig. avv. Scipione Cavi … (Rome: Presso Vincenzo Poggioli, 1823). 6 Liverani, Municipium Augustum Veiens, 18–19. 7 Carlo Botta, Il Camillo, o Vejo conquistata (Paris: Rey et Gravier, 1815). 8 Amid a vast literature, see: Alberto Mario Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento (Torino: Einaudi, 2000); Arnaldo Momigliano, ‘Ancient History and the Antiquarian’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 13:3/4 (1950): 285–315; Antonino De Francesco, The Antiquity of the Italian Nation: The Cultural Origins of a Political Myth in Modern Italy, 1796–1943 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 9 Bruce G. Trigger, ‘Alternative Archaeologies: Nationalist, Colonialist, Imperialist’, Man 19:3 (1984): 358. 10 Carlo Denina, Delle rivoluzioni d’Italia (Torino: I fratelli Reycends, 1769). See: Frederick Mascioli, ‘Anti-Roman and Pro-Italic Sentiment in Italian Historiography’, Romanic Review 33:4 (1942): 371–3; Mauro Cristofani, ‘Le mythe étrusque en Europe entre le XVIe et le XVIIIe siècle’, in Gli etruschi e l’Europa, ed. M. Pallottino (Paris: Fabbri, 1992), 288. 11 Vincenzo Cuoco, Platone in Italia, 3 vols. (Milan: A. Nobile, 1804–06). 12 De Francesco, The Antiquity of the Italian Nation, 29–50; Mascioli, ‘Anti-Roman and Pro-Italic Sentiment in Italian Historiography’, 366–8; Giovanna Ceserani, ‘Classical Culture for a Classical Country: Scholarship and the Past in Vincenzo Cuoco’s Plato in Italy’, in Classics and National Cultures, ed. Susan Stephen and Phiroze Vasunia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 59–77. 13 Giuseppe Micali, L’Italia avanti il dominio dei Romani, 4 vols. (Florence: G. Piatti, 1810), vol. 1, 28; vol. 4, 242–3; De Francesco, The Antiquity of the Italian Nation, 51–83. 14 De Francesco, The Antiquity of the Italian Nation, 68–83; Jacques Heurgon, ‘La découverte des Étrusques au début du XIXe siècle’, Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 117:4 (1973): 592. 15 Giuseppe Micali, Storia degli antichi popoli italiani, 3 vols. (Florence: Tip. all’ insegna di Dante, 1832); De Francesco, The Antiquity of the Italian Nation, 85. 16 Angelo Mazzoldi, Delle origine italiche e della diffusione dell’incivilmento italiano all’Egitto, alla Fenicia, alla Grecia e a tutti le nazioni asiatiche poste sul Mediterraneo (Milan: Guglielmini e Redaelli, 1840); Vincenzo Gioberti, Del primato morale e civile degli italiani, 2 vols. (Brussels: Meline, Cans e Compagnia, 1843).

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17 Giovanni Colonna, ‘L’avventura romantica’, in Gli etruschi e l’Europa, ed. M. Pallottino (Paris: Fabbri, 1992), 322; Maurizio Sannibale, ‘Il Museo Gregoriano Etrusco: le sue trasformazioni e il suo ruolo nella storia dell’Etruscologia’, in I Musei Vaticani nell’80 anniversario della firma dei Patti Lateranensi, ed. Antonio Paolucci and Cristina Pantanella (Rome: Edizioni Musei Vaticani, 2009), 57–79. 18 Carolyn Springer, The Marble Wilderness: Ruins and Representation in Italian Romanticism, 1775–1850 (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 49. 19 Springer, The Marble Wilderness, 49–50 and 58–63; Armando Cherici, ‘“Mirari Vos”: La politica museale di Gregorio XVI tra storia e antistoria’, in La Fortuna degli etruschi nella costruzione dell’Italia unita, ed. Giuseppe M. Della Fina (Orvieto: Edizioni Quasar, 2011), 51–67. 20 Saint Benedict himself was born in Norcia on the edge of what had once been ancient Etruria, but he made his mark elsewhere, at Subiaco and Monte Cassino, and the Veii reference seems not to have had anything to do with him personally. 21 Moreschi, Diario di Roma 87 supplement (29 October 1836): 1–4. 22 Giuseppe Melchiorri, ‘La nuova cappella a cornu epistolae nella basilica di S. Paolo di Poletti’, L’Ape italiana delle belle arti IV (1837): 7–9. 23 Pietro Pirri, ‘Il Movimento Lamennesiano in Italia. Nel Centenario dell’Enciclica “Mirari Vos”. Cessazione del Giornale Ecclesiastico’, La Civiltà cattolica 83:III: 1974 (9 September 1932): 567–83. 24 G.F.H. Berkeley, Italy in the Making: 1815 to 1846, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932), 103–26. 25 Filippo Delpino, ‘La “scoperta” di Veio etrusca’, in Ricerche archeologiche in Etruria meridionale nel XIX secolo, ed. Alessandro Mandolesi and Alessandro Naso (Florence: All’Insegna del Giglio, 1999), 73; William Gell, ‘Gli avanzi di Veji’, in Memorie dell’Instituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica, vol. 1 (Rome: Instituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica, 1832), 1–23. 26 Delpino, ‘La “scoperta”’, 74. 27 Giovanni Battista Rosani, ‘Il Museo Gregoriano’, Il Tiberino 5:1 (3 November 1838): 3–4. 28 Luigi Maria Ungarelli, ‘Museo Gregoriano’, L’Album 5:3 (24 March 1838): 17. Ungarelli also published his texts separately: Descrizione dei nuovi Musei Gregoriani, etrusco ed egizio aggiunti al Vaticano (Rome: Tip. dell’Belle Arti, 1839). 29 Melchiorri, ‘La nuova cappella a cornu epistolae nella basilica di S. Paolo di Poletti’. See also: Francesco Gasparoni, ‘La nuova cappella di S. Benedetto nella Basilica di S. Paolo sulla via Ostiense’, L’architetto girovago I (1841): 26–9. 30 Mariano Nuzzo, La tutela del patrimonio artistico nello Stato pontificio, 1821–1847 (Padova: Libreriauniversitaria.it, 2010), 51–63. 31 Melchiorri, ‘La nuova cappella a cornu epistolae nella basilica di S. Paolo di Poletti’, 7–9. 32 Olga Majolo Molinari, La stampa periodica romana dell’Ottocento, 2 vols. (Rome: Istituto di studi romani, 1963), vol. 1, xix–xx. 33 Vito Lo Curto and Mario Themelly, Gli scrittori cattolici dalla Restaurazione all’Unità (Roma: Laterza, 1976), 15–79. 34 Luigi Poletti, ‘Delle genti e delle arti primitive d’Italia’, in Dissertazioni della Pontificia Accademia romana di archeologia, vol. 8 (Rome: Tipografia della Pace, 1838), 145–209; Luigi Poletti, Delle genti e delle arti primitive d’Italia (Rome: Nella stamperia della reverenda camera apostolica, 1838). In July 1840 Poletti read a second instalment, published only in 1864: Luigi Poletti, Delle genti e delle arti primitive d’Italia: Dissertazione II, letta alla pontificia Accademia romana di archeologia. Il di 8 luglio 1840 (Rome: Nella stamperia della reverenda camera apostolica, 1864). 35 See for instance: Roberto Regoli, “I papi nel Risorgimento,” Archivio della Società romana di storia patria, vol. 136 (2013), 139-65. See also Christopher Korten’s forthcoming study of Gregory XVI’s life and papacy.

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36 Diario di Roma 60 (27 July 1841): 1; Gaspare Servi, ‘Architettura: Osservazioni intorno alla tombe etrusche di cene del Prof. Luigi Poletti … ’, Il Tiberino 4:52 (28 September 1838): 206–8; ‘Frammento di lettera intorno una dissertazione del ch. prof. Luigi Poletti, sulle genti e sulle arti primitive d’Italia, inserita negli atti dell’Accademia archeologica – Roma nella stamperia camerale, 1838’, La Pallade: giornale di belle arti I:6 (23 March 1839): 47–8. 37 Professor James Harrell via email (28 June 2015); M.K. Akaad and M.H. Naggar, ‘Geology of the Wadi Sannur Alabaster and the General Geological History of the Egyptian Alabaster Deposits’, Bulletin de l’Institut du Desert d’Égypte du Caire 13:2 (1965): 35–63. 38 Gaetano Moroni, ‘Egitto’, in Dizionario di erudizione storico-ecclesiastica, vol. 21 (Venice: Tipografia Emiliana, 1843), 108. 39 [Luigi Moreschi], ‘Roma, 28 Luglio’, Diario di Roma 60 supplement (28 July 1838): 1–2. 40 Erik Iversen, The Myth of Egypt and Its Hieroglyphs in European Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Brian A. Curran, The Egyptian Renaissance: The Afterlife of Ancient Egypt in Early Modern Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 41 Dan Edelstein, ‘The Egyptian French Revolution: Antiquarianism, Freemasonry and the Mythology of Nature’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century: The Super-Enlightenment: Daring to Know too Much, 2010:1 (2010): 227–39. 42 Joseph N. Hajjar, L’Europe et les destineés du Proche-Orient (1815–1848) (Paris: Bloud & Gay, 1970), 232–5. 43 Springer, The Marble Wilderness, 58. 44 Jean-Francois Champollion, Lettres de Champollion le jeune; tome premier: Lettres écrites d’Italie, vol. 30, ed. G. Maspero, Bibliothèque Égyptologique (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1909), 226–7. 45 Ippolito Rosellini, I monumenti dell’Egitto e della Nubia: disegnati dalla spedizione scientificoletteraria toscana in Egitto, 9 vols. (Pisa: Nicolo Capurro, 1832–44). 46 Paolo Liverani, ‘Il museo Gregoriano Egizio’, Aegyptus 79:1/2 (1999): 45–64; Renato Lefevre, ‘La fondazione del Museo Gregoriano Egizio al Vaticano’, in Gregorio XVI: Miscellanea Commemorativa, ed. Alfonso Bartoli, Pio Ciprotti and Giuseppe Bozzetti (Rome: Camaldolesi di S. Gregorio al Celio, 1948), 228. 47 Lionel Gossman, ‘History as Decipherment: Romantic Historiography and the Discovery of the Other’, New Literary History 18:1 (1986): 33. 48 Alberto Mei Del Testa, Michelangelo Lanci e l’interpretazione dei geroglifici (Fano: Biblioteca Federiciana, 2002); Camillo Marcolini, Su la vita e le opere di Michelangelo Lanci (Fano: Tip. Lit. Lana, 1874); Gaetano De Minicis, Biografia del Cavaliere D. Michelangelo Lanci (Macerata: Tipi di Luigi Viarchi, 1840). 49 Champollion, Lettres de Champollion le jeune; tome premier, 227. Champollion was referring to Lanci’s Osservazioni sul bassorilievo fenico-egizio che si conserva in Carpentrasso (Rome: Francesco Bourlie, 1825). 50 Rosellini to Gregory XVI, 8 November 1833; republished in Angelo Mercati, ‘Ippolito Rosellini e Gregorio XVI’, in Gregorio XVI, ed. Bartoli, Ciprotti and Bozzetti, 293–4. 51 Lefevre, ‘La fondazione del Museo Gregoriano Egizio al Vaticano’, 238; Francesca Longo, ‘Gregorio XVI e l’Egittologia: la spedizione romana in Egitto (1840–1841)’, in Gregorio XVI promotore delle arti e della cultura, ed. Francesca Longo, Claudia Zaccagnini and Fabrizio Fabbrini (Ospedaletto: Pacini, 2008), 137, n. 9. 52 Lefevre, ‘La fondazione del Museo Gregoriano Egizio al Vaticano’, 248–9. 53 Edouard Driault, L’Egypte et l’Europe, la crise de 1839–1841: correspondance des consuls de France et instructions du gouvernement, 5 vols. (Cairo: Société royale de géographie d’Égypte, 1830–33), vol. 1, 346.

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54 Mehmed Ali almost certainly had geopolitical motives for the gift as well, which it would take us too far afield to evoke here. 55 An overview may be found in Moroni, ‘Egitto’, 108–14; see also Longo, ‘Gregorio XVI e l’Egittologia’. I am currently at work on a separate study of the Expedition. 56 Augusto Verzaglia, Il museo Gregoriano Lateranense, esercizio accademico di belle lettere tenuto dai signori convittori del collegio Nazareno (Rome: Tipografia delle belle arti, 1845). 57 Moroni, ‘Musei di Roma’, in Dizionario di erudizione storico-ecclesiastica, vol. 47 (Venice: Tipografia Emiliana, 1847), 126–8. Moroni gives the date as 1845. Cherici (‘“Mirari Vos”’, 54) also stresses the importance of the quote. 58 This unsourced quote is attributed to Gregory by Georg Daltrop, The Vatican Collections: The Papacy and Art (New York: Harry Abrams, 1982), 202 (cited in Springer, The Marble Wilderness, 57). 59 Michelangelo Lanci, La sacra scrittura illustrata con monumenti fenico-assirij ed egiziani (Rome: Soc. Tipogr., 1827), 1 and ‘Ai leggitori’ (s.n.). The book concludes with a declaration of belief in the totality of Catholic dogma. 60 Lanci, La sacra scrittura illustrata con monumenti fenico-assirij ed egiziani, 1. 61 Moroni, ‘Egitto’, 126; Diario di Roma 18 (3 March 1838): 1. 62 Giuseppe Ungarelli, ‘Nuovo Museo Gregoriano-Egizio nel Vaticano’, L’Album 5:50 (16 February 1839): 394; also in Ungarelli, Descrizione dei nuovi Musei Gregoriani, etrusco ed egizio aggiunti al Vaticano, 22. 63 Robert Aubert, Johannes Beckmann, Partick H. Corish, and Rudolf Lill, The Church between Revolution and Restoration, trans. Peter Becker, ed. Hubert Jedin and John Dolan, vol. VII of The History of the Church (New York: Crossroad, 1981), 161; Aubert et al., The Church between Revolution and Restoration, 162; Jacques Gadille and Jean-Marie Mayeur, Histoire du christianisme. Tome XI. Libéralisme, industrialisation, expansion européenne des origines à nos jours 1830–1914 (Paris: Desclée, 1995), 140. 64 Aubert et al., The Church between Revolution and Restoration, 161; Moroni, ‘Egitto’, 136–9; Ersilio Michel, Esuli italiani in Egitto, 1815–1861 (Pisa: n.p., 1958), 1–21. 65 Moroni, ‘Egitto’, 136 (‘Missioni attuali nell’Egitto’). 66 Luigi Moreschi, Relazione sul monumento sepolcrale eretto alla santa memoria di Gregorio XVI sommo pontefice nella Basilica vaticana (Rome: Tipografia di Filippo Cairo, 1857). 67 ‘Intelligence’, Bengal Catholic Expositor 5:2 (11 July 1840): 27. 68 Jean-Felix-Onesime Luquet, Souvenirs de l’expédition française a Rome, 2 vols. (Rome: Paterno, 1849), vol. 2, 211. 69 Camillo Ravioli, Viaggio della spedizione romana in Egitto fatto nel 1840 e 1841 (Rome: Tipografia delle Belle Arti, 1870), 217. The course charted by the Expedition especially recalled Paul’s fourth voyage, landing at Crete, Malta and Sicily. 70 ‘Intelligence’, Bengal Catholic Expositor (Calcutta) III, no. II (11 July 1840): 27; ‘English Intelligence’, The Courier (Hobart, Tasmania) (20 April 1841), 3. 71 Ravioli’s travelogue appears, under slightly varying titles, in: L’Album 8, no. 2 (13 March 1841): 9–12; L’Album 8, no. 18 (3 July 1841): 137–44; L’Album 8, no. 25 (21 August 1841): 193–9; L’Album 9, no. 2 (12 March 1842): 9–16; and L’Album 9, no. 3 (19 March 1842): 22–3. 72 Ravioli, Viaggio della spedizione romana in Egitto fatto nel 1840 e 1841. 73 Ravioli, Viaggio della spedizione romana in Egitto fatto nel 1840 e 1841, 141, 151, 156. The trip to the Holy Land had to be abandoned because the Expedition arrived in the region just as a war was erupting between Mehmed Ali, the Ottoman Empire and an alliance of European powers.

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74 Ravioli, Viaggio della spedizione romana in Egitto fatto nel 1840 e 1841, 135–7, 141. 75 Ravioli, Viaggio della spedizione romana in Egitto fatto nel 1840 e 1841, 160–1. 76 Camillo Ravioli, L’Italia e i suoi primi abitatori (Roma: tipogr. delle Belle Arti, 1865). On this, see De Francesco, The Antiquity of the Italian Nation, 47–8. 77 On L’Album see: Majolo Molinari, La stampa periodica romana dell’Ottocento, vol. 1, 8–9; Gaetano Moroni, ‘Diario di Roma’, in Dizionario di erudizione storico-ecclesiastica, vol. 20 (Venice: Tipografia Emiliana, 1843), 31; Giovanni Luseroni, ‘La stampa periodica ed il pontificato di Gregorio XVI: prime ricerche’, in Gregorio XVI tra oscurantismo e innovazione: stato degli studi e percorsi di ricerca, ed. Romano Ugolini (Pisa: F. Serra, 2012), 398; Carmela De Falco, L’Album: giornale letterario e di belle arti (1835-1862) (Rome: Edilazio, 2001). 78 Gerald A. McCool, Catholic Theology in the Nineteenth Century: The Quest for a Unitary Method (New York: Seabury Press, 1977), 21–36. 79 John F. Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy: Financing the Vatican, 1850–1950 (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 22–8. 80 Barbara Corrado Pope, ‘Immaculate and Powerful: The Marian Revival in the Nineteenth Century’, in Immaculate & Powerful: The Female in Sacred Image and Social Reality, ed. Clarissa W. Atkinson, Constance H. Buchanan and Margaret Ruth Miles (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), 173–200. 81 Springer, The Marble Wilderness, 57; Federico Torre, ‘Nuovo Museo Gregoriano Lateranese’, L’Album 11:30 (21 September 1844): 233–6; 11, no. 35 (26 October 1844): 279–80; and 11:42 (14 December 1844): 333–5. Enrico Josi, ‘Il Museo Gregoriano Lateranense’, in Gregorio XVI, ed. Bartoli, Ciprotti and Bozzetti, vol. 1, 201–21. 82 Torre, ‘Nuovo Museo Gregoriano Lateranese’ (26 October 1844), 279–80. 83 Torre, ‘Nuovo Museo Gregoriano Lateranese’ (14 December 1844), 333–5. 84 Gioberti, Del primato morale e civile degli italiani; Cesare Balbo, Delle speranze d’Italia (Paris: Tip. Elvetica, 1844); Massimo D’Azeglio, Degli ultimi casi di Romagna (Lugano: Tip. Della Svizzera italiana, 1846). 85 Pietro Desiderio Pasolini, Giuseppe Pasolini. 1815–1876: Memorie raccolte da suo figlio, 3rd ed. (Turin: Fratelli Bocca, 1887), 61 (cited in Berkeley, Italy in the Making, 267). 86 Diario di Roma 37 (22 April 1837): 1; Moroni, ‘Musei di Roma’, 113. 87 Peter Raedts presents a related and complementary argument in his very suggestive essay, ‘The Church as Nation State: A New Look at Ultramontaine Catholicism (1850–1900)’, Nederlands archief voor kerkgeschiedenis / Dutch Review of Church History 84 (2004): 476–96. 88 Sonia Martone, ‘1797–1814. L’alternanza dei Governi francese e pontificio a Roma. Note sui criteri adottati per la conservazione dell’architettura ecclesiastica’, in Restauro architettonico a Roma nell’Ottocento, ed. Maria Piera Sette (Roma: Bonsignori, 2007), 87–106.

X-Screens: Röntgen Architecture Beatriz Colomina

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hen Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen first published his very recent discovery of the X-ray in December of 1895 in an article entitled ‘On a New Kind of Rays, a Preliminary Communication’, he wrote about a new form of transparency in which ‘bodies behave to the X-rays as turbid media to light’.1 The invisible rays are described as a ‘medium’ that penetrates objects and is revealed on screens. A floating technical surface acts as the most intimate witness of the otherwise hidden interior. An architecture is established that inverts the classical relationship between inside and outside, an architecture we still live in with our countless screens monitoring endless invisible flows. Architects, historians and theorists quickly absorbed the new paradigm – developing an entire logic of the invisible in the early decades of the twentieth century that remains largely in place. New medical screens are today creating new forms of architecture. The relationship between inside and outside is going through another twist. New forms of intimacy are emerging. Even before he mentions the ‘X-rays’, Röntgen describes already in the second paragraph of his paper a new concept of transparency intimately linked to the idea of a ‘screen’. The screen is actually made of a piece of paper coated with a thin layer of ‘barium platinum cyanide’ that glows fluorescent when exposed to the rays. He marvels at the fact that paper itself is very transparent when seen through such a ‘fluorescent screen’, so the screen is really just the thin layer of barium platinum cyanide. But it is not just a sheet of paper that is transparent. Even a 1,000-page book placed behind the screen becomes transparent. ‘Thick blocks of wood are still transparent’. Tinfoil needs many layers to hardly cast a ‘shadow’ on the screen and it takes a very thick sheet of aluminium to reduce the fluorescence. Röntgen’s screen showed, in the words of his first report, that ‘all bodies possess this same transparency, but in very varying degrees’.2 Transparency, therefore, is a property of seemingly

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Hand mit Ringen (Hand with Rings), 22 December 1895. A print of one of the first X-rays by Wilhelm Röntgen of the left hand of his wife Anna Bertha Ludwig. Wellcome Library, London, CC BY 4.0.

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opaque bodies, including the human body. In other words, it is not an effect. The X-ray is not something done to an object. The object is already transparent and the X-rays allow us to see it. The whole world is now understood to be transparent. Having studied the transparency of many materials, including glass itself, which paradoxically is more opaque (because it contains lead), Röntgen looks through the human body: ‘If the hand be held before the fluorescent screen’ – he writes – ‘the shadow shows the bones darkly, with only faint outlines of the surrounding tissues’.3 The famous X-ray image of the hand of his wife, Bertha Röntgen, with her wedding ring on the third finger, taken only five days before he submits the article for publication, is used as illustration, even as the proof of the astonishing revelation.4 The story of this image, which was crucial to the popular success of the invention, is that Röntgen, afraid of revealing his stunning discovery to his colleagues, brought his wife to the laboratory the evening of 22 December 1895, after months of experimentation with inanimate objects, and exposed her hand to the X-rays for 15 minutes, producing the first X-ray image of a human body. Upon seeing the image of her hand, Bertha Röntgen famously said, ‘I have seen my death’, anticipating a common popular reaction to such images.5 Röntgen’s article stimulated an enormous double reaction. Scientists all around the world seized on the idea and tried to replicate the experiment. The popular press ignited a huge speculation about the possible uses and meaning of these images. Newspapers were galvanized by the idea of an invisible world. The image of Bertha’s hand gave way to a whole genre of such images in both scientific and popular publication. Countless X-ray images of hands were made by Röntgen himself and others soon after the article was published. Röntgen photographed the hand of Professor Albert von Kolliker, famous anatomist at the university and president of the Würzburg Physical and Medical Society, during Röntgen’s first public lecture on the discovery the 13 January 1896. Summoned to Berlin by the Emperor to report on the discovery, he photographed the hands of the Emperor Wilhelm II and the Empress Augusta Victoria. Later he also did the hands of the Duke and Duchess of York and the Emperor and Empress of Russia, among many other notables. The X-ray of the hand had become a new kind of intimate portrait, and the icon of a new world view, a world view in which everything, no matter how seemingly impervious, becomes intimate. Röntgen had named the mysterious phenomenon ‘X-rays’ because he didn’t know what they were. Kolliker had proposed, after Röntgen’s Würzburg lecture, that the new rays be called ‘Röntgen rays’ but the self-effacing Röntgen preferred to continue to call them X-rays. The justification of the term ‘rays’, he claims in that first article, lies in the ‘shadow pictures’ produced by interposing a body between the source of the X-rays and a photographic plate or a screen. Röntgen wrote that he has ‘observed and photographed many such shadow pictures’, including a set of weights inside a wooden box and compass card and needle completely enclosed in a metal case, etc. in the two months before he photographed his wife’s hand.6 Röntgen considered this ability to make photographs of the ‘shadow pictures’ on the screen of ‘special interest’, because it makes possible to ‘exhibit the phenomena so as to exclude the danger of error’.7 The main advantage for him, therefore, is to provide proof, to confirm the observations already made multiple times with the fluorescent screen. Soon after the publication, he sent reprints of the article together with prints of the X-ray images he had taken to many scientists, including Emil Warburg in Berlin and Henri Poincare in Paris.8 Warburg immediately added the X-ray images to an exhibition that was already mounted on the occasion of the anniversary of the Berlin Physical Society at Berlin University. This was the first public exhibition of X-ray images.

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X-ray of the Hand and Wrist of Alexandra, Empress of Russia. Photographic X-Ray print, probably made by Dr. H.H. Horne, who brought his X-ray apparatus to the palace at St. Petersburg in the winter of 1898 at the Czar's request. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:X-ray_of_the_Hand_and_Wrist_of _Alexandra,_Empress_of_Russia.jpg

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Without these images the discovery of the X-rays would have been of less interest in both scientific and layman circles. It was front-page news in many newspapers worldwide. Die Presse of Vienna was the first to report on the discovery with an article entitled ‘Eine Sensationelle Entdeckung’ (A Sensational Discovery) 5 January 1886.9 In their haste they misspelled Röntgen’s name as Routgen. The following day the London Standard cabled the following news release to the world, repeating the misspelled name and misidentifying Bertha’s hand as a ‘man’s hand’: The noise of war’s alarm should not distract attention from the marvellous triumph of Science which is reported from Vienna. It is announced that Professor Routgen of Würzburg has discovered a light which, for the purpose of photography, will penetrate wood, flesh and most other organic substances. The Professor has succeeded in photographing metal weights which were in a closed wooden case, also a man’s hand, which shows only the bones, the flesh being invisible. When the London Standard reported on the story in the paper on 7 January 1896, they felt obliged to add: ‘The Presse assures its readers that there is no joke or humbug in the matter. It is a serious discovery by a serious German Professor’. The Frankfurter Zeitung published the news, also on 7 January, and was the first newspaper to print the images. Newspapers around the world, from Paris Matin, to the Cracow-based Czas, to The New York Times, St. Louis Dispatch and Sydney Telegraph, among many others, continued to sensationalize the discovery anticipating its medical uses, something that Röntgen was sceptical about. Since only text could be sent by cable telegraphy most of these early reports overseas were not illustrated – prompting scepticism among readers and even journalists. Czas, for example, wrote: ‘The problem, although it seems an All Fools’ Day joke, is seriously considered in serious circles’.10 Many people followed on Röntgen’s invention, developing techniques for photographing the X-ray effect. Röntgen had refused several offers to patent his discovery, declaring that it belonged to humanity. He died in near-poverty. From the beginning, he provided detailed accounts of his method allowing others to experiment. Within a month of Röntgen’s publication, Josef Maria Eder (director of an Austrian institute for graphic processes and author of an early history of photography11) and the photo chemist Eduard Valenta published Versuche über Photographie mittelst der Röntgen’schen Strahlen12 (Research on Photography with Röntgen rays), an album of fifteen photogravures made from X-rays, where they describe in great detail the procedure used and the improvements they had made to Röntgen’s apparatus. Human hands and feet, fish, frogs, a snake, a chameleon, a lizard, a rat and a newborn rabbit are among the images in the album, a kind of zoo, echoing the nineteenth-century naturalist albums of animals, insects and plants, but also anticipating the new vision photography of the 1920s by Moholy Nagy and others, which will also become encyclopaedic, as if the whole world had to be seen again, or more precisely as if it was a whole new world. Moholy Nagy will later write: The passion for transparencies is one of the most spectacular features of our time. In x-ray photos, structure becomes transparency and transparency manifests structure. The x-ray pictures, to which the futurist has consistently referred, are among the outstanding space-time renderings on the static plane. They give simultaneously the inside and outside, the view of an opaque solid, its outline, but also its inner structure.13

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Chamäleon cristatus. From Josef Maria Eder and Eduard Valenta, Photographie mittelst der Röntgenschen Strahlen (1896). Purchase, Alfred Stieglitz Society Gifts, Joyce F. Menschel Photography Library Fund, and Maureen and Noel Testa Gift, 2011. The Metropolitan Museum, 2011.66.1–.15. http://www.metmuseum .org/art/collection/search/296322.

In fact what interests me here is precisely how X-rays images transformed the visual field long before the so-called avant-garde. The X-ray was a new kind of realism, which was in no way in opposition to a new kind of mysticism or spiritualism. William Crookes, the scientist who developed the cathode tube used by Röntgen, was the president for the society of Psychical Research and within a year of the discovery of X-rays announced that the X-rays produce a new sense of reality based not on outer surfaces but inner vibrations, closer to consciousness itself, as Linda Henderson has pointed out.14 The X-ray was an optical and philosophical revolution that swept the world at an astonishing speed. The first surgery with X-rays was carried out in the USA within two months of the discovery, and the first fully fledged department of radiology was established at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary within a year. It is important to note that the albums of X-rays that proliferated everywhere were still presented as images on screens. Even books aimed to popularize science, such as the 1898 French book La Photographie de l’Invisible,15 carefully note below each image that it is a ‘shadow on a screen’. For example, under the X-ray of a frog we read: ‘ombre sur l’écran fluorescent d’une grenouille fixée par des épingles sur une plaque de liège’ or ‘ombre d’une main sur un écran au platinocyanure de barium’. The caption is needed because the screen

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Shadow on a fluorescent screen of a frog. Frontispiece of L. Aubert, La Photographie de l’Invisible: Les rayons X suivi d’un glossaire, les livres d'or de la science (Paris: Librairie C. Reinwald, Schleicher Frères, Éditeurs, 1898). https://archive.org/details/laphotographiede00aube.

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itself disappears. It has the same colour of the page in the publication. The caption reminds the reader that there is a screen there, a screen that was originally paper. The ‘shadow image’ takes the place and the modality of a drawing, a ghostly trace hanging before the viewer and offering a deep gaze into the secrets of a body or even of the cosmos itself. The floating, disappearing screen becomes the most powerful of instruments. Röntgen was fascinated that he could also produce the effect directly on a photographic plate. Within a year of the discovery of X-rays, Eastman developed a special plate for X-rays and a thin transparent surface will eventually take over the responsibility of the screen when Eastman introduced film, replacing the glass photographic plate. But the doubling, the eerie status of the shadow image, remained. The photograph of Bertha’s hand was the image of an image: the proof of what Röntgen had seen countless times on the screen. It is still the image of the screen. This magical and threatening screen effect rippled through society, becoming a new form of spectacle. It is as if nothing could be seen the same way. Everything needed to be rethought. Every field seemed to be affected by the magic screen. Science and medicine, of course, but also policing and entertainment, religion and spiritualism (where many seized upon the X-ray as proof of what they believed all along). The screen was a site of intense speculation. From the very beginning, this visual revolution was understood as an assault on privacy and even a form of indecency. The London newspaper Pall Mall Gazette wrote in 1896: ‘We are sick of the Röntgen rays … It is now said that you can see other people’s bones with the naked eye … On the revolting indecency of this there is no need to dwell’.16 Cartoons and comical poems explored the new space of exposure. The fear that X-rays will allow to see through clothing was there from the beginning. A poem in Electrical Review in 1896, for example, goes: The Roentgen Rays, the Roentgen Rays, What is this craze? The town’s ablaze With the new phase Of X-ray’s ways. I’m full of daze, Shock and amaze; For nowadays I hear they’ll gaze Thro’ cloak and gown – and even stays, These naughty, naughty Roentgen Rays.17 Shortly after the invention, merchants offered X-ray-proofed underwear (as happened again in more recent years when customs and security introduced full body scanners in airports in 2007). And a New Jersey assemblyman is supposed to have introduced a bill to ban X-ray opera glasses, should they ever be invented. Thomas Edison, who exhibited X-rays to the public in the New York Electrical exhibition of 1896, even imagined that the X-ray could eventually read people’s thoughts. The X-ray was an immense form of entertainment. There were X-ray machines in every fair, scientific or popular. A leaflet distributed at an 1896 exhibition at the Crystal Palace, London, for example, reads: ‘Before Leaving the Exhibition, “SEE”, the Wondrous X-rays, the greatest scientific Discovery of the Age … X-ray Photographs Taken’. In Paris, the Grands Magazines Dufayel alternated demonstrations of an X-ray machine with demonstrations of the Lumiere brothers’

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Left:  Leaflet distributed at a 1896 exhibition at the Crystal Palace, London. Right:  Advertisement of the Grands Magasins Dufayel, c. 1880. Courtesy of Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris, Éphémères, Commerces/Grands Magasins.

moving pictures. Customers could have an X-ray taken of their hand or their feet as a souvenir. In fact, cinematography and the X-rays were discovered within a few months of each other, in late 1895. X-ray equipment was bought not just by scientist but by entrepreneurs, some of whom believed that X-ray will offer more entertainment value than cinema. Business trade journals carried ads from impresarios trying to exchange their movie projectors for X-ray equipment.18 In 1896, Bloomingdales hired Columbia University physics senior Herbert Hawks to conduct public demonstrations of the X-rays. There were X-ray studios in all major cities. X-rays slot machines were installed in Chicago. You could have an X-ray for $1. X-rays were almost immediately used for policing in customs check points, where suitcases and people were subjected to exposure. In Paris railways stations, the police subjected passengers and their luggage to X-ray as early as 1898. An illustration in a Parisian newspaper shows how a woman hiding a bottle of liquor under her dress is exposed by the machine as the glass, with lead, becomes visible next to her femur in the X-ray.19 What is crucial here is the architecture of the scene. She is suspended behind a floating screen, held in place by the assistant. She is occupying a new space of radical exposure. The X-ray was architectural from the beginning and remains so,

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as can be seen in image after image, like the photograph of an attractive blond woman behind a screen made in 1940 as a publicity image to reassure the public that radiation from X-rays was negligible. She is occupying a new technological space defined by a screen rather than walls, a glowing screen with its shadow image. We are still in the territory of Bertha Röntgen and the urimage of her hand. The mysteries of the interior are brought to the surface by a screen and the flesh becomes just a faint outline. The body is literally turned inside out. Western Architecture, at least since the Italian Renaissance, has modelled itself on the human body. With the arrival of X-rays, the body is inverted, with the inside becoming the outside. Modern architecture absorbed the logic of the screen and even of the shadow image. In glass architecture the logic of the X-ray applies. There is an outer screen that disappears in order to register a ghostly image of the inside. It is X-ray architecture. As with Röntgen’s transformative images, X-ray architecture too becomes an image of an image – the effect of an X-ray, rather than an actual X-ray. It is not so much that the inside of the building is exposed but that the building represents exposure and this exposure occurs on a screen. Glass is called on to simulate transparency.

X-ray is used to expose a woman hiding a bottle of liquor under her dress. L'Illustration, 3 July 1897. Private collection.

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This X-ray effect was integral to a new discourse about transparency. Arthur Korn’s remarkable 1929 book Glas im Bau und als Gebrauchsgegenstand (Glass in construction and as a commodity), for example, catalogues the new use of glass in architecture and remarks, as if surprised, that ‘the outside wall is no longer the first impression one gets of a building. It is the interior, the spaces in depth and the structural frame, which delineates them that one begins to notice through the glass wall … Glass is noticeable yet not quite visible. It is the great membrane, full of mystery, delicate yet though’.20 This sense of mystery, which X-rays share, infuses Korn’s book, as in photographs of the Bauhaus building in Dessau where the glass wall is a kind of ripple – the volume of the building within looms without definition. Korn’s discussion of transparency is an uncanny echo of Wilhelm Röntgen’s discussion of new forms of ‘transparency’ in the very first publication of his discovery of the X-ray. Just as the body of the Bauhaus building appears strangely blurry through the not quite visible glass, Röntgen writes about the flesh becoming a kind of mysterious shadow while the bones are perfectly visible.21 Modern buildings even started to look like medical images. The impact of the technology of the X-ray, the dominant diagnostic tool for lung tuberculosis, is evident in the work of many avantgarde architects of the early decades of the twentieth century. Mies wrote about his work as ‘skin and bones’ architecture, and rendered his projects of the Friedrichstrasse Skyscraper of 1919 and

A technician takes an X-ray of a patient in 1940. This image was used to argue that radiation exposure during X-raying was negligible. Unknown photographer. National Cancer Institute AV-4000-3979.

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Walter Gropius, Bauhaus Dessau. Photo: Lucia Moholy. Later printed in Arthur Korn’s Glas im Bau und als Gebrauchsgegenstand (1929). Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin/©Lucia Moholy/BONO, Oslo 2017.

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Photo montage of glass skyscraper next to image of a silhouette and an X-ray of a head. Mies van der Rohe. Berlin, Germany (1922). In G: Zeitschrift für elementare Gestaltung, no. 5–6, April 1926. © Mies van der Rohe/BONO, Oslo 2017.

his Glass Skyscraper of 1922 as if seen through an X-ray machine. Mies was deeply interested in X-ray images and used them as illustrations in his articles, as in the April 1926 issue of G. He even puts an image of a bone alongside his glass skyscraper in Merz to drive the point home. Mies was not alone. Books on modern architecture are filled with images of glowing glass skins, revealing inner bones and organs; they look like albums of X-rays, reminiscent of the X-ray atlases that proliferated in the early decades of the twentieth century.22 Think, for example, about Le Corbusier’s project for the Glass Skyscraper (1925), Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus (1925–26), Brinkman & Van der Vlugt’s Van Nelle Factory (1925–27) in Rotterdam, Mendelsohn’s Schocken Department Store (1926–28) in Stuttgart, George Keck’s Crystal House (1933–34) at the World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, Paul Nelson’s Suspended House (1935), Frits Peutz’s Schunck Glass Palace in Heerlen (1935) and countless other examples. This is more than a dominant aesthetic. It is a symptom of a deep-seated philosophy of design deriving from medical discourse. The development of the X-ray and that of modern architecture coincide; they evolve in parallel. If experiments with glass were numerous in the early years of the twentieth century, they still tended to be isolated esoteric projects by avant-garde architects – many developed as temporary buildings for fairs. Only by the mid-century does the see-through house become realized in Mies’s Farnsworth House (1945–51) in Plano, Illinois, and Philip Johnson’s Glass House (1949) in New Canaan, Connecticut. Just as the X-ray exposes the inside of the body to the public eye, modern architecture exposes its interior. This exposure becomes a mass phenomenon with the picture window at midcentury at exactly the same time that the X-ray itself was becoming a mass phenomenon. And it was not just the house that had to be see-through. Everything from Pyrex cookware, to Saran Wrap, to windows in ovens and washing machines, exposed their contents. Likewise, everything was subject to X-rays – even cars, as in a 1946 image of a Jeep featured in Life (‘World’s Biggest X-Ray’) and used in the exhibition ‘Parallel of Life and Art’ at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1953. The front cover of the catalogue has a 1941 X-ray image of a man using an electric shaver, taken from László Moholy-Nagy’s 1947 book Vision in Motion,

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where it is described as the work of two doctors in a New Jersey laboratory. The image had been published in Mechanix Illustrated, which is probably where Moholy got it from. But Moholy also picked up images of X-rays from a 1923 issue of Wendingen magazine – which goes to show that architectural magazines were publishing X-ray images from early on. But by the time of Moholy-Nagy’s book, X-rays had evolved from being radical images representing the hidden truth of things to becoming almost routine elements of everyday life. Starting in the 1930s, shoe stores used X-ray machines for shoe fittings without any kind of protection from radioactivity, which wasn’t banned until the 1970s. Also in the 1930s the mass X-raying of citizens on a regular basis started. With this development, the now-visible interior of the body became not just a tool for diagnosis but also the site of a new form of public surveillance. The post-war mobilization against TB included programs for the mass X-ray surveying of the entire population using mobile X-ray machines in places such as department stores, industries, schools, suburban streets and public markets. Over a period of a half-century, an experimental medical tool had been transformed into a mechanism of surveillance for the whole population.

Frits Peutz, Schunck Glass Palace, Heerlen, The Netherlands (1935). Photo: J. Cohnen. Collection Rijckheyt.

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Philip Johnson (1906–2005), Glass House (Philip Johnson House), New Canaan, CT, 1949. Gelatin silver print, 7 1/2 × 9 3/4" (19.1 × 24.8 cm). ©Photo: SCALA Florence / The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. Architecture & Design Study Center. Inv. no.: AD1375.© 2017. Digital image: The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence.

The association between X-rays and glass houses became a common place in mid-century popular culture. For example, in Highlights and Shadows, a 1937 Kodak Research Laboratories film on the virtues of X-rays in disease prevention by the filmmaker-radiographer James Sibley Watson Jr., a woman wearing a swimming suit is shown strapped to a laboratory table while her body is subjected to X-rays. As her photographic image gives way to the image of her X-rayed body, the narrator declares: ‘This young lady, to whom henceforth a glass house should hold no terrors, will after an examination of her radiographs, be reassured that she is indeed physically fit’.23 The glass house acted as a symbol of both the new form of surveillance and health. A similar set of associations can be found in the discourse surrounding canonic works of modern architecture. In an interview in House Beautiful, Edith Farnsworth, a successful doctor in Chicago, compared her famous weekend house, designed by Mies in 1949, to an X-ray: I don’t keep a garbage can under my sink. Do you know why? Because you can see the whole ‘kitchen’ from the road on the way in here and the can would spoil the appearance of the whole

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Advertisement for Twindow (Pittsburgh Plate Glass Co.). Published in The Saturday Evening Post, 26 April 1958.

house. So I hide it in the closet further down from the sink. Mies talks about ‘free space’: but his space is very fixed. I can’t even put a clothes hanger in my house without considering how it affects everything from the outside. Any arrangement of furniture becomes a major problem, because the house is transparent, like an X-ray.24 The use of the metaphor of the X-ray was not accidental. It is not by chance that Farnsworth goes on to say of her house: ‘There is already the local rumor that it’s a tuberculosis sanatorium’.25 Modern architecture was literally presented and understood as a piece of medical equipment. Modern architecture cannot be understood outside TB and its dominant diagnostic tool, the X-ray. Indeed, the principles of modern architecture seem to have been taken straight out of a medical text on the disease. A year before the German microbiologist Robert Koch discovered the tubercle bacillus in 1882, a standard medical book gave as the causes of the disease: ‘unfavorable climate, sedentary indoor life, defective ventilation and deficiency of light’.26 It took a long time

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‘Cooking Taught with Loving Care’, advertisement for Pyrex (1940). Reproduced with kind permission from the Corning Museum of Glass/Rakow Research Library.

for these notions to lose credibility, as Susan Sontag writes: ‘The TB patient was thought to be helped, even cured, by a change in environment. There was a notion that TB was a wet disease, a disease of humid and dank cities. The inside of the body became damp (“moisture in the lungs” was a favored locution) and had to be dried out’.27 Modern architects offered health by providing exactly such a change of environment. Nineteenth-century architecture was demonized as unhealthy, and sun, light, ventilation, exercise, roof terraces, hygiene and whiteness were offered as means to prevent, if not cure, tuberculosis. The publicity campaign of modern architecture was organized around contemporary beliefs about

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Title page of the catalogue brochure ‘Parallel of Life and Art’ held in the Institute of Contemporary Arts, 11 September to 18 October 1953. © Tate, London 2017, and Bettmann/Getty Images.

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tuberculosis and fears of the disease. Modern architecture not only thinks of itself as providing sanatorium conditions for everyday life but even thinks of buildings as diagnostic instruments with the power of an X-ray. As Le Corbusier put it in L’art decoratif d’aujourd’hui in 1925: If the house is all white … everything stands out from it and is recorded absolutely, black on white; it is honest and dependable … It is rather like an X-ray of beauty.28 Le Corbusier’s metaphor was no accident. Diagnosis of tuberculosis continued to be difficult; physicians often confused it with other illnesses, including bronchitis, chronic indigestion, malaria, neurasthenia and typhoid fever. To evaluate the condition, they needed to see inside the body. X-ray technology had been available in sanatoriums since the beginning of the century, and by the 1920s, the X-ray was a routine part of the examination of those with visible symptoms. Screening the body for tuberculosis meant optically penetrating areas of the body previously invisible. X-rays created a new kind of vision, a new paradigm of truth that architects could not resist. Nothing could have been more modern. ‘The TB sufferer is a wanderer’, Susan Sontag wrote in one of her notebooks in her archives in UCLA. The patient travels to find a cure. ‘There is a geography of health’.29 This nomadic figure is also the paradigmatic client of modern architecture that enters modern buildings like entering any other medical apparatus. Architecture here is less about shelter and more about a kind of exposure – X-ray exposure. There is whole architecture of health organized around a new kind of image. The discourse about transparency in modern architecture is but an echo of the discourse about transparency that was already part of Röntgen’s first scientific paper announcing the discovery of X-rays in 1895 and immediately captivating the popular imagination: The idea that one could see through buildings and clothing challenged all assumptions and social protocols about privacy and psychological well-being. As X-rays became indelibly associated with tuberculosis, the tuberculosis patient became the paradigm of this new way to think about bodies, objects and psychologies. ‘TB Makes the body transparent’ writes Sontag in another note in her archives, ‘while to have cancer is to become more than normally opaque’,30 perhaps because cancer turns the very structure of the body into a blur. ‘The X-Ray permits one, often for the first time, to see one’s inside, to become transparent to oneself’, she writes. Indeed, the tuberculosis patients in the sanatorium of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain carry their X-rays, or those of their loved ones, in their breast pockets. When Clavdja Chauchat, Hans Castor’s love object, leaves the sanatorium she gives him her X-ray as a memento: Then he flung himself into his chair, and drew out his keepsake, his treasure, that consisted, this time, not of a few reddish-brown shavings, but a thin glass plate, which must be held toward the light to see anything on it. It was Clavdia’s x-ray portrait, showing not her face, but the delicate bony structure of the upper half of her body, and the organs of the thoracic cavity, surrounded by the pale, ghostlike envelope of flesh. How often had he looked at it, how often pressed it to his lips in the time which since then had passed and brought its changes with it – such changes as, for instance, getting used to life up here without Clavdia Chauchat, getting used, that is, to her remoteness in space!31

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The X-ray is a kind of self-exposure, a new, more intimate, kind of portrait. The intrusive logic of medical and police surveillance, with the body unable to resist a newly penetrating gaze, gives way to a tender intimacy. The attempt to discipline the body – with a new regime of synchronized medical, technological and architectural protocols – produces new psychological, social, philosophical and emotional interactions. The seemingly fragile cloudy space of the X-ray becomes

Advertisement for Victor Roentgen Stand, Model 3. From Victor X-Ray Company, X-Ray Supplies (Chicago, 1920), p. 25.

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an architecture in its own right that can be inhabited, and is inhabited. All the ostensible sharpness and clarity of modern architecture gives way to soft layers of reflections and translucencies. X-ray architecture is an occupiable blur.

Notes 1 Wilhelm Röntgen, ‘On a New Kind of Rays’, Nature, 23 January 1896, 274–76; English translation of the 1895 original text ‘Ueber eine neue Art von Strahlen’ published in the Sitzungsberichte der Physikalisch-Medizinischen Gesellschaft in Würzburg, 137, 28 December 1895, 132–41. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 The original article ‘Ueber eine neue Art von Strahlen’ did not include illustrations. But the English version published in Nature a few weeks later included the X-ray of Bertha’s hand, among other illustrations. 5 Multiple sources, including Gottfried Landwehr and A. Hasse (eds), Röntgen centennial: X-rays in Natural and Life Sciences (Singapore: World Scientific, 1997), 7–8. 6 Röntgen, ‘On a New Kind of Rays’. 7 Ibid. 8 Röntgen sent the reprint and images to the following scientists: Arthur Schuster of Manchester, Friedrich Kohlrauch of Gottingen, Lord Kelvin in Glasgow, Henri Poincare in Paris, Franz Exner of Vienna. 9 ‘Eine sensationelle Entdeckung’, Die Presse, Vienna, 5 January 1896, 1–2. Röntgen had sent the article to scientist Franz Exner of Vienna who alerted the newspaper. 10 A. Urbanik, ‘History of Polish Gastrointestinal Radiology’, Journal of Physiology and Pharmacology, 54, no. S3 (2003), 211. 11 Josef Maria Eder, Ausführliches Handbuch der Photographie (Halle: Wilhelm Knapp, 1892). 12 Josef Maria Eder and Eduard Valenta, Versuche über Photographie mittelst der Röntgen’schen Strahlen (Vienna: R. Lechner & Halle, Wilhelm Knapp, 1896). 13 László Moholy-Nagy, ‘Space-Time Problems’, first published in American Abstract Artists Yearbook New York, 1946. Reprinted in Vision in Motion, Chicago, 1947, 252. 14 Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works (Princeton University Press, 1998). See also, Tom Gunning, ‘Invisible Worlds, Visible Media’, in Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible 1840–1900, ed. Corey Keller (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2008), 51–63. 15 L. Aubert, La Photographie de l’Invisible: les rayons X suivi d’un glossaire (Paris: Les livres d’or de la science, 1898). 16 Pall Mall Gazette, London, March 1896. Quoted in Jon Queijo, Breakthrough!: How the 10 Greatest Discoveries in Medicine Saved Millions (New Jersey: Pearson Education, 2010). 17 Wilhelma, Electrical Review, 17 April 1896. 18 Gunning, ‘Invisible Worlds, Visible Media’, 52. 19 Guy Pallardy, Histoire illustrée de la radiologie (Paris: Les Editions Roger Dacosta, 1989), 98. 20 Arthur Korn, introduction to the first edition of Glas im Bau (1929); quote from the introduction of the English edition by Barrie & Rockliff, n.p.

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21 Röntgen, ‘On a New Kind of Rays’. 22 Rudolf Grashey’s Typische Rontgenbilder von normalen Menschen, for example went through six printings between 1905 and 1939. See Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, ‘The Image of Objectivity’, Representations (University of California Press), no. 40, Special Issue: Seeing Science (Autumn 1992), 81–128. 23 James Sibley Watson, Jr., Highlights and Shadows (Rochester, NY: Kodak, 1937), quoted in Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 155. 24 Edith Farnsworth quoted in Joseph A. Barry, ‘Report on the American Battle between Good and Bad Modern’, House Beautiful, May 1953, 270. 25 Edith Farnsworth, ‘Memoirs’ (unpublished manuscript), quoted in Alice T. Friedman, Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and Architectural History (New York: Abrams, 1998), 143. 26 August Flint and William H. Welch, The Principles and Practice of Medicine (5th edition, 1881), cited in Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 53. 27 Ibid., 14–15. 28 Le Corbusier, L’art decoratif d’aujourd’hui (Paris: G. Crès et Cie, 1925), 190; my translation. 29 Susan Sontag Archives, UCLA, Box 43. 30 Ibid. 31 Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1945), 348–9.

PART TWO

Printed Places

Bibliotopography Victor Plahte Tschudi

A

modern-day reader is inclined to read a book from cover to cover, from start to finish, expecting the text to offer a continuous, self-contained narrative, independent of the apparatus and physical frame of the book. Such readership expectations, cemented in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, tend to cloud earlier and very different approaches to the making and reading of books. In the Renaissance, a book was a costly and fragile object. Paper was pricy, sponsors scarce, typesetting laborious and bindings splendid. The content never simply existed in and for itself, in an enclosed, imagined world, but tied to the ordering and materiality of the publication. Through the manipulation of paper size, letter types and page numbers, the subject of the book was redoubled and concretized, combining content and form in a sophisticated multidimensionality. On 4 February 1510, Francesco Albertini published a book on the history and architecture of Rome, titled Opusculum de mirabilibus novae et veteris urbis Romae: ‘Essay on the marvels of new and ancient Rome’. Already the idea of a Rome separated as old and new was an innovation. With the few scattered projects being built around 1500 crouching in the shadow of the grand remnants of the imperial past, ‘New Rome’ catered for a notion of ‘newness’ that was precarious, unstable and, indeed, novel, as both concept and urban reality. A recognition of Rome’s ‘newness’ inevitably carried with it another novelty, equally interesting, namely the idea of Rome as old. Vetus evokes a Rome that is antiquarian in nature – finite, worth preserving and irrevocably past. A past confined to an ‘antiquity’ is the confident sign of an age that considers itself modern. Opusculum, then, reframes the city on advanced and fairly audacious terms.

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Frontispiece of Francesco Albertini’s Opusculum De Mirabilibus Nouae & Ueteris Urbis Romae, 1510. Reproduced from the original held by the Department of Special Collections of the Hesburgh Libraries of the University of Notre Dame.

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Francesco Albertini, obviously, was a learned man.1 As he left his native Florence for Rome around 1505, he also left the post he held as canon of the church of S. Lorenzo as well as the thriving artistic and intellectual milieu of late fifteenth-century Florence. Well versed in the visual arts, music and poetry, and probably familiar with the neo-platonic ideas of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Marsilio Ficino, Albertini was a theoretician on Rome more than an archaeologist. In Rome, Albertini immediately joined the circle of Julius II who had been elected pope in 1503 and belonged to the powerful Della Rovere family. In the preface to the book, Albertini writes that it was the pope’s nephew, Cardinal Galeotto Della Rovere, who commissioned him to write it. According to Albertini, Galeotto had asked him to improve ‘imperfect’ accounts of Rome ‘so full of fables and fabrications’. The accounts to which he referred probably counted the popular and widely distributed guide to Rome, Mirabilia urbis Romae, produced in the twelfth century and printed in several editions. The Mirabilia was a miscellany of anecdotes in which Rome seemed forged in part by volatile emperors and in part by divine intervention. The importance of the ancient sites was lost in popular myths and superstition, often with a Christian bias. Worse, perhaps, was the Mirabilia’s accidental organization of sites. It listed the monuments of Rome according to no scholarly principle but in the order someone on foot would encounter them – as in many modern guidebooks in fact. Most likely it was this hodgepodge Albertini was commissioned to improve; and certainly he produced a more stylish Latin and careful descriptions of the ancient monuments, cleansed of hearsay and moral overtones. But the real novelty concerned not the structures in the text, but the text as structure. Albertini does not merely reprint accounts of Rome. He turns the printed into something built. A study of Opusculum soon reveals that Albertini arranged the text as if he were a town planner, implementing a scheme that I shall name ‘bibliotopography’. Bibliotopography defines an organization of the text that imitates the layout of the city. In other words, the term describes the recreation of a place by the means of book production: through binding, format, pagination and typography the author marshals – or landscapes – the text into an order that mimics the territory it describes. A bibliotopographic scheme, then, provides a theoretical framework for the content, and, in Albertini’s case, it derives from a very specific model. The architect, author and city planner Leon Battista Alberti had also travelled from Florence to Rome, just like Albertini, but sixty years earlier. Commissioned by Pope Eugene IV to measure Rome, Alberti wrote in 1444 a short manual with the title Descriptio urbis Romae.2 The text was a manual on how to assemble a measuring instrument of Alberti’s own making. First, he instructs his reader to draw what he calls a ‘horizon’, explained as a circular disc ‘within which the depiction of the city is enclosed’. This disc should be divided into forty-eight parts, or ‘degrees’, with each degree again divided into four parts. Then, he explains how to make a spoke – named a ‘radius’ – divided in an identical manner. By working the disc and the spoke together Alberti’s readers are able to produce a survey of the city with unprecedented accuracy. The operation depends, however, on the surveyor taking up position at a fixed central point, which Alberti locates on the Capitol. It is from here that Alberti’s city surveyor is able to plot the positions of various ancient and new monuments. Alberti’s objective in the Descriptio was to present not a map of Rome but an instrument on which such maps could be based – or any other ‘descriptio’ for that matter – including a textual exposition, which brings us back to Opusculum. Albertini might have thought of himself as a city surveyor too, only in words, for he mirrored Alberti on surprisingly concrete terms. He counted

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Jean-Roch Marion, Interpretation of Leon Battista Alberti’s Delineation of the City of Rome (Descriptio urbis Romae), 2012; constructed for the studio workshop (taught by Yelda Nasifoglu) of Prof. Alberto Pérez-Gómez’s history lecture course ‘Architectural Intentions from Vitruvius to the Renaissance’ at McGill University.

pages. Hundred-and-two printed pages precede the chapter on the Capitol and hundred-and-two pages succeed it in a regularization of Rome as consistent as Alberti’s, although the coordinates derived not from Rome’s topography, but from its typography.

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Albertini’s reapplication of Alberti’s numbers was quite precise: as we saw, Alberti’s ‘horizon’ consisted of forty-eight degrees, each subdivided in four, producing a grid of 192 equal parts. It is not accidental, therefore, that Opusculum counts 192 (unnumbered) pages within which textual Rome, too, was mapped. Poignantly put, the number of pages ‘draws’ Alberti’s circumference by the means at the disposal of a bookmaker. The set-up must have been deliberate. Albertini’s geometric scheme could only have resulted from precise calculation and tight collaboration between the author and the professionals at work in the publishing house. In this perspective, the compositor had perhaps the most important job. It was he who set the types in the wooden frame called forme, and, in short, composed the page. To be able to measure out the text evenly, a precondition for a bibliotopographic scheme, he would have to regulate the size and number of types and control the use and extent of abbreviations. The man in charge of imposition – the folding of sheets – was also important. In its first edition, Opusculum came out in a quarto format, which meant that eight book pages were printed on one sheet – four on the recto and four on the reverse.3 To reserve the Capitol chapter for the middle would depend on the ability to predict the precise sequence the pages would form after the sheets had been folded and the book bound. That Albertini’s bibliotopography was anything but accidental is obvious from subsequent editions of Opusculum in which every care was taken to ensure that the Capitol, the ‘umbilicus urbis’ (the city’s navel) in Albertini’s words, also remained the navel of the publication. Regardless of the fact that different publishers issued these editions – in different formats and with a different number of pages – the chapter on the Capitol was always manoeuvred into a position where it extended across the exact midpoint of the publication.4 In fact, a bibliotopography centred on the Capitol became infectious. It governed guides to Rome from Andrea Palladio’s L’Antichità di Roma, published in 1554, to Fioravante Martinelli’s Roma Ricercata first published in 1644. Further studies might find bibliotopographies at work in descriptions of other cities than Rome and in other genres than guidebooks. Focusing on our example, however, reordering Rome on the model of scientifically based surveys surely placed Opusculum apart from the Mirabilia urbis guides, making it the first, and perhaps only, true Renaissance guidebook, realized on principles that governed the renewal of art and architecture around 1500. The geometric organization of the content allowed texts to communicate on many levels, and not only as a narrative to be read from cover to cover, as if they were novels. Renaissance bibliotopography does not make a text three-dimensional, but sorts the things described in an invisible grid, not unlike the contemporary one-point perspective. It lends verisimilitude, even ‘depth’, to a sequence of pages, structuring the content as a textual città ideale. Naturally it also conveys a sense of the city’s physical presence for armchair travellers, enhancing the experience of reading. The notion of bibliotopography points to the fact that the book in the sixteenth century has yet to fully embrace its nature as an abstraction. It still somewhat pertains to represent a view, not a mediation, of the city – with the urban reality transparently glimpsed, and not only read, through the letters on a page. To modern readers, such early forms of a book’s ‘architecture’ are easily lost. It seems like an alien approach indeed to place words and passages in a scheme that translates the content of the book into a pattern which itself cannot be read, but constitutes a typographical geometry, so to speak. The composition of the book complements its content and reminds us how in the early days of printing books were wondrous artefacts.

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Notes 1 On Albertini and the Opusculum, see Concetta Bianca, ‘Da Firenze a Roma: Francesco Albertini’, Letteratura & Arte 9 (2011): 59–70, and Five Early Guides to Rome and Florence, edited and with an introduction by Peter Murray (Farnborough: Gregg Publishers, 1972), introduction (not paginated). 2 The literature on Alberti’s survey is extensive, but see Leon Battista Alberti, Delineation of the City of Rome (Descriptio urbis Romae), edited by Mario Carpo and Francesco Furlan, translated by Peter Hicks (Temple, Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2007). See also Jessica Maier, Rome Measured and Explained: Early Modern Maps of the Eternal City (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), 25–31. 3 In the 1510 edition of Albertini’s Opusculum, the signatures are labelled as follows: A-Z4 & 4 [con]4R[um]4. I am grateful to Tracy C. Bergstrom, director of the Specialized Collection Services at the University of Notre Dame, for this information. 4 Thus, in the new, luxurious edition printed in Rome by Jacobo Mazzocchi in 1515, fifty pages (now paginated on the recto) lead up to the Capitol and fifty pages succeed it. In the Basel edition issued by Thomas Wolff in 1519, fifty-one pages precede the Capitol and fifty-one pages come after.

Cablegram Mari Lending

A flow of cablegrams across the Atlantic finally secured the full Western facade of the listed, twelfthcentury abbey church at Saint-Gilles-du-Gard. Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.

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‘Move every stone in order to secure the Porch of St. Gilles, packed and ready for shipment, by May 1st, or no later than June 1st, 1906’, John W. Beatty, director of Fine Arts at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, ordered one of his European agents in May 1905.1 Authorized ‘to make any reasonable offer to secure St. Gilles’, the agent was instructed to send Beatty a ‘comprehensive but brief cable’ as soon as matters were resolved. Every stone was indeed moved to secure this grandiose plaster monument. The operation of getting around French monument legislation and cast the full western façade of the twelfth-century abbey church that had been designated a historical monument in 1840 was a high-powered manoeuvre, involving the American Secretary of State, several European ambassadors, French preservation authorities and local politicians and bureaucrats. Everyone involved was constantly reminded that this was a matter of ‘special haste’, and the submarine communication sprinkled with references to ‘gifts’ and ‘gratefulness’. The Mayor of Saint-Gilles-du-Gard was assured that ‘the Carnegie Institute will esteem it as a great favor’, when requested to cable his authorization instantly. Another agent was asked to confirm that the chief moulder Charles-Édouard Pouzadoux at the Musée de sculpture comparée in Paris would complete the work according to plan: ‘cable me this information quickly, and I will promptly cable you whether or not the date is satisfactory’. After intense back-stage negations, a cablegram

Directors and other prominent representatives of the Atlantic Telegraph Company, the Telegraph Construction Company, and the Great Eastern Ship Company, with families, were on board the Great Eastern, enjoying the staging of the play ‘A Cable-istic Extravaganza’, authored by two journalists from the Times and the Daily News. Published in the Illustrated London News, 28 July 1866. From Mason Jackson, The Pictorial Press: Its Origins and Progress (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1885).

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arrived from Paris: ‘Permission granted St Gilles Pouzadoux promises delivery June first cost forty thousand francs suggest giving order after all official intervention cable if want whole porch or part’. The whirlwind of trans-Atlantic correspondence (‘Pouzadoux letter received’/‘Will Pouzadoux make St. Gilles nine months if authorization secured. Cable answer’/‘Order and money cabled Director’) crescendoed during the remounting of the monument in its new habitat: e.g. ‘Urge Pouzadoux to send floor plans Saint-Gilles immediately’. The electric telegraph had been launched as ‘one of the greatest achievements of ancient or modern times’.2 Its underwater continuation for transporting letters became the preferred medium for moving monuments from across space and time, rapidly and over great distances. This was particularly true when Andrew Carnegie decided that a world-class architecture collection should be placed centre stage in the Carnegie Institute’s enlarged building in Pittsburgh upon its inauguration in June 1907. The frantic pace of the selection, ordering, casting, packing, shipping, storing and mounting of architectural casts on full scale happened through a relentless stream of cablegrams to save precious time. The technology was, of course, not new. On the inauguration of the Transatlantic Telegraph Cable 16 August 1858, Queen Victoria congratulated American president James Buchanan with a ninety-nine-word Morse-transmitted message that took sixteen hours to cross 2,500 miles of submarine cables. Although saltwater soon eroded the cables of copper and iron, new insulation technologies stabilized the apparatus a decade later, enabling speedy intercontinental messaging along the seabed. Two years after Queen Victoria’s verbose salute, telegraph electrician George B. Prescott advised correspondents to keep the messages in a concise style and to avoid superfluous words: ‘Most despatches are contained in less than ten words, and it is surprising how much matter is often contained in this brief number’.3 In 1903, 56.2 per cent telegrams sent from New York contained two to ten words, 82.2 per cent less than fifteen words.4 The Western Union Telegraph Company’s letterhead – way wordier than the orders and misunderstandings the Carnegie cablegrams conveyed – documents the global scope: ‘Two American Cables from New York to Great Britain. Connects also with five American and one direct U.S. Atlantic Cables. Direct Cable Communication with Germany and France. Cable Connection with Cuba, West Indies, Mexico and Central and South America. Messages sent to, and retrieved, from all parts of the World’. This was the paratext for the bombardment of lapidary orders streaming out of Pittsburgh, encouraging, begging and threatening leading European museums and private formatori workshops from Cairo to Oslo to speed up their deliveries: ‘Every day counts in this work’, ‘Ship all casts quickly fast steamer’ and so on. The Americans commanded the format with ease. When permission to make new moulds from the west portal of the cathedral in Bordeaux was ‘absolutely refused’, Beatty queried the Art Institute in Chicago, where an edition was on display: ‘Where secured Bordeaux cast? How long to make? Answer collect’. The director replied immediately: ‘Bordeaux portal from French Government through Colombian Exhibition’. For the Choragic monument of Lysicrates and the Erechtheion porch, the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris received the following cabled question without question mark: ‘Comme une grand faveur a Institute Carnegie de Pittsburgh pouvez-vous faire dans quatre moins les grand moulages […] Réponse télégraphique’. A column from the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus was procured from Brucciani & Co in London: ‘If you will make the cast upon these instructions, cable me as follows: “Beatty, Pittsburgh. Yes” ’. When placing another massive order (including a colossal Assyrian lamassu, an Egyptian papyrus-bud column and numerous parts of the Parthenon), Brucciani was asked to confirm straightaway that

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the goods would be ‘completed and packed ready for shipment in four months’, with the same formula ‘Beatty, Pittsburgh. Yes’. Brucciani’s four-word response – ‘Yes best part writing’ – was symptomatic. In America, ‘telegrams are sent on an unimaginable speed’, it was reported from Egypt in 1903.5 In the old world, cast producers appeared unfamiliar with both the speed and the genre. Brevity and hermeneutics are not necessarily oxymoronic, yet Yes and No made it hard to explain complications such as the Trustees of the British Museum’s ban on further moulding and casting of the Assyrian collection. In response to the flow of American cablegrams, a panoply of embellished formatori stationary and long explanatory letters in many languages were written to explain the specificity regarding the production of each and every monument. To keep it short is hard. This we are constantly reminded of while getting used to a new politically invested genre; the daily, brief wireless messages from the United States. But even Donald Trump occasionally finds the tweet format a limitation. A 4 December 2016 address from the Presidentelect, posted at 11.23 pm begun: ‘Did China ask us if it was OK to devalue their currency (making it hard for our companies to compete), heavily tax our products going into..’. The unconventional

To keep it short is hard. A 4 December 2016 address from President-elect Donald Trump on twitter.com.

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final two dots promised a continuation, but also evoke the three dots of suspension that makes Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s stylistic signature, providing his delirious prose with pauses and rhythm, intensity and flow; a wild pace of constant parataxis, where events follow events in unexpected ways. Trump’s two dots were also pragmatic, fulfilling the format to precisely 140 characters. The continuation, posted seven minutes later, read: ‘their country (the U.S. doesn’t tax them) or to build a massive military complex in the middle of the South China Sea? I don’t think so!’ Counting 136 characters this second part showed confinement. Trump could have furnished the four empty spots with more exclamation marks, to make the analysis even more powerful (‘I don’t think so!!!!!’), but rather lines up with the decorum expressed by Polonius in the second act of Hamlet (‘the old chatterbox’, as Freud diagnosed him in his 1905 book on jokes): ‘brevity is the soul of wit’.

Notes 1 All cablegrams quoted are from 1905 and 1906, held in the Hall of Architecture archive, Heinz Architectural Center Library Collection, Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh. 2 George B. Prescott, History, Theory, and Practice of the Electric Telegraph (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1860), dedication to Cyrus W. Field. 3 Ibid., 350, 339. 4 David Hochfelder, The Telegraph in America, 1832–1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 79. 5 On Barak, On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 146.

Cartoon Michela Rosso

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he figure of the architect and builder, though less exposed to social criticism than the politician, has not stayed safe from the pencils of satirical cartoonists. A cursory overview of graphic satire across the modern age reveals how the advent of architectural modernism has often functioned as a catalyst for humour. Indeed, processes of urbanization and change have naturally gone hand in hand with the rise of satire employed as a weapon to express dissent as well as a form of adaptation to a quickly changing reality. In this framework, satirical cartoons appear as a particularly fruitful field of investigation for the architectural and urban historian.1 A research on architectural visual satire should probably begin by looking at the mid- to late eighteenth century, and in this respect Britain undoubtedly provides a preferred terrain of study. A number of factors favoured the flourishing of visual satire in Britain in the eighteenth century: the absence of absolutism carried with it a relative freedom of the press while this century witnessed the development of a propitious context for debate, whether in the coffee house, club, or on the street. Moreover, the availability of new means of image production and dissemination – the print shops, the emergence of new publishers and booksellers, and the appearance of a number of great artists on the scene – further contributed to the growing popularity of this genre of social and political commentary. A virtual catalogue of graphic architectural and urban satire can start with William Hogarth’s candid and frequently humorous engravings, portraying London during the rapid expansion which affected both its social and urban fabric during the artist’s lifetime. In Hogarth’s prolific production, architecture and the built environment often work as an agent of a wider political and social commentary targeting the contemporary trends of high culture. Hogarth’s print ‘The Five Orders

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William Hogarth, ‘The Five Orders of Periwigs’ (London: 1761). The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library Digital Collections.

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of Periwigs’ (1761), for instance, contains several layers of satire. Firstly, it lampoons the fashion for eccentric wigs in the mid- to late eighteenth century. In it, Hogarth presents caricature versions of the heads and wigs of those who attended the coronation of King George III, and groups them into five distinct orders, parallel to the architectural ones, which he wittily rephrases as ‘Episcopal or Parsonic’ (for the clergy), ‘Old Peerian or Aldermanic’ (for lords and council officials), ‘Lexonic’ (for lawyers), ‘Composite or Half Natural’ and ‘Queerinthian or Queue de Reynard’. Alongside them is the figure of a barber’s block crowned with a pair of compasses titled ‘Athenian measure’, a caricature of James ‘Athenian’ Stuart, author with Nicholas Revett of The Antiquities of Athens, the systematic survey of the architectural monuments of Athens in five folio volumes (1748). The artist’s irony focuses on the slow publication process of this monumental work, which, when its first volume finally appeared, in 1762, had already been overtaken by several rival undertakings, most notably Leroy’s Les ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grèce (1758). Just as scrupulous accuracy had been the dominant feature of Stuart and Revett’s work, so scrupulous accuracy is also the leading point of Hogarth’s satire. Each of the twenty-four profiles in the print represents an existing person; moreover, each wig is ‘measured architectonically’ and divided into component parts, which are labelled with letters A to I, each denoting a mock architectural term, from A: the ‘Corona or Lermier or Foretop’ and B: the ‘Architrave or Archivolt or Caul’ to H: ‘Fillet or Ribbon’ and I: ‘Helices or Volute or Spiral or Curl’. Hogarth’s opinion of The Antiquities of Athens is summarized in the remark published in his Anecdotes: There is no great difficulty in measuring the length, breadth, or height of any figures, where the parts are made up of plain lines. It requires no more skill to take the dimensions of a pillar or cornice than to measure a square box; and yet the man who does the latter is neglected, and he who accomplishes the former, is considered as a miracle of genius: but I suppose he receives his honours for the distance he has travelled to do his business.2 In ‘The Five Orders of Periwigs’ the analogy between architecture and fashion is explicit: by assimilating matters of architectural style to matters of fashion, the artist calls attention to the transitory nature of the contemporary discussion over antiquity. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, feverish London building activities were to further fuel the inventiveness of British caricaturists and illustrators. Among George Cruikshank’s abundant series of etchings, his ‘London Going Out of Town or the March of Bricks and Mortar’ of 1829 showing regiments of new streets marching ruthlessly out of the British capital into the surrounding country stands out as a sharp-edged denunciation of the contradictions implicit in early nineteenth-century urbanization. The detailed picture of the brickmaking and house-building processes comments on the frenzy in the construction that had taken place in London around 1820. The urban expansion is portrayed as an invasion of the countryside by building tools, construction materials and new tenements blocks – a scene of violence and destruction. From the left – the direction of London – a robotic army advances into the countryside. Its soldiers have chimney pots for bodies, mortar-filled hods for heads, and picks and shovels for limbs. In the background, the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral and the towers of Westminster Abbey frame rows of tenements still in scaffolding rolling forward on giant wheels. The rural response appears on the right side of the picture where cows, sheep, geese and birds flee in panic; a haystack shouts ‘We are losing ground here’, and a desperate tree cries ‘I must leave the fields!’3

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‘London Going Out of Town or the March of Bricks and Mortar’, in George Cruikshank, Scraps and Sketches, Part the Second (London: published by the artist and sold by James Robins and Co., 1829). © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Within the context of dramatic economic and social transformations which were to lead to the emergence of Britain as the world’s dominant industrial power, Punch, or the London Charivari, the weekly magazine established in 1841, was pivotal in giving voice to conflicts resulting from the country’s meteoric urbanization. Demolitions of the historic medieval fabric and the enforced displacement of the less wealthy ensuing from massive urban renewal and railway construction were soon to become the favourite targets of Punch’s pencils. In 1845 an illustration entitled ‘The Battle of the Streets’ significantly pre-echoed the uneasy tone of Marcelin’s cartoons for the Journal pour Rire sneering at Baron Haussmann’s renovation of Paris.4 At the centre is ‘the contest of the broad and the narrow’ where ‘the old brick and tile order will be utterly superseded by the modern stuccoite’. The picture shows women dressed as humble medieval houses in the act of clashing with a group of horsemen carrying brand new Georgian palaces.5 Probably more powerfully than any other public event in Victorian Britain, the 1851 Great Exhibition was to attract the attention of socially minded satirists. Significantly, the very name of the cast-iron and glass structure that was to host the event originated from Punch: on 13 July 1850 the English dramatist Douglas Jerrold wrote as ‘Mrs Amelia Mouser’ about the forthcoming Exhibition coining the phrase the ‘palace of very crystal’.6 From that day onwards, Joseph Paxton’s

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Top right: ‘This was the first design made for the house that Paxton built …’. Bottom left: ‘The first four designs all valuable beyond price though they didn’t get the prize’. From George Augustus Sala, The House That Paxton Built, London, Ironbrace, Woodenhead & Co. [i.e. Adolphus Ackermann], 1851. Etchings. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

structure, at that time still a proposal, gained the name by which it would henceforth be known. Within the wide contemporary commentary, George Augustus Sala’s folding panorama The House That Paxton Built contains one of the few references to the architecture of the Crystal Palace. Here the work of Paxton and Fox & Henderson is treated not merely as the backdrop of a political, cultural or social satire, but is ridiculed as such. The specific object of Sala’s humour is the building’s competition, mocking five specific entries. The first and winning entry is a ‘House of Cards’, a clear reference to the uncertainty inspired by the fairly new building technique of cast iron and plate glass. The others are examples of an architecture parlante whose appearance mirrors the designer’s profession. The structure is alternatively a dish cover designed by ‘the Cook of the London Tavern’ or a gigantic hat by ‘Mr Perring the Hatter’. A fifth project, by ‘the Infant Prodigy’, depicts the typical infantile composition of a pitched roof house crowned by a smoking chimney and framed by a sun and a tree.7 Among Punch’s targets in the subsequent decades were market-force building and suburbanization of the English landscape. The monotonous and unimaginative quality of ribbon development is at the centre of a cartoon by George Morrow published in 1910. In the middle of

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George Marrow, ‘It is proposed that architecture shall enjoy copyright?’, Punch, 12 January 1910. Punch Limited.

the illustration depicting two identical rows of terrace housing facing each other, the architect of Pomona Villas is shouting to the architect of Laburnum villas that he is infringing his copyright.8 In 1919 two cartoons portray Mr Smith facing the shocking transformation of the English landscape throughout industrialization. In the first Smith leaves his native town in the country with the promise to preserve it unviolated; in the second he returns some years later to discover that it has turned into a busy industrial city filled with smokestacks and gasometers.9

Notes 1 See ‘Rire en ville. Rire de la ville’, ed. Olivier Ratouis and Martin Baumeister, Histoire Urbaine 31, no. 2 (2011). doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.3917/rhu.031.0005; Michela Rosso, ‘From Distaste to Mockery: The City and Its Architectures Ridiculed’, Association of Art Historians 41st Annual Conference (Norwich: University of East Anglia, 2015), 83–6; Gabriele Neri, Caricature architettoniche: Satira e critica del progetto moderno (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2015). 2 Anecdotes of William Hogarth and explanatory descriptions of the plates of Hogarth restored (London: Thomas Cook, 1803), 311–12; see also Anecdotes of William Hogarth: Written by Himself, with Essays on his life and genius, and criticisms on his works selected from Walpole, Gilpin, J. Ireland, Lamb, Phillips, and others to which are added a catalogue of his prints; account of their

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variations, and principal copies; lists of paintings, drawings, &c. (London: J. B Nichols and Son, 1833), 67; 256–7. 3 For a detailed description of this etching see Michael Rawson, ‘The March of Bricks and Mortar’, Environmental History 17, no. 4 (2012), 844–51. https://academic.oup.com/envhis/articleabstract/17/4/844/420565/The-March-of-Bricks-and-Mortar. 4 See Rosemarie Gerken, ‘Transformation’ und ‘Embellissement’ von Paris in der Karikatur. Zur Umwandlung der französischen Hauptstadt im Zweiten Kaiserreich durch den Baron Haussmann (Hildesheim, Zürich, New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1997). 5 Gilbert a’Beckett, ‘The Battle of the Streets’, Punch Historical Archive 213 (9 August 1845), 64. 6 Jan R. Piggot, Palace of the People: The Crystal Palace at Sydenham 1854–1936 (London: Hurst & Company, 2004), 5. 7 George Augustus Sala, The House That Paxton Built (London: Ironbrace, Woodenhead & Co., 1851). 8 George Marrow, ‘It is proposed that architecture shall enjoy copyright?’, Punch Historical Archive 3605 (12 January 1910), 36. 9 The illustration is reproduced as the frontispiece of Clough Williams-Ellis, England and the Octopus (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1928).

Colour Mari Hvattum

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hen the young Gottfried Semper published his bold hypothesis on the use of colour in ancient architecture, he did so in black and white. Vorläufige Bemerkungen über bemalte Architektur und Plastik bei den Alten (1834) was little more than a pamphlet, with a crudely made xylographic frontispiece as its only illustration.1 Against the pallid pages, the epigram from Goethe’s Faust reads almost ironic: ‘Grau, theurer Freund, ist alle Theorie,/Und grün des Lebens goldner Baum’. Though the little book seemed to place itself firmly in the category ‘grey theory’, Semper had higher ambitions: ‘The author takes the liberty’, he proclaimed, ‘of attaching to these remarks the announcement of a publication that will systematically embody his collected studies and illustrate what has been said. It will consist of coloured lithographs and copper plates with a commentary … The author seeks a publisher for it’.2 Semper’s insistence that ancient architecture had been painted was hardly original in the 1830s. He was particularly inspired by Jaques-Ignace Hittorff’s exuberantly coloured 1830 reconstruction of a Hellenic temple in Selinunte, Sicily, a study that Semper took to reinforce his own observations from Greece. Already in 1762, however, Stuart and Revett had noted that Greek temples were ‘enriched with painted ornament’, and as conservative a classicist as Quatrèmere de Quincy had long recognized the centrality of colour in Greek sculpture and ornament.3 Cockerell, Brøndsted and von Hallerstein’s 1811 excavations in Aegina confirmed the suspicion, as did numerous excavations and publications during the 1820s and early 1830s. The white marble monument – for Winckelmann the very epitome of antiquity – was gradually being replaced by more colourful apparitions. Colour was an unstable phenomenon, however, in both print and real life. Pigment faded fast on excavated archaeological specimens, making it hard to record and retain. The German

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Gottfried Semper, Vorläufige Bemerkungen über bemalte Architectur und Plastik bei den Alten (1834), frontispiece. The title on the frontispiece is different from the title page, indicating, perhaps, the haste of the production process and the inexperience of the author. ETH-Bibliothek Zurich.

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Jacques-Ignace Hittorff, Restitution du temple d'Empédocle à Sélinonte, ou l'architecture polychrôme chez les Grecs (1851), longitudinal section of the temple. Heidelberg University Library, C 3693: Atlas, plate IV – CC-BY-SA 3.0. http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/hittorff1851bd2/0009. Creative Commons Licence.

archaeologist Otto Magnus von Stackelberg, for instance, had to witness the brightly coloured frieze of the recently excavated temple of Apollo in Bassae fade in a matter of weeks. In print, too, colour was hard to handle. Colour printing was expensive and laborious, and ink proved far from stable.4 Early publications on architectural polychromy, consequently, were often in black and white. Von Stackelberg’s book Der Apollotempel zu Bassae in Arcadien (1826) is a good example: a passionate defence for ancient polychromy illustrated by twenty-one black line copper engravings.5 But things were changing fast. In the next decade, as Ulrike Fauerbach and Arnd Hennemeyer have recently pointed out, the growing interest in architectural polychromy would dovetail increasingly sophisticated colour printing techniques.6 Colour had always resisted mechanical reproduction. Indeed, some scholars consider it the greatest casualty of the invention of printing. While medieval manuscripts were gleaming with colour, the first printed books, as Andrew Pettegree observes, were lacklustre.7 Printers would sometimes compensate for this shortcoming by leaving blanks, allowing the reader to fill in with colourful initials and ornaments. To be sure, woodcuts could be printed with any colour ink, but if you wanted more than one, the sheet had to be printed several times over, often with crude result. Mezzotint – an intaglio technique invented in the seventeenth century – allowed for highquality colour prints, but was time-consuming, technically demanding and expensive.8 The late

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Gottfried Semper, Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten oder praktische Ästhetik (1860), vol. 1, detail from the temple of Theseus in Athens. Private collection.

eighteenth-century technique of lithography was equally cumbersome, requiring one lithographic stone for each colour. Nonetheless, it was lithography that became the most important technique for the dissemination of architectural polychromy. Lithographers had experimented with colour since around 1800, yet chromolithography was patented by the Mulhause printer Godefroy Engelmann only in 1837. It was his firm, Engelmann et Graf, which in 1851 printed the colour plates for Hittorff’s Restitution du temple d’Empédocle à Sélinonte, ou l’architecture polychrôme chez les Grecs. Hittorff’s controversial reconstruction had first been presented at the École des Beaux Arts in 1830, where Semper presumably saw it. Later it was published – with black and white illustrations – in the annals of the archaeological society.9 In 1851, printing technology had finally caught up with Hittorff’s argument, allowing him to produce what Semper considered ‘the most important publication in the literature of polychromy’.10 Yet Hittorff was not first. Already in the late 1830s, Owen Jones set new standards for chromolithography with his twelve-part Plans, Elevations, Sections and Details of the Alhambra (1836–45). Jones was dissatisfied with the state of contemporary colour printing and set up his own press, complete with draftsmen, printers and state-of-the-art equipment.11 The result was a huge success, turning polychromy from an academic debate into a wildly popular fashion in nineteenth-century Britain. The fad peaked with the Crystal Palace at Sydenham (not least thanks to Jones’s sumptuously polychrome Alhambra court) and with the dazzling colour plates of Jones’s Grammar of Ornament, published in 1856.

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Semper, Hittorff and Jones oscillated between real and printed polychromy. Their quest for colour in contemporary architecture went hand in hand with a struggle to represent ancient polychromy in books. In the nineteenth century, as André Tavares points out, books and buildings were mutually dependent, down to their most intimate details.12 Semper never published his promised folio on polychromy.13 He returned forcefully to the matter, however. In Der Stil, published in two volumes between 1860 and 1863, Semper included twenty-two chromolithographic plates and made polychromy key to both his textual and his visual argument. For if colour printing had evolved since Vorläufige Bemerkungen in 1834, so had Semper’s own thinking on colour. In his mature theory, polychromy served to connect the concept of the original enclosure with the history of monumental architecture. The metamorphic process of Bekleidung runs, as Semper saw it, from the wickerwork wall to the modern wallpaper, getting its noblest expression in ancient polychromy.14 Colour, then, is key not only to the reinterpretation of antiquity, but also to understanding the historical development of architecture and the modern notion of space. More than a matter of archaeological reconstruction, polychromy – in print and in buildings – prefigures modern architecture.

Notes 1 Gottfried Semper, Vorläufige Bemerkungen über bemalte Architectur und Plastik bei den Alten (Altona: J.F. Hammerich, 1834). 2 Semper, Vorläufige Bemerkungen, 64. Transl. as ‘Preliminary Remarks on Polychrome Architecture’, in Wolfgang Herrmann (ed.), Gottfried Semper. The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 66. 3 James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, Antiquities of Athens, vol. 1 (London: Haberkorn, 1762), 10. Antoine-Chrysostome Quatrèmere de Quincy, Le Jupiter Olympien (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1814). 4 The history of colour printing is told in Bamber Gascoine, Milestones in Colour Printing 1457–1859 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 5 Otto Magnus Von Stackelberg, Der Apollotempel zu Bassae in Arcadien und die daselbst ausgegrabenen Bildwerke (Frankfurt a.M.: Gedruckt mit Andreäischen Schriften, 1826), 33. In later publications Stackelberg used colour, e.g. the hand-coloured plates in Trachten und Sitten der Griechen (1831) and colour lithographs in Die Graeber der Hellenen (1837). See ‘Otto Magnus Stackelsbergs Publikationen zu Griechische Kunst’, in Uta Hassler (ed.), Maltechnik & Farbmittel der Semperzeit (Munich: Hirmer, 2014), 443. 6 Ulrike Fauerbach and Arnd Hennemeyer, ‘Printing Ancient Polychromy’, paper at the Society of Architectural Historian’s 68th Annual Conference 2015 Chicago. 7 Andrew Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 53–55. 8 Gascoine, Milestones in Colour Printing 1457–1859, 7–11. 9 Jaques-Ignace Hittorff, ‘De l’architecture polychrôme chez les Grecs, ou restitution complète du temple d’Empédocles, dans l’Acropolis de Sélinunte’, in Annals de l’institute de Correspondence Archéologique, vol. 2 (Paris: Crapelet, 1830), 263–84. 10 Gottfried Semper, ‘The Four Elements of Architecture’, in Herrmann (ed.), Gottfried Semper, 80. 11 See Kathryn Ferry, ‘Owen Jones and Chromolithography’, Architectural History, 46 (2003), 175–88. 12 André Tavares, The Anatomy of the Architectural Book (Basel: Lars Müller, 2016).

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13 He did, however, publish a colour lithography of the Parthenon in ‘Über die Anwendung der Farben in der Baukunst’, in Sammelschrift des Instituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica (Rome, 1836). Discussed in Winfried Nerdinger, ‘Leo von Klenze – Gottfried Semper: Zwei Positionen zur Polychromiefrage’, in Hassler (ed.), Maltechnik & Farbmittel der Semperzeit, 31. 14 See Sonja Hildebrand, ‘“In hohen Grade vergeistigt”: Materielle und symbolische Qualitäten von Farbe in Sempers Prinzip der Bekleidung’, in Hassler (ed.), Maltechnik & Farbmittel der Semperzeit, 292–99. This collection contains several seminal essays on polychromy, e.g. Werner Oechslin, ‘Kugler, Semper, der Polychromiestreit und der tiefere Sinn der Geschichte’ and Fritz Neumeyer ‘Die lange Schatten der Polychromie. Gottfried Semper – Richard Wagner – Friedrich Nietzsche’.

Column Anne Hultzsch

‘How many Corinthian and Doric columns do you think there are in your banks, and post-offices, institutions and I know not what else’, architectural critic John Ruskin asked an Edinburgh audience, somewhat exasperatedly, in 1853. ‘One exactly like another’, he exclaimed, ‘and yet you expect to be interested! … you think you can put 150,000 square windows side by side in the same streets, and still be interested in them’.1 Half a century later, the French poet and critic Stéphane Mallarmé echoed Ruskin’s sentiments when lamenting the monotony of the newspaper page ruled by ‘l’insupportable colonne’ (the unbearable column). ‘Cent et cent fois’ (hundred and a hundred times), he wrote in desperation, one was content to set, print and read the newspaper column.2 The column, for better or for worse, dominated both the printed and the built world of the nineteenth century. In English, the polysemy of the term ‘column’, its capacity to have multiple meanings, reaches back to the roots of the language. Etymologically, it stems from the Latin word columna which also became the Spanish columna, the French colonne and the Italian colonna, all of which share the dual reference to the printed and the built. The eighteenth-century lexicographer and writer Samuel Johnson gave the term’s meaning as ‘a round pillar’ as well as ‘half a page, when divided into two equal parts by a line … and, by several lines, pages are often divided into three or more parts’, besides listing its geometric and military senses.3 By the time the nineteenth-century broadsheet newspaper was reaching its heights of distribution, columns could easily number nine per page. The Times started out with four columns in 1785, then still as Daily Universal Register, but had six by 1900, separated by thin vertical lines. What is more, contemporary editors and writers were clearly aware of the term’s potential for wordplay, as a series of ‘Composite Columns’ in the Illustrated London News demonstrates. From March to May 1850, the humorous column presented readers with small verbal and graphic sketches on various topics, mostly society gossip, with the first including a built column as initial – yet lacking any other reference to the architectural form.

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The Times, 21 May 1862. Private collection.

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‘The Composite Column’, a regular humorous column in the Illustrated London News, 2 March 1850. © The British Library Board. All rights reserved. Reproduced with kind permission of The British Newspaper Archive (www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk).

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The orders according to Serlio. Sebastiano Serlio, Regole generali di architetvra sopra le cinqve maniere de gli edifici: cioe, thoscano, dorico, ionico, corinthio, et composito, con gli essempi dell'antiqvita, che per la magior parte concordano con la dottrina di Vitrvvio (In Venetia: Per Francesco Marcolini da Forli, 1537).

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There are remarkably many polysemic words linking the printed with the built. ‘Capital’ is one of them, signifying both the uppercase letter and the top of the built column. As Helen Smith argues in this book, the printed has long been linked epistemologically to the built. This link existed even before printing was invented. Indeed, the written column preceded print; columnization itself stemmed from horizontally arranged papyrus rolls and Gutenberg’s two-column layout was modelled on earlier manuscripts.4 While derivatives of the Latin columna all seem to share the double connotation of the printed and the built, this does not exist in other languages; German has Säule for the built column and Spalte for the printed. Apart from a narrow, upright shape, what is it then that links these two kinds of columns? The printed column in books and newspapers ‘presents copy in widths that the eye can read’, informs the Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism.5 Essentially, the column is an ordering tool, both visually and conceptually – and in many ways, the built column does exactly the same. While the architectural column has existed since time immemorial, at least since Vitruvius it has encapsulated the relationship between man and architecture, both literally and figuratively. According to Renaissance thinkers, the revival of De Architectura libri decem was a return to order – and the orders – in architecture. In it, Vitruvius narrates the origins of each order: the Doric, for instance, was born when the ancient Greeks ‘measured a man’s foot, and finding its length the sixth part of his height, they gave the column a similar proportion’.6 From these and similar myths, Vitruvius derived the column’s gendered character: masculine Doric, matronly Ionic and maidenly Corinthian.7 Architecture – with a capital A – is justified as such by imitating man through the column and it is because of this, that base, shaft and capital, together with the entablature, give the building proportion, meaning and order. The first time that this systematization of the built was presented not only in words but also in images was when Sebastiano Serlio presented his Regole generali di architettura (1537), the first (even if named fourth) of his books on architecture. As Mario Carpo has argued, Serlio’s orders ‘transformed an inheritance of diverse structural and decorative elements into a highly formalized language’.8 Indeed, what Carpo has called Serlio’s ‘prêt-à-porter line of Renaissance architectural composition’ is precisely what Ruskin rallied against in the mid-nineteenth century. And had Mallarmé been familiar with twentieth-century fashion jargon, he would probably have mockingly referred to newspaper broadsheets as the prêt-à-porter of literature. So, where does this leave the frustrations of Ruskin and Mallarmé? Both writers vented their anger at a moment when printing as well as building underwent processes of mass mechanization: decorative architectural elements, including columns, could now be ordered via catalogues and new printing presses spewed out hundreds of copies per hour. Ruskin countered this by proposing a return to abstraction, in theory at least. In the Stones of Venice, he argued that to make any sense of the orders ‘as the roots of all European architecture’, one should reduce them to two primary forms: the convex – including the Doric and the Norman – and the concave – for the Corinthian, the Early English and the Decorated. Breaking Serlio’s prescriptiveness and bridging the styles for his architectural history, Ruskin closed the argument with the words: ‘there can never be any more [orders] until dooms day’.9 In the end, Ruskin saw the solution to the monotony of classical architecture’s repetitiveness in the gothic and in its variety and irregularity. In print, relief seems to have come from the introduction of advertisements as well as illustrations breaking up the monotonous verticality of the newspaper column.10 And Mallarmé himself? He freed his writing from the detested column – and most other formatting rules – in his free-form poem Un Coup de dés (A Throw of the Dice, 1897), anticipating modernist graphics, as Marit Grøtta ponders elsewhere in this book.

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Notes 1 John Ruskin, Lectures on Architecture and Painting, Delivered at Edinburgh, in November, 1853 (New York: John B. Alden, 1885), 12. 2 Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘Le Livre, Instrument Spirituel’, in Œuvres Complètes, ed. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 381. 3 Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language in Which the Words Are Deduced from Their Originals, and Illustrated in Their Different Significations by Examples from the Best Writers. To Which Are Prefixed, a History of the Language, and an English Grammar, 6th ed., vol. 1, 2 vols. (London: J. F. and C. Rivington, 1785). 4 See Falconer Madan, ‘Materials for Writing and Forms of Books’, in Reader in the History of Books and Printing, ed. Paul A. Winckler (Englewood, Colorado: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1983), 31–36. 5 Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor (eds.), ‘Columns’, in Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland (Gent: Academia Press, 2009), 134. 6 Book IV, Chapter I: ‘Of the origins of the three sorts of columns, and of the Corinthian capital’, in Vitruvius Pollio, The Architecture of Marcus Vitruvius Pollio: In Ten Books. Translated from the Latin by Joseph Gwilt (London: Priestley and Weale, 1826), 100–1. 7 Ibid., 101–2. See Joseph Rykwert, The Dancing Column: On Order in Architecture (Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press, 1996). 8 Mario Carpo, Architecture in the Age of Printing: Orality, Writing, Typography, and Printed Images in the History of Architectural Theory, trans. Sarah Benson (Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press, 2001), 49. 9 John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, vol. 1 (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1851), 14. 10 See Brake and Demoor, ‘Columns’, 134. And Tom Gretton, ‘The Pragmatics of Page Design in Nineteenth-Century General-Interest Weekly Illustrated News Magazines in London and Paris’, Art History 33, no. 4 (September 2010): 680–709, doi:10.1111/j.1467-8365.2010.00766.x.

Criticism Christina Contandriopoulos

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aris, 1787, just two years before the French Revolution, a young writer by the name of JacquesAntoine Dulaure risked his life by publishing a critical pamphlet raging against the most ambitious construction project of the century: the wall for the Ferme Générale, a colossal toll gate built to surround and enclose the French capital and restore the nation’s finances through the imposition and control of heavy taxes. Published anonymously, A Citizen’s Complaint against the New Wall of Paris struck a bold and fearless tone: ‘We must rise up against the abuses of this monument that is a public offense to good taste, that prostitutes the richness of architecture to the tax collectors and that insults the hardship of the people … forcing them to admire the instrument of their own misfortune’.1 Dulaure’s pamphlet canalized the growing outrage of Parisians against the wall, exposing it as a great symbol of oppression, a ‘monument to extreme power’.2 Within a few months, public anger grew so loud that Louis XVI was forced to suspend all work on the construction sites. The following year, in 1788, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, the architect who was responsible for the ostentatious style of the barriers, was removed from the project.3 Finally, in early July 1789, in the nights leading up to the famous storming of the Bastille, the great wall itself and its barriers were attacked violently from within, burnt and torn down. For Dulaure, these acts of destruction confirmed the ultimate success of his endeavour. In his memoirs, he confessed ecstatically that his pamphlet marked a turning point in his career. ‘When the people were forced to admire their own chains, I was the first and the only one who dared write against this act of revolting despotism. I am the people [je suis le peuple], I feel the people in me and I suffer what they have suffered for more than a thousand years’.4 Despite what Dulaure wrote in his memoirs, he was not alone in writing against the wall. This infamous project triggered immediate and unprecedented amounts of criticism. The reaction in the press to the project has already been well studied but with a focus primarily on the figure of the

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Cover page of Jacques-Antoine Dulaure, Réclamation d'un citoyen contre la nouvelle enceinte de Paris élevée par les fermiers généraux (1787). Gallica.bnf.fr/Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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architect, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, rather than the critic, Jacques-Antoine Dulaure.5 In spite of his widespread popularity and his pioneering role as an architectural critic, Dulaure’s career remains largely overlooked.6 What is most striking about Dulaure’s work is his deep and lasting commitment to redefining architecture as a public discipline oriented towards common good and social reform. Dulaure’s writing as an influential architectural critic in these tumultuous years introduced a specific trend of architectural criticism, what we would today call architectural journalism: a discourse produced by a journalist or a critic, published in popular media, and destined to a popular readership. Printed on both sides of the page and folded in half, Dulaure’s thirty-two-page pamphlet begins by sounding the alarm on environmental and urban concerns. Following recent aériste trends, he argues that the new barriers would dramatically halt the horizontal flow of winds through the city, leading to massive epidemics and even to ‘the death of millions of citizens’.7 Dulaure then describes how the positioning of the wall would greatly increase the size of Paris leading to sprawling decay and self-destruction ‘in the same way that Babylon, Athens, Thebes and Carthage, found in their grandeur the inner principle of their own destruction’.8 Whether or not these pseudoscientific arguments were fact or fiction, they were extremely effective in rallying all Parisians, regardless of social or political status, into a unified movement enraged by the prospect of living within the territorial confines of such putrid atmospheric conditions. Beyond these environmental arguments, Dulaure’s most original critique was to underline and vehemently denounce the offensiveness of the walls on symbolical grounds. Taking on the voice of the layman, he calls for his readers to rise up against the architecture of ‘public outrage’.9 Dulaure grounds his argument in the well-known theory of caractère, according to which the appearance of a building must be coherent with its function. As the wall’s purpose was to collect taxes from a humble and poor population, according to Dulaure, its architecture should be as understated and as ‘invisible’ as possible.10 Instead, Ledoux adopted a highly monumental style, naming his fiftyfive toll gates Propylées in reference to the gates of the Acropolis. The architect designed each gate with its own monumental typology, carefully adapting each barrier to its site and to the type of merchandise that was to pass through. The sophistication and the careful ornamentation of the barriers stood in shocking contrast to the misery and the humility of the people. On the eve of the revolution, Dulaure articulates the new frontiers of the intolerable – an aesthetics of outrage – calling out those in power and instigating action against them. To mobilize a vast general public and reach out even to large numbers of illiterates, he borrowed methods from popular theatre, making use of catchy epigrams. The most memorable Le mur murant Paris rend Paris murmurant plays with the multiple meaning of the French word mur (at once ‘wall’, ‘murmuring’, or ‘grumbling’). This rhyme echoed through the streets of Paris as a mounting cry to action. In the wake of Richard Wittman’s work on architecture and print culture, I would like to insist on the operative role of architectural criticism during that period of deep social transformation.11 Immediately following the attacks of 11, 12 and 13 July 1789, a series of engravings were produced to mediatize the burning of the barriers. These engravings spread like wildfire, reaching a massive, eager and disseminated public. The printed press allowed all Parisians – and even all French people – to recognize themselves in the images of an empowered anonymous crowd taking over the barriers, climbing on fences and colonnades while flames and smoke poured out of the windows of the ornamented toll gates, thus announcing the birth of a new world order.12 Dulaure’s early example of journalistic architectural criticism communicated a clear and strikingly modern concept. He raised his voice against the wall and awoke all Parisians to the idea that each citizen is responsible to criticize, to accept or to refuse the configuration of the built environment.

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Jean-François Janinet, Evénement du 12 juillet 1789: incendie de la nouvelle barrière des Gobelins. Le feu fut mis dans le même instant à toutes les autres barrières: on en chassa tous & les commis et l’on en brula tous les registres (Paris: J.F. Janinet, 1789–1791). Gallica.bnf.fr/Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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Pierre-Gabriel Berthault and Jean-Louis Prieur, Barriere de la Conférence incendiée: le 12 juillet 1789 (Paris, 1802). Gallica.bnf.fr/Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Notes 1 Jacques-Antoine Dulaure, Réclamation d’un citoyen contre la nouvelle enceinte de Paris élevée par les fermiers généraux (Paris, 1787), 27. 2 Ibid., 5. 3 See Anthony Vidler, ‘The rhetoric of monumentality: Ledoux and the barrières of Paris’, AA Files, no. 7 (September 1984): 14–29. 4 Jacques-Antoine Dulaure, Tableau de la vie politique d’un représentant du peuple (Paris), 4. Cited by Marcellin Boudet, Les conventionnels d’Auvergne. Dulaure (Paris: Aubry, 1874), 66. 5 Jean-Marc Peysson, ‘Le mur d’enceinte des fermiers-généraux à Paris et la population parisienne: Étude à travers la presse (1784–1791)’, in Michael Petzet (ed.), Soufflot et l’architecture de lumières (Paris: CNRS, 1980), 290–297; Daniel Rabreau, ‘Les attendus de la critique: de l’Histoire et du style’, in Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (ed.) (1736–1806), L’Architecture et les Fastes du Temps

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THE PRINTED AND THE BUILT (Paris: Centre Ledoux; Bordeaux: W. Blake & Co., Art & arts, 2000), 259–274; Vidler, ‘The rhetoric of monumentality’.

6 Dulaure published a wide variety of books, including a famous History of Paris in 10 volumes, a groundbreaking work in French ethnography with the Académie Celtique and two provocative essays on frontiers, phallic cults and primitive architecture. See Christina Contandriopoulos, ‘Retour au monolithique: Jacques-Antoine Dulaure (1755–1835) et la territorialisation de l’architecture primitive’, (PhD dissertation, McGill University, Montreal, 2011). 7 Dulaure, Réclamation d’un citoyen contre la nouvelle enceinte de Paris élevée par les fermiers généraux, 26. 8 Ibid., 17. 9 Ibid., 6. 10 Ibid., 21. 11 Richard Wittman, ‘Architecture, space, and abstraction in the eighteenth-century French public sphere’, Representations, vol. 102, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 1–26; Richard Wittman, Architecture, print culture, and the public sphere in eighteenth-century France (New York and London: Routledge, 2007). 12 Recently, historians Burstin and Markovic have re-interpreted the burning of the barriers as equally important events as the celebrated storming of the Bastille. Momcilo Markovic, ‘La Révolution aux barrières: l’incendie des barrières de l’octroi à Paris en juillet 1789’, Annales historiques de la Révolution française, no. 372 (2013): 27–48; Haim Burstin, Une Révolution à l’œuvre: le faubourg Saint-Marcel (1789–1794) (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2005).

Description Adrian Forty

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anguage, as Roland Barthes pointed out, is, by nature, fictional.1 In spite of all the stratagems that we resort to so as to give language authenticity – logic, signed documents, sworn affidavits and so on – language always tends to revert to the fictional. This is particularly apparent when we compare language to architecture’s other principal media: building, drawing and photography. Building’s physical presence condemns it to reality, and try as baroque architects might to escape from this, they could never quite succeed. Photography, at least until the era of digital manipulation, was always tied by its indexicality to the time and place when the film was exposed, and confirmed what was there at that particular moment. But if building, drawing and photography are all, in one way or another, truth-telling media, language is the odd one out. Yet even though language is impotent towards its own authenticity, it is good at communicating generalities; building and photography on the other hand, strong on authenticity, are hopeless when it comes to conveying generalities, while drawing scores rather better, though not as well as language in this particular contest. In Words and Buildings I argued that within architecture, language is not inferior to building, drawing or photography; it is simply different. Whereas building, as a medium, is replete with authenticity, language’s tendency is towards the fictional – but this is not necessarily a defect. Language can deal with things that escape building, drawing or photography, while these other media can do things that language cannot. This is not a reason to denigrate language, but rather we need to respect language for what it is good at, and not condemn it for what it fails to do.

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G.B. Lenardi, ‘Allegory of the Arts of Architectural Representation’. From G.G. Ciampini, Vetera Monimenta (Rome, 1690). Heidelberg University Library, Ciampini1690bd1, frontispiece – CC-BY-SA 3.0.

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I started Words and Buildings with two seventeenth-century images. The first, Lenardi’s frontespiece to Ciampini’s Vetera Monimenta of 1690, shows four of the arts of representation – painting, drawing, writing and printing – resisting time’s destruction of architecture. The notion that writing survives better than monuments has a long history – Horace claimed his Odes would outlast the pyramids – but the personification of the various media is typically baroque.2 The other image that I took was from the English seventeenth-century writer John Evelyn, who characterized architecture as consisting of four people: the architectus ingenio, the superintending architect, a man of ideas, with a knowledge of history, geometry and drawing techniques; the architectus sumptuarius, the patron, ‘with a full and overflowing purse’; the architectus manuarius, the tradesman; and the architectus verborum, the architect of words, whose task was to expound the work and interpret it to others.3 Evelyn included himself in the last category, but in addition to writing about architecture, Evelyn also wrote on many other topics, and is now probably best known for his Diary, covering seventy years of his life between 1620 and 1690. The Diary was not published in his lifetime, and not until 1955 was it printed in full.4 The early part of Evelyn’s Diary recounts his travels in France and Italy as a young man in the 1640s, and in the later years he records many conversations and observations. It is not, however, a diary as we know it, for though it follows a day-by-day format, the early years in France and Italy, though probably based on notes taken at the time, were written some twenty years later. Evelyn’s use of the diary form was new and experimental, with few literary precedents – and what makes it relevant to us is his employment of the form for the purposes of architectural description. His choice of the diary mode may well have been connected with his membership of the newly founded Royal Society, whose objectives were to promote scientific investigation and geographical exploration. A problem recognized early on within the Royal Society was the need in both fields of research to find a satisfactorily accurate language of description, for it was no good recording either scientific experiments or geographical discoveries if the language used to report them distorted or was untruthful to the findings. Given that ‘language is by nature fictional’, this was always a risk. Very soon after the foundation of the Royal Society in 1660, the question of the language of scientific description was considered, and various recommendations made for experimenters and explorers to follow. Writing specifically about the need for better topographical description, Robert Hooke, the Secretary of the Society and Evelyn’s friend, observed that while we must acknowledge many excellent, ingenious and truly Philosophical Histories of the Architecture, and grandeur, and situation of Royal and Noble Palaces, Cities, Cittadels, Fortifications, Towns, Bridges, Rivers, fertile valleys, Rocks and Mountains … some of these have a Consideration apart from Physiology, and do rather belong to arts and artifices: And some writers are more concerned for Panegyrics of the amenities of the place … But in our designed Natural History we have more need of severe, full and punctuall Truth, than of Romances and Panegyrics.5 ‘Full and punctual truth’ was to be attained through a non-distorting style of writing that would communicate the phenomena observed by the scientist or traveller as if the reader were observing it for themselves. Hooke remarked how the reports of the recently discovered lands of North America were in many cases more reliable than those of the more familiar wonders of Europe, because the accounts of them, written in the plain language of the seamen who had discovered

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them, were free from art and artifice, romance or panegyric. The advice given was that scientists and travellers should record observations in a notebook at the time they were made, and then write these up into a narrative later. Evelyn’s Diary belongs to this newly emerging category of scientific writing. A difficulty faced by the scientist or explorer was to convince the reader of the veracity of the report. How was the reader to know that the writer was telling the truth and had not simply made it up? Given the mendacity of language, the reader would always be inclined to suspect this. Three general strategies emerged to give authenticity to the written reports. The first was to convince the reader of the author’s virtue, to persuade the reader of their honesty and trustworthiness; this was often done by reference to the author’s own past, their parentage, education, etc. – verifiable facts, supported by indications of the authors’ devotion to their metier, their social uprightness and so on. The second was to provide clues to indicate that the author had observed the phenomena himself, so as to say, ‘I was there’. The third strategy was the adoption of a deliberately plain style of language, without art or artifice.6 The diary, as a genre, belongs within the general attempt to develop a truth-telling form of writing. The daily entries persuade the reader of its authenticity; the sequence of dates adds to the reader’s conviction that the author was there. The inclusion of observations that are incidental to the main object of interest helps to confirm that the author was really present and saw exactly what he describes. Evelyn’s Diary was an experiment in this new genre of truth-telling – but Evelyn also had a particular concern, with cities and architecture, for he was architectus verborum, he had made it his task to write architecture. How did he go about this? A single example, Evelyn’s description of Genoa, will give some idea of his approach: GENOA Octob: 17 [1644] … we went to vieue the rarities: The Citty is built in the hollow, or boosome of a Mountain, whose ascent is very steepe, high & rocky; so as from the Lanterne, & Mole, to the hill it represents the Shape of a Theater; the Streetes & buildings so ranged one above the other; as our seates are in Playhouses: but by reason of their incomparable materials, beauty & structure: never was any artificial sceane more beautifull to the eye of the beholder; nor is any place certainely in the World, so full for the bignesse of well designed & stately Palaces7; In this passage, Evelyn emphasizes the ‘I was there’ – ‘we went to view the rarities’. He uses a metaphor, that of the theatre, to describe the city, as if seen from the stage; but then he writes, ‘never was any artificial scene more beautiful to the eye of the beholder’. ‘Scene’ in English had not at this date yet acquired its common meaning of ‘landscape’, but referred only to the theatre, so here Evelyn suddenly inverts his metaphor; whereas the city had been the auditorium and the harbour the stage, now the city becomes the stage, made up of scenery, observed from the harbour. This about-turn gives to the reader a vivid sense that they are themselves indeed the ‘beholder’.8 This example is enough to show something of how the new genre of truth-telling was deployed, as part of the ‘art of describing’ of the late seventeenth-century scientific revolution. But no sooner had the English developed this whole new way of writing, to give language authenticity, than a most extraordinary and unexpected inversion took place, when this very same genre of truthful reportage was seized upon and appropriated within the new genre of the novel.9 Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, is often regarded as the first English novel. What sets it apart

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from all previous fictional writing, from romance, is that the reader presumes that it is a true story – everything about the story is constructed so as to give veracity to it. To create Robinson Crusoe, Defoe took the existing genre of travel writing, the describing of voyages, with all its apparatus for guaranteeing truthfulness – the honesty and probity of the teller, plain language, a definitive calendar of dates, precise topographical description – and used it to tell a story that was wholly imaginary. Only the pre-existence of this established genre made it possible for Defoe to create the balance of uncertainty between veracity and make-believe upon which the novel as a form depends. Crusoe’s story, told as a narrative, recounts in great detail his shipwreck, his choice of a site for his dwelling place, the excavation of his cave, his tent, the building of his stockade and the colonization of his summer house, or ‘villa’, located in another part of the island. Not only is the process of construction described in detail – and Defoe recounts Crusoe’s frustrations and failures as well as the successful outcomes – but so too is the manner of his occupation of his various residences. Defoe’s Crusoe was, as Anthony Vidler has pointed out, well grounded in the theory of architecture and its origins, as told by Vitruvius and his English commentator, Henry Wotton, in The Elements of Architecture of 1624.10 The story is in part an allegory of the ancient story of the birth of architecture, but the architectural descriptions are more vivid and detailed than anything to be found in the probable architectural sources. In recounting Crusoe’s various dwellings Defoe borrows the very same language of description developed by Evelyn and others to render places and architecture into words, but uses them for a wholly opposite purpose, to make the reader believe in the reality of a make-believe world. Suddenly the whole structure of truthful description, of architecture, of foreign lands, of scientific experiments, so laboriously constructed by the Royal Society, collapses into fiction. Language reverts to its natural, fictional state. And, for architectural theorists, there was a further elaboration, for the story of the origins of architecture, itself mythical, by being incorporated into a fiction took on an authenticity and an immediacy that were entirely lacking in the texts of Vitruvius and his successors. It needed fiction to give reality to a myth.11

Notes 1 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (La Chambre Claire, 1980), trans. R. Howard (London: Fontana, 1984), 87. 2 On the survival of writing over monuments, see Catherine Edwards, Writing Rome: Textual Approaches to the City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 3 John Evelyn, ‘An Account of Architects and Architecture’, in R. Fréart de Chambray (ed.), A Parallel of the Ancient Architecture with the Modern, transl. J. Evelyn (London: T. Roycroft, 1664). 4 John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E.S. de Beer, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955). 5 ‘The Preface’, Philosophical Transactions 11, no. 123 (1676): 552. 6 See M. McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), chapter 3. 7 Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn, vol. 2, 172–73. 8 For Evelyn’s use of metaphor see also Anne Hultzsch, Architecture, Travellers and Writers: Constructing Histories of Perception 1640–1950 (Oxford: Legenda, 2014), chapter 4.

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9 McKeon makes this connection between the development of scientific writing and the origin of the novel. 10 Anthony Vidler, The Writing of the Walls (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 1987), 12–14. 11 A longer version of this essay is published as ‘Architectural Description, Fact or Fiction?’ in Jørgen Dehs, Martin Esbensen and Claus Peder Pedersen (eds), When Architects and Designers Write Draw Build? (Aarhus: Arkitektskolens Forlag, 2013), 188–209.

Encyclopedia Helge Jordheim

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n the most famous encyclopedia in the Western tradition, the Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts, or in the original, Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, better known as l’Encyclopédie, the entry on architecture begins rather innocuously: ‘Architecture is in general the art of building’.1 Then, in line with the ambition to be ‘systematic’ it distinguishes between ‘three types’ of architecture: civil, military and naval. Only ‘civil architecture’ is treated at length in the entry, whereas readers interested in the two other types are referred – by the famous method of the renvois, cross-references – to the entries on ‘Fortification’ and ‘Marine’ respectively. So far, so good. But in the third sentence of the entry something surprising happens. Rather than making another topical or definitional claim about architecture, the author provides a commentary on the structure and the basic mechanism of the encyclopedia as a whole. All of a sudden the entry is transformed into a meta-entry, even a kind of user’s manual: Referring back to the systematic division between three types of architecture, it reads: ‘The location of each within the Encyclopedia differs. See the Tree at the end of the Preliminary Discourse’. Voyez l’Arbre. See the Tree. The imperative Voyez is a returning feature in l’Encyclopédie. Indeed, the entire system of the renvois, establishing cross-references between various entries and thus various pieces of knowledge in the seventeen volumes of text, rests on this deictic form of the verb: Voyez l’art. FORTIFICATION. Voyez l’art. de la MARINE. But Voyez l’Arbre is different, since it does not refer the reader to another entry, but to the very structure of the encyclopedia: l’Ordre encyclopédique, which in a somewhat clunky English translation is rendered as ‘the location of each within the Encyclopedia’. In other words, every one of the 74,000 entries in the Encyclopédie could meaningfully have contained a similar reference, to the specific location of this piece of knowledge in the order of the encyclopedia. But in reality only two of them do: one is the probably most

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read, translated and reprinted entry in the entire work, namely Encyclopédie, in which the editor himself, Denis Diderot, writes about the genre and about his ambition for the project at hand – a full-fledged meta-entry. The other is the entry on architecture, written by the renowned architect, architectural theorist and teacher at l’Académie Royale d’Architectures, Jacques-François Blondel. Having seemingly nothing in common at first glance, these two entries are connected by the fact that they both contain explicit references to l’Arbre. How come? First, we have to note that the diagram that concludes the so-called ‘Preliminary discourse’ to l’Encyclopédie, written by Diderot’s co-editor, the mathematician Jean d’Alembert, does not show many resemblances to a tree. A reader would be hard-pressed to recognize trunk, branches or leaves. Nor does the word ‘tree’ appear in the heading: Systême figuré des connaissances humaines, or in the English translation, ‘Map of Human Knowledge’. Reading d’Alembert’s preface, where he tries to figure out the system, the order, or even the machine he and his co-editor have placed at the centre of their collection of all knowledge, he appears rather unhappy with the tree as organizing principle. The tree as system of knowledge was originally conceived by Francis Bacon in Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning, Divine and Human (1605) and put into practice by Ephraim Chambers in another dictionary, which is said to establish the genre of the modern encyclopaedia and was the model for l’Encyclopédie: the Cyclopædia, or, An universal dictionary of arts and sciences, published in 1728. At first d’Alembert seems to agree with his predecessors, affirming that ‘after reviewing the different parts of our knowledge and the characteristics that distinguish them, it remains for us only to make a genealogical or encyclopedic tree which will gather the various branches of knowledge under a single point of view and will serve to indicate their origin and their relationship to one another’. To make a tree is to make a spatial structure, in which all the different fragments of knowledge, presented alphabetically in entries, are put in relation to each other, above or below, to the left, or to the right. But then d’Alembert starts doubting his own procedure, even calling it ‘slavish’: Instead ‘the generation of ideas’ should be likened to ‘a tortuous road which the intellect enters without quite knowing what direction to take’, so discontinuous and full obstacles and barriers that ‘an encyclopedic tree which attempted to portray it would be disfigured, indeed utterly destroyed’. Another spatial, indeed architectural, structure comes to his mind: not the tree, but ‘the labyrinth’.2 Now, let us turn back to ‘Architecture’ and to the question why this entry is one of only two that contain a cross-reference to the initial diagram in the work, the Systême figuré.3 One the one hand, ‘architecture’ is the only word that appears at three different locations in the table, even in two different columns, attributed to the human faculties of ‘Reason’ and ‘Imagination’ respectively. As a branch of human imagination, architecture belongs to ‘Poetry’, which can be both ‘Sacred’ and ‘Profane’. Architecture straddles the narrative and dramatic genres, maybe less the parable, alongside music, painting sculpture and engraving. To include architecture in ‘Poetry’ was an innovative move compared to Bacon and Chambers, who both placed it in the category of mathematics. However, only ‘Civil Architecture’ is counted among the poetic arts, whereas ‘Military’ and ‘Naval Architecture’ are located on the branch of mathematics, part of the ‘Science of Nature’, which is again part of ‘Philosophy’. In the table of the Systême figuré, mathematics comes in three forms: ‘pure’, ‘mixed’ and ‘physicomathematical’. Interestingly, the two remaining forms of architecture are not placed on the same branch om mathematics: one is ‘pure’, the other is

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‘Systême figure des connaissances humaines’ (‘Map of Human Knowledge’), Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (Paris, 1751). Courtesy of University of Chicago: ARTFL Encyclopédie Project.

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‘mixed’, a term introduced by Bacon to denote subjects such as optics, astronomy, harmonics, mechanics, as well as cosmography and music.4 Whereas ‘Military Architecture’ appears as a form of ‘Pure Mathematics’, more precisely, as one of two types of ‘Elementary Geometry’, alongside ‘Tactics’, ‘Naval Architecture’ belongs to ‘Mixed Mathematics’, branching out into ‘Mechanics’, ‘Dynamics’ and eventually ‘Hydrodynamics’, alongside ‘Hydraulics’ and ‘Navigation’. Of course, the distribution of various forms of architecture across the table provides information about architectural knowledge in the eighteenth century, in relation to other forms of knowledge. Architecture was both art and science, both theoretical and applied, was generated by both reason and imagination, and, maybe most strikingly, was seen as closely linked to other, today completely unrelated forms of representing and taking possession of space, such as military tactics and naval navigation. However, the many locations of architecture and the many and surprising roads leading to it are also a perfect illustration of difficulties in creating an ordre encyclopédique, a stable spatial order of all knowledge, a system, or, indeed, a tree. As d’Alembert puts it: Impelled, first of all, by its needs and by those of the body to which it is united, the intelligence studies the first objects that present themselves to it. It delves as far as it can into the knowledge of these objects, soon meets difficulties that obstruct it, and whether through hope or even through despair of surmounting them, plunges on to a new route; now it retraces its footsteps, sometimes crosses the first barriers only to meet new ones; and passing rapidly form one object to another, it carries through a sequence of operations on each of them at different intervals, as if by jumps. The discontinuity of these operations is a necessary effect of the very generation of ideas.5 Finally, both the sprawling and often discontinuous roads that anyone who wants to know about architecture must take, and the engagement with various forms of space implied in this venture, are hints at why the entry ‘Architecture’ seems to hold a key to understanding l’Encyclopédie as a whole. The editors Diderot and d’Alembert were never content just offering a multi-volume alphabetical list of everything known to man; they also wanted to create a system, an order, indeed, an architecture of knowledge. Tables, trees, maps and labyrinths are all architectural diagrams deployed to organize not just the space of the page, but the space of the world.

Notes 1 Jacques-François Blondel, ‘Architecture’, In French: Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc., Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert (eds), University of Chicago: ARTFL Encyclopédie Project (Spring 2016 edition), Robert Morrissey and Glenn Roe (eds), http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu/. In English: The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project, translated by Reed Benhamou (Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, 2003). http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0000.192 (accessed 6 June 2017). Originally published as ‘Architecture’, in Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol. 1 (Paris: Briasson, 1751), 617–618. 2 Jean-Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert, ‘Preliminary Discourse’, in The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project, translated by Richard N. Schwab and Walter E. Rex (Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, 2009). http://hdl.handle.net/2027/

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spo.did2222.0001.083 (accessed 6 June 2017). Originally published as ‘Discourse Préliminaire’, in Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol. 1 (Paris: Briasson, 1751), i–xlv. 3 For a further discussion of diagrams in l’Encyclopédie see John Bender and Michael Marinnan, The Culture of Diagram (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). 4 Cf. Richard Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions. Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 64. 5 d’Alembert, ‘Preliminary Discourse’.

Exhibition Léa-Catherine Szacka

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n the nineteenth century, the illustrated press acted as a form of urban encyclopaedia: showing architecture, public spaces and ephemeral structures, day by day, as they appeared, were transformed, and eventually torn down.1 On the printed page, ephemeral architecture, more often produced in the context of world exhibitions, was presented as a container of the spectacular in which the fleeting and the static were not mutually exclusive. The 1867 Exposition Universelle d’Art et d’Industrie was the second world fair to be held in Paris under Napoléon III and the first of many to take place on the Champ-de-Mars.2 Its main attraction, the Palais de l’Omnibus, was envisioned as ‘an attempt to master the universe’.3 A building of approximately 230,000 square metres, designed by Frédéric LePlay and built by JeanBaptiste Krantz and Leopold Hardy with the help of the young Gustav Eiffel, its aim was to confirm France’s position as a highly industrialized nation. This universal ideal answered to an unstable political context: whereas the 1855 Exposition Universelle had been meant to manifest the new regime of Napoléon III, the 1867 exhibition was arranged under an economically and politically impaired government. This state of affairs was made evident by the international jury’s chairman Michel Chevalier´s apprehensive statement that the exhibition would be ‘a meteorite, bright, but momentary, against a horizon notifying a dark and stormy destiny’.4 The Palais’s ovoid shape derived from the model of the Roman arena and the Renaissance ideal city. It dictated the internal organizational principles: a series of concentrically organized rings or galleries ordered the exhibits in parallel arcs and by nationality in the radiating areas.5 An ode to industry, the Palais aimed at showcasing national production, foremost of all that of construction. Indeed, as pointed out by Pieter van Wesemael, the Palais de l’Omnibus was much more impressive, in technological terms, than the Crystal Palace: it consisted of 35,000 tons of

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‘Aspect général de l’exposition universelle, vue prise du Trocadero’, L’Illustration, 6 April 1867. © L’Illustration.

steel – all mechanically produced modular ‘prefab elements that only needed to be assembled at the location itself’.6 The temporary building was also equipped with all modern amenities: water and gas pipes, gas lamps and an underground ventilation system. But despite this festival of technical prowess, the building was inevitably doomed to destruction as it was necessary, at the end of the exhibition, to free up the Champ-de-Mars. In L’Illustration, readers were kept well informed of the Palais’s construction process. From the installation of the first column on 3 April 1866, up until the building’s completion in November of the same year, texts and engravings reported on the erection of the temporary yet monumental construction, putting the act of building at the centre of a feuilleton-like series of articles that most certainly captivated the readership of the time. On 17 March 1866 a double spread engraving showed a general view of the earthworks and future construction site populated by groups of flâneurs, gathering on the other side of the pont d’Iéna, admiring, from the Trocadéro heights, the spectacle at a distance.7 Approximately two months later, L’Illustration published another image reporting on the progress on the building site.8 The engraving revealed colossal iron pillars coming out of the ground and thus demonstrating the superiority of the material: ‘This new exhibition palace exemplifies the way in which iron will invade more and more buildings. All main parts are made of iron frames. What pillars! One meter large and twenty five meters high!’9 On 16 June, another double spread engraving featured an aerial view of the Champ-de-Mars with the structure

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‘Vue générale des travaux de terassement exécutés pour la construction du Palais de l’Exposition de 1867’, L’Illustration, 17 March 1866. © L’Illustration.

starting to reveal its ovoid shape.10 Each time, images were accompanied by a detailed report from the construction site. On 25 August, another full-page engraving showed the building site with dozens of men at work, focusing on the almost completed structure of the central nave and giving a very first hint at what the interior of the Palais would look like.11 A month later, on 29 September, L’Illustration published a similar view yet showing an intermediate gallery. The image was accompanied by a text proclaiming that not only was the Palais a wonder of scientific and industrial civilization that would remain as an indelible sign of the century, but, moreover, that the building was ‘a magical creation [féérique] that stands there, as if by enchantment’.12 From November, once the structure had been completed, a series of engravings recorded the Palais, placing it within a larger context. All these images contributed to make the building legendary but also to record it for future generations. If in his 672-page Rapport sur l’Exposition universelle de 1867 à Paris, LePlay mentions attempts to save the Palais, dismantling and rebuilding it elsewhere, similar to London’s Crystal Palace,13 none of these efforts were successful, and the demolition process started, with delay, on 1 March 1868.14 Chaotic, the clearance of the Palais cost several workers their life: as reported by LePlay, the demolition site resembled a battlefield in which, from the 182 men employed, 3 died while 76 were wounded, 19 severely.15 Yet, despite the spectacle of many deaths and wounded, none of L’Illustration’s reports on the construction of the Palais ever mentioned the building’s destruction, and neither did it insist on its ephemerality, making permanency less and less relevant for architecture. The omission – intended or not – of such an intrinsic characteristic of the building is surprising and reveals something compelling about the coverage of architecture by the new illustrated press: in L’Illustration, architecture featured as event and yet, as it seems, could not avoid being permanent. As a consequence, on the pages of the illustrated press, ephemeral and permanent were not antonymous, but constituted a whole meant to enchant the public through the paradox at play. Built permanence, in this case, was achieved on the printed page rather than through iron and stone, making paper longer wearing than even those columns – with an exclamation mark: ‘One meter large and twenty five meters high!’ – of the Palais d’Omnibus.

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‘Le Palais de l’exposition universelle de 1867 – Aspect des travaux dans la grande nef circulaire’, L’Illustration, 25 August 1866. © L’Illustration.

Notes 1 Ségolène Le Men, ‘Représentation architecturales dans l’Illustration’, in Jean-Michel Leniaud and Béatrice Bouvier (eds), Les périodiques d’architecture XVIIIe-XXe siècle: Recherche d’une méthode critique d’analyse (Paris: École de Chartres, 2001), 65. 2 Brita Brenna, ‘Verden som ting og forestilling: Verdensutstillinger og den norske deltakelsen 1851–1900’. Det Historisk-Filosofiske Fakultet, Universitetet i Oslo, Unipub, 2002, 115. 3 Pascal Ory, Paris et ses expositions universelles: Architectures, 1855–1937 (Paris: Editions du Patrimoine; Catalogues exposition edition, 2009), 74. 4 Brenna, ‘Verden som ting og forestilling’, 114. 5 Pieter van Wesemael, Architecture of Instruction and Delight: A Social Historical Analysis of World Exhibitions as a Didactic Phenomenon (Rotterdam: 010 Publisher, 2001), 261, 263 and 274. 6 van Wesemael, Architecture of Instruction and Delight, 263, 262. 7 L’Illustration, n.1203, tome XLVII, 17 March 1866, 168. All translations are by the author. 8 L’Illustration, n.1212, tome XLVII, 19 May 1866, 309. This engraving offered more or less the same viewpoint as the famous painting A View of the 1867 Exposition Universelle (Vue de l’exposition universelle de 1867) by Édouard Manet. 9 L’Illustration, n.1212, tome XLVII, 19 May 1866, 311. 10 L’Illustration, n.1216, tome XLVII, 16 June 1866, 376. 11 L’Illustration, n.1226, tome XLVIII, 25 August 1866, 121. 12 L’Illustration, n.1231, tome XLVII, 29 September 1866, 202.

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13 Rapport sur l’Exposition universelle de 1867, à Paris: précis des opérations et listes des collaborateurs: avec un appendice sur l’avenir des expositions, la statistique des opérations, les documents officiels et le plan de l’Exposition / Commission impériale – Paris: imp. impériale, 1869. 14 Rapport sur l’Exposition universelle de 1867, 217. 15 Rapport sur l’Exposition universelle de 1867, 220.

Feuilleton Marit Grøtta

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he newspaper is a fascinating space with a topography of its own. The reader makes her way through the pages, following her own impulses, allowing her gaze to wander in different directions. And just as the nineteenth-century flâneur took a stroll in the city, making his own trajectory, the nineteenth-century reader took a stroll on the newspaper pages, glancing at the advertisements, browsing through some news pieces and then checking out the feuilleton section. Yet, the newspaper topography changed during the nineteenth century. At the time when Paris was transformed by Baron Haussmann’s urban renovation program, the space of the newspaper page underwent its own restructuring process.1 It all began in 1836, when the newspaper La Presse made room for le roman-feuilleton and advertisements.2 What had been a respectable and serious medium up to that point was transformed into a popular product sold for profit. The space of the newspaper changed accordingly; a modern and commercially oriented newspaper required shorter pieces and higher speed. Both the flâneur and the newspaper reader were thus encouraged to move faster and not to linger in any corner. An important factor in this redistribution of the newspaper space was the feuilleton-section, the lower segment of the newspaper page. It now became a contested field, symbolizing the conflict between serious journalism and saleable entertainment. Around 1800, it had been devoted to literary varia, such as art criticism and book reviews. However, after the success of La Presse in 1836, the feuilleton became synonymous with le roman-feuilleton and associated with commercial literature.3 There, novels of various quality were parcelled out and presented with the promise ‘to be continued’. This became the main venue for literature in nineteenth-century newspapers, and Balzac, Maupassant and others contributed to its reputation, whereas a number of minor writers rather contributed to its disrepute.

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Frontpage of the French newspaper La Presse, 26 August 1862, featuring Charles Baudelaire’s prose poems in the feuilleton section. Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

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Yet, even if the feuilleton section was separated from the other newspaper pieces, the dividing line between fact and fiction in the newspaper was all but clear. What filled the pages in addition to news pieces (often reproduced from other newspapers) and advertisements for such things as chocolate, weapon and lotto (printed on the last pages) was a hurdle of semi-literary texts conveying impressions from the streets, rumours from the theatres and anecdotes from near and far. The ‘chronique parisienne’ was typical; it specialized in urban motifs, providing everyday sketches from modern life.4 Important was also the ‘fait divers’ section of the newspapers, nonverified stories of miscellaneous quality, conveyed to entertain the reader. Other columns entitled ‘bruits’ (noise) or ‘échos’ provided news and rumours in a witty form. In addition, the physiologie was influential, even if it was not printed in the newspaper; it was the haute-école of the feuilleton, providing literary descriptions of the types of people one could encounter in the urban landscape.5 The newspaper thus appeared as a montage of short texts; some committed to veracity, others written to entertain and create literary effect. Nineteenth-century authors lived with this conflict between commercial journalism and the ‘noble’ field of literature, yet they also acknowledged their interdependence. Honoré de Balzac wrote a parody on the new journalistic ideals in his great novel Illusions perdues (Lost Illusions, 1837–43), himself being a great provider of novel-feuilletons to French newspapers and habitually short of money. He tells the story of an aspiring poet who ends up making a successful career as a journalist, his journalistic specialty being poetic pieces in prose capturing impressions from the street. The novel also describes how rumours and anecdotes are made up by the journalists to fill the columns. Indeed, ‘fake news’ and doubtful news pieces have a long lineage. Charles Baudelaire was also highly aware of the changing topography of the newspaper. Even if he despised its vulgar language and commercial editing principles, he published literary pieces and essays in various newspapers and journals. It is safe to say that he maintained an ambivalence with respect to the newspapers. When he sent a series of ‘short prose poems’ to the newspaper La Presse in 1862, he explained to the editor in a letter how well this poetic form would function in the modern newspaper: ‘Just think what admirable advantages such a combination offers to everyone, to you, to me, and to the reader. We can interrupt wherever we wish, I, my rêverie, you, the manuscript, the reader, his reading’.6 The prose pieces were printed in the feuilleton section of La Presse, introduced by Baudelaire’s letter. Most of them describe scenes and episodes from Parisian life, and in this regard they seem to be inspired by the semi-literary newspaper pieces. Yet, Baudelaire prose poems are always more bizarre, puzzling and wonderful. A decade later, the poet Stéphane Mallarmé launched his one man’s journal La Dernière mode (The latest fashion, 1874) in which he experimented with the surface of the newspaper, applying a large variety of fonts, sizes and illustrations. This journalistic endeavour must have translated into his most experimental book of poetry: A Coup de dés (A Throw of the Dice, 1897), where he distributed the words all over the page. With this publication, the space of poetry was changed forever. Linearity had been abandoned and the white space of the page acknowledged. In his reading of nineteenth-century Paris, Walter Benjamin expressed his concern with the new journalistic principles that developed during the nineteenth century.7 As he saw it, the newspaper induced a way of reading that made true experiences impossible. Nothing was allowed to last, take its time and be integrated into a bigger context; instead browsing and zapping became the norm. Yet, Benjamin also acknowledged the way fragmentary writing could challenge the dominance of

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the book and the hegemony of bourgeois culture.8 His own writing practice testifies to this; it was inspired by the literary journalism of his day. Nineteenth-century newspapers were part of a new visual culture, forming a symbiotic relationship with the city. Taking a walk in the modern city could be a confusing experience, but the newspapers guided the reader’s attention and provided frames for the interpretation of urban phenomena. Indeed, there is reason to believe that the nineteenth-century flâneur did not merely experience modern life by strolling about in the streets, but was also a dedicated newspaper reader.

Notes 1 This article is based on a chapter in my book Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics: The Gaze of the Flâneur and 19th-Century Media (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015). An important source is also Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, trans. Howard Eiland et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 2 Claude Bellanger et al. (eds), Histoire générale de la presse française, vol. 2 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1969), 114. 3 Lise Queffelec, Le Roman-feuilleton français au XIXe siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989), 11–12. 4 Marie-Ève Thérenty, La Littérature au quotidien: Poétiques journalistiques au XIXe siècle (Paris: Seuil, 2007), 242. 5 Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life, 67. 6 Charles Baudelaire, The Prose Poems and La Fanfarlo, trans. Rosemary Lloyd. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 30. 7 Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life, 173–74. 8 Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street, in Selected Writings, vol. 1, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 444.

Fiction Emma Cheatle

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n July 1848 the Chartist activist and poet Ernest Charles Jones was imprisoned at Tothill Fields for nineteen months. Repeatedly kept in solitary confinement ‘in a dark cell and fed on bread and water’, he was, more importantly, deprived of pen, ink and paper. Despite this, he scavenged materials and wrote what some consider ‘the finest poems in the English language’.1 He also made two little-known, yet extraordinary, juxtaposed drawings: the industrial ‘English Town’ and the utopian, pastoral ‘Grecian City’. Jones had criticized other Chartists for using art to ‘sugar the pill’ and ‘pander to the public’s sensuality’.2 In contrast, his own illustrations, although fictional, were biting. Claiming to have made them using his own blood, they served to illuminate the rawness of his message rather than soften it. Criticizing capitalist industrialization Jones wrote, ‘machinery is to facilitate production, and lighten the work of the producer, instead of which it has been used to displace labour, to render fewer men necessary, to turn numbers adrift, and to make work harder for those who remain employed’.3 In ‘English Town’ this dehumanizing industrialization is portrayed as an urban accumulation of repetitious, uniform buildings, obliterating ground and sky. This massive brick machine, a dystopian form prescient of Orwell or Huxley, has absented its people, absorbing them into the black brick and rhythm of ever-lit windows. Capitalism’s destruction of society, then, was architectural. In contrast, the ‘Grecian City’ proposes a lost idyll of classical order set in an Arcadian landscape. Buildings, figures, water and sky are all drawn with the same light and lively touch. People commune in large groups in the foreground, albeit as an anonymous throng. Notably, in both images individuals are indistinguishable from the built forms that structure their lives. If Jones draws people as interchangeable with architecture, in his sole novel, Woman’s Wrongs. A Series of Tales (1852), he likewise uses interior spaces, buildings and streetscapes to define characters’ social class, opportunities and oppression. Written on his release from prison, each

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Ernest Jones, Drawing of a Nightmare Vision of a Northern English Town, c. 1848–50. © The British Library Board, c13341-66.

chapter is a fable-like yet realist story. Although a second edition was illustrated by Jones, it is through the writing itself that he successfully spatializes the novel. Placing fictional characters in factual spaces and buildings, Jones uses architecture not only as scene or backdrop but to

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Ernest Jones, Drawing of an Idealised Grecian City, c. 1848–50. © The British Library Board, c13341-67.

shape the narrative and its meaning.4 In chapter two, ‘The Young Milliner’, we meet anti-heroine, Anna, framed by the garret window of her lodging house. Although the house is ‘of an inferior grade’ (40), Anna has dressed the window with plants and a canary, and looks eagerly into a

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small square between her building and a large manor opposite. This houses the students of what appears to be the newly extended North London Hospital. The description of both dwellings – one dilapidated, the other preserved – intimates the developing urbanity and decay of Bloomsbury. Hereon, the purpose of the story is to trace the spaces through which Anna rises above her class, then dramatically falls. Initially, Anna is given hope, even if we are not fooled. Watching the medical students daily, one catches her eye. She and Charles begin to exchange looks across the square. He plays the flute in his window; she keeps a light burning in hers; the architecture constructs their relationship. Eventually, this translates into words, excursions and, unsurprisingly, love. Yet Anna lives precariously and, owing rent, her landlady ejects her. Homeless and destitute, she is mistaken for a prostitute when Charles finds her on the street, wet, cold and almost unconscious. He takes her into his lodgings where ‘a warm fire still glowed in the grate, quiet and rosy – the silver gleam of

North London Hospital exterior, artist unknown, 1834. University College London Records Office, PID 33441.

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a night-lamp mantled through its alabaster lotus over the damasked walls’ (54). She is brought to life by these fine surroundings and, predictably, the couple make love. Equally inevitably, they are discovered and Anna again is forced to leave. Charles uses his position and wealth to lodge her in a ‘respectable house. He loved her too well … to take her to a disreputable neighbourhood’ (58). Although passing her off as his sister, her position as a single woman is suspicious and the landlady ejects her. For a time in a slightly less well-heeled abode, the couple live openly in ‘domesticity’, yet the feckless Charles is tiring of her, his friends are cautioning him, his parents threatening to cut him off. Eventually, ‘once more … hunted from their refuge by the hounding spirit of society’ they ‘moved to a humbler and a duller lodging, in a remote part of town’ (60). Living in secrecy, Anna is now pregnant, and, as for many poor women, the pregnancy symbolizes the end. As her fortunes worsen so do the spaces she occupies. Whilst Charles is out, she is visited by his mother who attempts to pay her to leave. Charles fails to return and the story is abruptly cut. The story resumes some months later in the hospital. Anna’s baby has died and she is also on her deathbed. She is in the medical care of Arthur, Charles’s close friend, but Charles himself is absent. The nineteenth-century hospital, though charitable, was the last resort, symbolizing a complete lack of agency. Indeed, the story ends a page later with a startling denouement. We are in the hospital anatomical theatre with Arthur attending a dissection. Charles arrives as the cloth is removed from the body; he cries out and faints as he recognizes Anna on the slab. Anna’s journey around London – from the boarding house behind the hospital through a succession of increasingly poorer lodgings – terminates with her degrading position on the dissection table, possibly inside the same hospital. Where Jones’s political writings detail the dismantling of masculinity through capitalist labour, Woman’s Wrongs uses fictional narrative to emphasize the way societal limitations, particularly those around class, lead to appalling sufferings for women. The architecture serves not only as a sign of this, but as a contributory politicized factor. Anna is defined by the buildings she is forced to inhabit. She has little choice over these, and the increasing inferiority of each space corresponds to a further decrease in agency. Further, even more so than in the idealized prison drawings, architecture here is made equivalent to, represents the subsumption of, the body, climaxing with the image of cadaver as dissection slab. Finally, it is Arthur’s voice that becomes revelatory of Jones’s powerful weaving of body, place and class criticism. Describing the ultimate architectural space Anna will occupy, he states: ‘your body has ministered to the amusement and to the instruction of the favoured few: now to the pit that society gives you in the common graveyard’ (68).

Notes 1 Edmund Frow and Ruth Frow, ‘Ernest Jones Chartist and Socialist’, from The Working Class Movement Library, Salford, in gerald-massey.org.uk/Jones/b_woman%27s_wrongs.htm (retrieved 27 January 2017). 2 Rob Breton, The Oppositional Aesthetics of Chartist Fiction: Reading against the Middle Class Novel (London: Routledge, 2016), 20, note 5. 3 Frederick Leary, The Life of Ernest Jones (London, 1887), 51–52. 4 All page numbers following from Ian Haywood (ed.), Chartist Fiction, Vol. 2 Ernest Jones: Woman’s Wrongs (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001).

Handbook Petra Brouwer

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lmost without exception, the reviews of James Fergusson’s The Illustrated Handbook of Architecture (1855, reprinted in 1858) praised its cheapness and its handy size. ‘We have here, in two portable volumes, a truly rich manual of Architecture’, wrote The Athenaeum.1 The North British Review called the book ‘a marvel of cheapness, considering the mass of information contained, and the profusion of woodcuts’.2 The new genre of the handbook catered for the want of ‘easy access’ to the abundant material for a history of architecture that had become available by the middle of the nineteenth century.3 Thus far, the prize and size of the illustrated works pertaining to the history of architecture, such as Giovanni Piranesi’s architectural illustrations, or Jean-Baptiste Seroux D’Agincourt’s Histoire de l’art par les monuments (1823) had been an impediment to their use as a reference.4 ‘Who can find space to have two or more of these leviathans abroad at the same time?’, wondered a critic. The reader would also encounter another difficulty, namely the differences in descriptive and illustrative methods, measurements and scales.5 According to The Gentleman’s Magazine Fergusson had solved this problem by copying ‘the best plates in the best works upon architecture that have ever been published’ on a uniform, reduced scale.6 Fergusson’s publication made up part of an international succession of handbooks on the history of architecture, which were published from the 1840s onwards, including Louisa Tuthill, History of Architecture (1848), Thomas Talbot Bury, The History and Description of the Styles of Architecture of Various Countries, from the Earliest to the Present Period (1849), Wilhelm Lübke, Geschichte der Architektur (1855) and Franz Kugler, Geschichte der Baukunst (1856–73, 5 vol.).

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Plans and sections on a uniform scale (100 ft to an inch) in James Fergusson, The Illustrated Handbook of Architecture (1858, reprint of 1855). Because of its uniform scale, the reader could compare architectural monuments as diverse as the Palace at Zay, the Hypostyle Hall at Karnac and the Cathedrals of Reims and Amiens. Private collection.

The popularity of handbooks led The Literary Gazette to remark in 1856 that their appearance was typical for ‘our times’. Their function was to compare and to criticize, as opposed to the older encyclopaedia, which left the inductive process to the reader. Thus, Fergusson not only presented a collection of new facts, he also summed up the characteristics of various styles and passed judgement on their relative value. The critic of The Literary Gazette assumed that the vast subject of the history of architecture included styles ‘which would have filled with amazement and disgust the men of the last century, who believed in “the five orders” ’, such as the styles of Buddhist and Saiva architecture, and of China and America.7 Indeed, the publication of the first handbooks on the history of architecture marked the coming to an end of the universal, classical ideal of architectural beauty, as explicated in the classical treatises and books on the orders.8 Opposing classical canonic histories, the handbooks aimed to demonstrate that the beauty of architectural forms (‘styles’) no longer followed a fixed norm, but changed according to the circumstances under which they arose. This dynamic, historical aesthetic could no longer be described and depicted in terms of variations within a given architectural language but had to be explained in terms of its characteristic formal language, proportions, decoration and expression, as well as its historical and material conditions. Whereas in the order books the explanatory notes were brief and the instructions for practical application were key, in the handbooks the explanation itself took centre stage, with small illustrations inserted into the body text. Examples of the practical application of the new, historicist architectural language could

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be found in pattern books, which were arranged according to stylistic ornaments or elements like mouldings and window frames.9 The earliest handbooks of the 1840s were all written for the ‘general reader’10 – a large audience which was alternately specified as students, artists, architects, gentlemen, novelists, travellers and, in Tuthill’s book, women, to cultivate their taste and to appreciate the beauty of architecture as one of the liberal arts. The characteristics invariably mentioned related to the art of architecture were both its publicness – ‘its treasures are open to all, free as air’ – and its operating as an ‘index’ to the cultural level of society, revealing in its enduring form ‘the religion, government, social institutions, science and art of the mighty past’.11 Nineteenth-century architecture served as both a mirror of its age and an agent of change. The authors, consequently, presented their handbooks not only as a source of historical knowledge, but also as an instrument for the improvement of contemporary architecture, by educating patrons of the arts, architectural students and a culturally receptive public.12

Table of contents in Wilhelm Lübke, Geschichte der Architektur (1855). Heidelberg University Library, PT Lch 56 429, pp. ix–x. – CC-BY-SA 3.0.

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With the publications of Fergusson, Kugler and Lübke in the 1850s, the architectural history handbook took on a second purpose, namely to demarcate architectural history as an independent field of knowledge within art history and the historical sciences, the latter classified by the authors as ‘general history’ or ‘cultural history’.13 Lübke compared the authorship of the handbook with the integrating activities of the architect who created an appropriate form out of an assembly of materials.14 In the book, the field of knowledge literally took shape with an overview and taxonomy of the subject matter, presenting architectural history as a continuous and coherent ‘whole’ in which single facts could be fitted in, and thus acquired meaning.15 For all authors, the continuity of the narrative was the principal device of bringing order into the mass of information. An uninterrupted story line aided the reading of the text. Equally important, the continuity of the narrative was believed to display the continuous development of art, describing the ‘gradual transition from one style to another’.16 In this way, the handbook demonstrated the underlying laws of form that explained the immense diversity of architectural forms in time and place. The rows of morphologically similar architectural objects displayed in the books suggested a comparative stylistic method analogous to that of the natural sciences. Close inspection of empirical phenomena would reveal the regular, causal laws underlying them.17 The pursuit of a continuous narrative explains the development of the handbook in the 1840s and 1850s.18 The authors and the reviewers often mention the need to order the mass of information, but close reading of the first handbooks also reveals the authors’ frequent remarks that information was just sufficient to construct an uninterrupted chain of stylistic development.19 ‘Up to the present time it has been hardly possible to accomplish this, and even now very much more information is required before it can be done satisfactorily for all styles’, wrote Fergusson, ‘but on comparing this work with any of the older productions of its class, it is easy to see how much progress has been made, and how much nearer we are to completeness than we ever were before’.20 These were optimistic words. The typical critical apparatus of the handbooks – footnotes, appendix, bibliography – and their often lengthy publication history revealed the difficulties in documenting architectural history knowledge in the making. Appendices contained the most recent publications and observations that came too late to be incorporated in the main text, and with every re-edition not only the bibliography but also the number of illustrations and pages increased – putting the handbook’s handiness to the test. Starting off in 1855 with 1,004 pages and 837 illustrations in 2 volumes, Fergusson’s The Illustrated Handbook of Architecture was reworked and expanded drastically in the decades to follow, with volumes added on the history of modern styles and Indian and Eastern architecture respectively.21 Published under the new title A History of Architecture in All Countries, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day the original work more than tripled in size, incorporated the new medium of photography in its illustrations, and outlived its author by decades, appearing in parts of the world that Fergusson had uncovered.22

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Title pages of the four volumes of James Fergusson, A History of Architecture in All Countries (1865–76), the revised and enlarged edition of The Illustrated Handbook of Architecture (1855). Google Books / Hathi Trust.

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Notes 1 The Athenaeum, 12 January 1856: 45. 2 ‘The Christian Architecture of Europe’, The North British Review, May 1861: 513. 3 ‘Fergusson’s Handbook of Architecture’, The British Quarterly Review, April 1856: 567. 4 James Fergusson, The Illustrated Handbook of Architecture: Being a Concise and Popular Account of the Different Styles of Architecture Prevailing in All Ages and Countries (London: John Murray, 1855), vi. 5 The Athenaeum, 45. 6 The Gentleman’s Magazine, vol. 46, July 1856: 33. 7 The Literary Gazette, 20 September 1856: 713–714. 8 Harry Francis Mallgrave, Architectural Theory: Volume 1. An Anthology from Vitruvius to 1870 (Malden, Oxford and Victoria: Blackwell Publishing, 2006): part 5 and part 6. 9 E.g. Jules Gailhabaud, Monuments anciens et modernes, collection formant une histoire de l’architecture des différents peuples à toutes les époques, 4 vols. (Paris: Librairie de Fermin Didot frères, 1840–50); Friedrich Hoffstad, Gotisches ABC Buch: Das ist: Grundregeln des gothischen Styls für Künstler und Werkleute, 7 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Schmerber, 1840–48); Karl Möllinger, Elemente des Rundbogenstils: Für Schulen und zu technischen Zwecken, sowie als Anleitung zum Selbstunterricht für Architekten, Bildhauer, Maler, Steinmetze usw (München: Roller, 1846). 10 Thomas Talbot Bury, Rudimentary Architecture: For the Use of Beginners. The History and Description of the Styles of Architecture of Various Countries, from the Earliest to the Present Period (London: John Weale, 1849), vii. 11 Louisa Tuthill, History of Architecture: From the Earliest Times. Its Present Condition in Europe and the United States (Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston, 1848), viii. 12 Mari Hvattum, ‘Crisis and Correspondence: Style in the Nineteenth Century’, Architectural Histories 1, no. 1 (2013): 21: 1. 13 Wilhelm Lübke, Geschichte der Architektur, von den ältesten Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart (Leipzig: Graul, 1855), vi; Franz Kugler, Geschichte der Baukunst, 1 vol. (Stuttgart: Ebner & Seubert, 1856), v; Fergusson, The Illustrated Handbook of Architecture, v. 14 Wilhelm Lübke, ‘In Eigener Sache’, Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst 21 (1886): 228. 15 Mitchell Schwarzer, ‘Origins of the Art History Survey Text’, Art Journal 54, no. 3 (1995): 24–29; Dan Karlholm, Art of Illusion: The Representation of Art History in Nineteenth Century Germany and Beyond (Bern: Peter Lang, 2004). 16 Talbot Bury, Rudimentary Architecture, vi. 17 Henrik Karge, ‘Franz Kugler und Karl Schnaase: Zwei Projekte zur Etablierung der “Allgemeinen Kunstgeschichte”’, in Franz Theodor Kugler. Deutscher Kunsthistoriker und Berliner Dichter ed. Michel Espagne, Bénédicte Savoy and Céline Trautmann-Waller (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2010), 92–93; Barry Bergdoll, ‘Of Crystals, Cells and Strata: Natural History and Debates on the Form of a New Architecture’, Architectural History 50 (2007): 1–29. 18 Cf. Karholm, Art of Illusion, 143. 19 Lübke, Geschichte der Architektur, von den ältesten Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart, 9 introduces in his first chapter Indian architecture ‘als erstes Glied in der kette architektonischer Entwicklung’. 20 Fergusson, The Illustrated Handbook of Architecture, vi. Cf. Franz Kugler, Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte, Stuttgart: Verlag von Ebner & Seubert, 1842, xi; Lübke, ‘In eigener Sache’, 228–229.

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21 James Fergusson, History of the Modern Styles of Architecture: Being a Sequel to the Handbook of Architecture (London: John Murray, 1862) and James Fergusson, History of Indian and Eastern Architecture. Forming the Third Volume of the New Edition of the ‘History of Architecture’ (London: John Murray, 1876). 22 James Fergusson, A History of Architecture in All Countries, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day. New edition edited by R. Phene Spiers. With Notes and Additions by George Kriehn. In two volumes (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company Publishers, 1907); James Fergusson, History of Indian and Eastern Architecture by the late James Fergusson. Revised, and edited with additions. Indian Architecture by James Burgess. Eastern Architecture by R. Phené Spiers (1910; Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1967).

Libel Timothy Hyde

A

ccording to one legal definition at the end of the eighteenth century, ‘A libel is a malicious defamation, expressed either in printing or writing, or by signs, pictures, &c. tending either to blacken the memory of one who is dead, with an intent to provoke the living, or the reputation of one who is alive, and thereby exposing him to public hatred, contempt, or ridicule’.1 Preceded historically by slander (a defamation expressed in speech), the circumstances of libel were the consequence of literate society. From the seventeenth century onwards, with the enormous increase in printed materials and the number of people able to read them, the potential influence of libellous statements grew ever greater. The paramount concern was criminal libel: a statement likely to arouse the person criticized to anger, and to a violent breach of peace. Close attention was paid by monarchs, parliaments and nobility to printed words that hinted at, or directly declared, seditious tendencies.2 Beginning in the eighteenth century, the laws of libel evolved in parallel to legislation for the freedom of the press. Across Europe, publishers and authors claimed the privilege of a freedom of expression, a privilege that began to attain legal consolidation. Sweden promulgated a precocious Freedom of Printing Act in 1766. In Great Britain, a substantial step towards press freedom was achieved by the government’s failure in 1770 to prosecute the publishers of anonymous letters criticizing King George III. In 1789, French revolutionaries drafted Article XI of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which stipulated: ‘The free communication of thoughts and opinions is one of the most precious rights of Man: every citizen can therefore speak, write, print freely, except to answer for the abuse of this freedom in the cases determined by the Law’.3 The free expression and dissemination of ideas in print was both valued and feared, and official articulations of freedom of expression therefore contained provisions to curtail libel.

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Libel could also be charged as a tort, a civil damage, when a published statement impugned a person either in demonstrably false terms or with demonstrably malicious motives. In such cases, the pertinent standards of judgement included a considerable breadth for interpretation. British common law, lacking a statutory definition, weighed a set of criteria: defamation, publicity and motive. Defamation was an injury to an individual’s reputation, which was itself considered to be a legal right: ‘The common law [protects] the good fame, as well as the life, liberty, and property of every man – It considers reputation, not only as one of our pure and absolute rights, but as an outwork which defends, and renders them all valuable’.4 Because only a defamation conveyed to another party could provide cause for libel, a claim also required evidence that the injurious statement had been published. Judges and juries also took motive into account, examining the intention that lay behind the publication of the statement and the cruelty or candour of the means of expression.5 Over the course of the nineteenth century, these criteria were carefully refined, as the regulation of civil libel assumed increasing importance and as the negotiation of public and private realms became one of the influential prerogatives of the press. With the enormous increase of printed publications, celebrated persons of all types entered more directly and more prominently into public view. Architects were no exception, their professional lives and their buildings subject increasingly to public scrutiny and therefore to aesthetic criticism, to satire and to scorn. On 12 June 1827, the Court of the King’s Bench in London heard the case of Soane v. Knight. The architect Sir John Soane had brought a charge of libel against the publisher of Knight’s Quarterly Review for printing a satire of his architecture.6 Soane’s counsel argued that the choice to print a public ridicule was evidence of the critic’s personal malice, but the defendant’s counsel responded by citing earlier case law that had specified that criticism – critical commentary upon artistic works – could not be cause for a libel action, even if it did cause some harm to a professional reputation. This view had been formulated as a legal precedent in 1808 by a prominent libel case, Sir John Carr v. Hood and Sharpe. The judge for that case declared that all artistic works placed before the public were open to fair and candid criticism, which every person has a right to publish, although the author may suffer a loss from it. It is a loss, indeed, to the author; but is what we call in law Damnum absque injuria; a loss which the law does not consider as an injury, because it is a loss which he ought to sustain. It is, in short, the loss of fame and profits, to which he was never entitled.7 The defence counsel in Soane v. Knight carried the argument a step further, following other recent rulings in asserting that published criticism served an important public purpose by elevating work deserving of praise and exposing work deserving of ridicule. It was, he proposed, ‘the undoubted right of the press to endeavour to correct the public taste, and to explode by argument or ridicule all false notions and erroneous works’, and this regulatory function was all the more vital in the case of an architect, ‘whose works, like his materials, are lasting, and who covers a metropolis with them’.8 The novel rulings on aesthetic criticism and libel set out at the beginning of the century gained substance as legal precedents over the decades. As aesthetic criticism made ever more frequent and ever more authoritative appearances in the pages of the popular press, these legal interpretations on the nature of libel established a scope of permission that distinguished the ends of aesthetic criticism from other types of commentary. These legal precedents did not, however,

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Indictment of surveyor Philip Norris for libel against architect Sir John Soane, 6 April 1799. London Metropolitan Archives.

forestall one of the most famous libel trials near the century’s end: Whistler v. Ruskin. Incensed by John Ruskin’s scathing critique of his Nocturnes, the artist James McNeill Whistler brought suit for libel. The trial in 1878 received extensive attention in the pages of journals and newspapers, enabling the incessant repetition of Ruskin’s dismissive likening of Whistler’s artworks to ‘flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face’.9 Following established precedent, the judge instructed that fair criticism of Whistler’s art was permitted by the law, but that insults to the artist as a person were libellous. After deliberations, the jury returned a verdict in Whistler’s favour, deeming Ruskin’s statements a libel, but awarded damages of only one farthing, a token amount whose insignificance indicated a sense that both critic and artist were wronged by the legal proceedings that followed from the initial publication. But if such criticisms of the aesthetic value of architectural works had acquired a considerable degree of immunity from claims for libel, published statements that questioned professional competence did not. Harm to an architect’s reputation might result from the disparagement of his completed works, but it could suffer even more from claims or insinuations that he was not

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‘An Appeal to the Law’. Cartoon ridiculing the trial of Whistler v. Ruskin, Punch, 7 December 1878. Punch Limited.

good at his job. Daily newspapers did not give to the case of Botterill and Another v. Whytehead the attention they had given to Whistler v. Ruskin just a year before, but the case was reported in professional architectural journals. An architectural firm had lodged the claim against a vicar who had sent a communication to a neighbouring parish urging them not to hire the firm for planned restorations of a church. The vicar had claimed the architects were not sufficiently knowledgeable in the work or in their religion, claims which the plaintiffs would argue insulted their professional character and damaged their business. The architects won their claim and were awarded fifty pounds in damages by the jury.

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Report on the trial of Botterill and Another v. Whytehead, The Building News, 8 August 1879. https:// archive.org/details/buildingnewsengi35londuoft.

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The prerogatives of print were circumscribed by law from the start, from the mechanics of publishing licenses or copyright rules to the philosophical ideals of the dissemination of knowledge or freedom of expression. The law of libel emerged during the explosion of print in the nineteenth century as a crucial instrument in the negotiation between public and private realms, with aesthetic criticism obtaining a very particular standing in that negotiation. Cumulatively, the hundreds upon hundreds of libel trials held across the century helped to establish the factuality of reputation as a novel standard within the world of print media.

Notes 1 Francis Ludlow Holt, The Law of Libel (London: J. Butterworth, 1816), 73. Holt’s The Law of Libel is an early-nineteenth-century treatise on libel law. A similar overview from the end of the nineteenth century can be found in Henry Coleman Foulkard, The Law of Slander and Libel (London: William Clowes and Sons, 1897). 2 See Van Vechten Veeder, ‘History and Theory of the Law of Defamation’, Columbia Law Review, vol. 3, No. 8 (December, 1903): 546–573. 3 Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, Art. 11. https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/Droitfrancais/Constitution/Declaration-des-Droits-de-l-Homme-et-du-Citoyen-de-1789 [accessed 19 January 2017]. 4 Holt, The Law of Libel, 72. 5 In criminal libel, the truth or falsity of the libellous statement was irrelevant, because either might provoke a violent response, and that provocation was the crime under consideration. A civil libel could be defended by proving the truth of the statement. 6 A report of the trial and its outcome was printed in The Times, 13 June 1827. Soane had lodged an earlier and unsuccessful claim for libel in 1799, also against a publisher who printed satirical comments about his architecture. 7 Liberty of the Press! Sir John Carr against Hood and Sharpe. Report of the above Case (London: Vernor, Hood, and Sharp, 1808), 28. The case was brought by the author Sir John Carr against the publishers of a pamphlet satirizing his literary work. 8 The Times, 13 June 1827. 9 For an account of the trial proceedings see Linda Merrill, A Pot of Paint: Aesthetics on Trial in Whistler v. Ruskin (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1992).

Masthead Anne Hultzsch

T

he Illustrated London News, credited as the first illustrated newspaper, employed the same masthead with very little modification for the majority of its 160-year lifespan. From 1842 to 2003, its issues were headed by an, at least for its first decades, true-to-life wood engraving of the busy Thames River under the skyline of the City of London with St Paul’s in the centre. Many other illustrated newspapers from around the world employed similar images to brand their titles; indeed this practice marked a departure from the first generation of illustrated magazines such as the British Penny Magazine, the French Magasin Pittoresque and the German Pfennig Magazin. Emerging in the 1830s, these earlier magazines aimed at distributing ‘useful knowledge’ rather than news – and had neither pictorial mastheads nor distinct urban associations. Mastheads, alongside other paratextual elements such as title pages of annual volumes and frontispieces, served to establish a precise identity for both text-only and, in particular, illustrated newspapers across the western world.1 Besides a catchy title that could be called out by newspaper boys, the masthead was exactly that, the highest part of the ship where the flag was flown to visually identify the vessel. The masthead’s amalgamation of word and image, and word into image, signified the transformation of the news, of information, into something visual, to be displayed – at the newsagent, by the newspaper boy or in the coffee house and home library – and consumed. It demonstrates how the visual and verbal began to collaborate in ever-tighter ways in the commodification of both the news and the metropolis. The Illustrated London News was not the only periodical to draw upon a city to brand itself. Indeed, urban mastheads in particular encapsulated the tight relationship between the city, printing and the business of the news. They ranged from the skyline-above-waterfront type, pioneered by the Illustrated London News and carried on by US titles such as Gleason’s Pictorial (Boston,

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Skylines and waterfronts in the mastheads of the Derby Mercury (1732–1900, courtesy of the British Newspaper Archive), the Illustrated London News (founded 1842), and Gleason’s Pictorial (1851–59).

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1851–59, later Ballou’s Pictorial) or The Southern Illustrated News (Richmond, Virginia, 1862– 65), to single iconic buildings, such as the Capitol on the front page of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (New York, 1852–1922), to less recognizable and more static scenes on continental European papers such as the French L’Illustration (Paris, 1843–1955) and the German Illustrirte Zeitung (Leipzig, 1843–1944). Be it London, Paris, Leipzig, New York or Richmond, mastheads turned the metropolis into an icon, framed by the more or less frivolously curved and foliate letters of the title. The image stood not for the city itself, but functioned rather as an allegory for higher things: the Thames and St Paul’s implied the British Empire, the US Capitol a proud democracy, the steam boat industrial power. These icons were easily replaceable: the rather short-lived competitor of the Illustrated London News, the Illustrated Weekly News (London, 1861–69), copied its rival’s masthead closely, simply replacing the word ‘weekly’ for ‘London’ and the Houses of Parliament for St Pauls. Whether or not this shift from the commercial to the political caused its short life, this range of images shows how the city was turned into an iconography of the news. When Herbert Ingram, the resourceful printer, newsagent and patent medicine salesman, first published the soon-to-be highly profitable Illustrated London News in 1842, he did so in a time of heightened activity in the business of the printed news. Competition was fierce and many titles were short-lived. Ingram himself had come up with the title of his enterprise, inspired by his Nottingham patrons’ eager request for the ‘London news’.2 The capital was a marketplace for news from near and far. The Illustrated London News’ masthead emphasized this unity, printing the words ‘London’ and ‘news’ in large, straight, foliate letters, with the smaller curved line ‘the illustrated’ crowning Christopher Wren’s iconic drum and dome. The lively scene depicted in the Illustrated London News’ masthead, with state barges sailing up to Westminster during the Lord Mayor’s Show, watched by groups of people on smaller dinghies, mirrored the mechanics of the news: both the City of London and the spectators themselves were instrumental in spreading the ‘news’. Indeed, the link to London – a place of trade and prosperity, of architectural and religious glory, the commercial capital of knowledge, linked by the Thames, the British Channel and the oceans beyond to every corner of the British Empire – provided the Illustrated London News with the credibility and trustworthiness essential to any successful news outlet.3 Yet, beyond its pictorial content the image also exploited the full potential of the newly revived technique of wood engraving, or xylography, rivalling metal engraving in precision while being cheaper and faster to produce. The nineteenth-century mastheads far outshone earlier examples such as the eighteenth-century Derby Mercury (1732–1900), which carried a comparatively crude woodcut of the City of Derby as its masthead. Nonetheless, to establish a graphic entity of the city through the shape of its buildings and skyline along the figure-ground principle became common practice. Later mastheads continued to rely on clearly defined shapes such as spires, domes or the outline of a waterfront or bridge, even when Victorian illustrators added to this the flux of life in form of movables, such as people and vehicles as well as clouds and smoke. Thus, in the foreground of Gleason’s masthead, well-dressed people gather around a raised flag under the playful double curve of the title. In a clear demonstration of national pride, they look across the Charles River towards the domed Massachusetts State House, reigning over smoking chimneys and pointed spires. In Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, minute figures ascend the dwarfing steps of the Capitol in Washington, representing the permeability but also the

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Static urban scenes in the mastheads of L’Illustration (1843–1955), Illustrirte Zeitung (1843–1944), and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (1852–1922). Private collection, Wikipedia (https://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Illustrirte_Zeitung_Leipzig.jpg) and Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-137591.

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The collaged urban imaginary in La Ilustración Española y Americana (1869–1901) and L’Illustrazione Italiana (1873–1962). Private collection and Wikipedia (https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Illustrazione_ italiana_hd.jpg).

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solemnity of democratic power. On the front page of the short-lived Southern Illustrated News, smoking steamboats glide in a show of industrial power under the masthead’s dramatic lettering, a mixture of foliate serif and curved non-serif. The French equivalent of the Illustrated London News, L’Illustration, used a busy bridge over the Seine, while the Leipzig Illustrirte Zeitung demonstrated the lack of craftsmanship among German wood engravers by presenting a rather static and lifeless image of the Augustusplatz in Leipzig, topped by straight, unfoliate lettering. The emphasis, here, is on newness: the first issues show the recently erected university building in the classical style and the old Paulinerkirche, with very little life present in the foreground. This gradually changed and by 1861 an updated view with the newly built Museum der bildenden Künste (Museum of Fine Arts) presented a more interesting foreground, including people and carriages, as well as foliate letters above. Interestingly, neither L’Illustration nor the Illustrirte Zeitung employed a place name in their title and neither of their mastheads was as iconic and recognizable as their London model. Besides the realistic scenes that dominated most illustrated mastheads, there existed yet another type: the collaged urban imaginary. Both L’Illustrazione Italiana (Milan, 1873–1962) and La Ilustración española y Americana (Madrid, 1869–1901) showed in their mastheads collages of buildings and artefacts from their respective spheres: Italy in the first case and Spain with Latin America in the latter. By creating a fictional ‘best of’ city, these titles made clear what the Illustrated London News had initiated: the modern news became visual at the same time as the expanding metropolis of the nineteenth century turned into a collection of urban icons.

Notes 1 See the entry for ‘masthead’ in Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor (eds), Dictionary of NineteenthCentury Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland (Gent: Academia Press, 2009), 401–02. 2 Mason Jackson, The Pictorial Press: Its Origins and Progress (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1885), 284. 3 See Andrew Pettegree, The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know about Itself (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015).

Movables Tim Anstey

Abandoning the Cleopatra. Illustrated London News, 27 October 1877, Extra Supplement. © The British Library Board. All rights reserved. Reproduced with kind permission of The British Newspaper Archive (www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk).

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On a double-page spread from the Illustrated London News, 27 October 1877, a ship founders at sea. The ship is an odd one – a very large cigar, topped by something like a submarine’s conning tower. Part Zeppelin, part London Underground carriage, it lists dangerously as mountainous seas break over its decks. On its bows the name Cleopatra is visible. And inside lies an obelisk, Cleopatra’s Needle, on its way from Alexandria (where it has spent nineteen centuries buried in the sand) to London (where it will later be placed, rather unimpressively, on the Victoria Embankment). The picture records a storm in the Bay of Biscay at dawn on 15 October. Cleopatra’s captain Henry Carter has just issued the command to abandon ship; her towing vessel Olga is standing by to rescue survivors; and the obelisk itself is about to be lost. This potent image was seen in turn on a Saturday morning two weeks later by perhaps half a million people: on trains and omnibuses, in London clubs and rural parsonages; in breakfast parlours and tea-time conservatories all across the United Kingdom.1 The Illustrated London News covered the story of moving Cleopatra’s Needle in great detail, the loss of the obelisk at sea providing unlooked for drama in a meticulously documented narrative. Every stage in the eventful journey from Alexandria (September 1877) to the celebrations that accompanied the needle’s final arrival at Gravesend at the mouth of the Thames (January 1878) was drawn, tracked and articulated in print (happily Cleopatra was sighted afloat, against all odds, three days after her abandonment). Artists were sent to record the intangible debris of experience that accompanied this odyssey.2 The pictures that were printed juxtaposed technological precision (ships, signalling, sections) with surrounding transitional instability. Cleopatra is portrayed as inherently unstable. She lists in every image, from the full-page spreads that reported her planning, through the supplement that records her catastrophic capsize, to the pictures of her recovery, repair and final towing to London.3 Intriguingly, this habit of articulating technological achievement, together with underlying uncertainty, was a trope of news coverage in the nineteenth-century illustrated press. The dramatic pictures in the 1877 Illustrated London News resonated with images published exactly forty years earlier recording the movement of the Luxor obelisk to Paris, a journey that also navigated stormy seas.4 Indeed, the press appears to have specialized in portraying heavy engineering projects in uncertain waters: the Illustrated London News covered the salvage of Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s pioneering steamship Great Britain (which spent most of 1847 beached at Dundrum Bay in Ireland) and the delayed launching of his later Great Eastern on the Thames at Blackwall (a crowd of 25,000 waited in vain to see it move).5 Such stories highlighted the moment in which heavy objects of design – obelisks, ships, bridges – dealt with precipitous change, challenging stable patterns of experience. During the midcentury, the illustrated press became a privileged locus for images expressing this potential. Le Magasin Pittoresque (from 1833), the Illustrated London News (from 1842), the Illustrirte Zeitung (from 1843), Harpers Magazine (from 1850) and La Monde Illustrée (from 1857) – to name but a few – all made engineering and the removal of objects into a mass experience. In reporting on the completion of the new Houses of Parliament in its 16 October 1858 issue, the Illustrated London News fixed on the moment when the great bell was suspended, mid-hoist, within the tower of Big Ben. Paxton’ s Great Exhibition hall was portrayed by the paper in a way that evidenced the ‘abracadabra’ railway-speed arrival of its components on its London site.6 After 1840 people watched engineers moving objects the way we watch YouTube. The press used the circulation of images to describe the circulation of objects, and to mediate processes of hiatus and change. Its

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Salvaging the Great Britain. Illustrated London News, 21 August 1847. © The British Library Board. All rights reserved. Reproduced with kind permission of The British Newspaper Archive (www. britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk).

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visual concern with instability – with systems that tip between one logic and another – must have affected the way in which readers applied meaning to these engineered objects. Indeed, it might even be argued that the news-oriented illustrated press affected the way in which engineering itself conceived of design. A theme of doubleness, of hermaphroditic potential and of Ovidian change began to colour engineering projects at around the time that the illustrated press sprang into life. Brunel’s Great Eastern, whose 1857 launch the Illustrated London News described so carefully, is a particularly good example of this. The ship was a hybrid of sail and steam. It had double boilers, double propulsion mechanisms, a double hull.7 Disturbingly, it was two things at once; both a beached whale and an about-to-become burthen. It was originally christened Leviathan and then, in popular parlance, the ‘monster ship’.8 The Illustrated Times commissioned a photographic survey of its building process especially for use in engraved images in the paper.9 The extraordinary tale that the Illustrated London News made of the transport of Cleopatra’s Needle plays very well into this kind of design narrative. The vessel that was to transport the obelisk was conceived not by a naval architect but by a railway engineer (Benjamin Baker, later famous for the construction of the Forth Bridge, another obsessively mediated project). This Cleopatra was constructed in iron in much the same way as the first tube tunnels under London (on which Baker

Moving the Needle: technological precision and transitional instability. Illustrated London News, 10 March 1877. © The British Library Board. All rights reserved. Reproduced with kind permission of The British Newspaper Archive (www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk).

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later worked). As the paper carefully explained in its 10 March 1877 issue, Cleopatra was to be built perfectly circular in section, out of interlocking iron panels, through a process that progressively excavated the sand beneath the obelisk to insert each iron section.10 And as well as being at once tunnel and ship, Cleopatra was designed to function simultaneously as ship and all-terrain over-land vehicle. Once clad in iron, the Needle was to be trundled from its antique site sideways across the sands and into the harbour by rotating its circular-section container, like a giant garden roller. The Cleopatra rolled very badly as a ship; but she rolled very well as a wheel. Her instability and the near-disaster that affected the obelisk rested in this uncertain identity. But the story of the Needle points also to something else: for the instability in identification that appears integral to the engineering object begins to seep into the status of the object the ship contained. The signifying function of the obelisk appears highly unstable in the print media accounts. Did it stand for permanence or transience? Did it stand for triumph or disaster? Was it to be considered an indication of rectitude, stability, durability? Or was it rather a triumphant example of mutability, change, mobility? As well as recording the fragility of human endeavour, and the nineteenth century’s great propensity for moving large things about, these pictures in the Illustrated London News identify both the vessel and the Needle within a logic of paradoxical capsize. In this news-saturated environment, engineering objects and obelisks alike are translative. Periodically they flip identity, change their site and state. However much they are inscribed into narratives of technical prowess and cultural duration, they sway, yaw, list and roll.

Notes 1 The circulation of The Illustrated London News in the 1860s swelled to around 300,000 copies, greatly helped by its proprietor’s strategy of expanding the readership to the regional clergy. See C.N. Williamson. ‘The Illustrated London News and Its Rivals – Lloyd’s Illustrated London Newspaper, The Pictorial Times, and The Illustrated Times. Illustrated Journalism in England: Its Development. II’ Magazine of Art, vol. 13, November 1889–October 1890, 334–40. 2 See The Illustrated London News, 26 January 1878, ‘Cleopatra’s Needle. Supplement to the Illustrated London News’. 3 The story was reported in The Illustrated London News, 10 March 1877 and in a special supplement 16 January 1878, but had been covered on and off since the paper’s inception in 1842. 4 The journey was published as Campagne pittoresque du Luxor by Leon Daniel de Joannis, 2nd Lieutenant of the corvette Luxor that had towed the obelisk barge, and was printed in 1835. The Magasin Pittoresque printed an extended illustrated account of the transport and erection of the obelisk in the Place de la Concorde, vol. 5, January 1837, 3–7. 5 The Illustrated London News, 21 August 1847, 124–26, and 14 November 1857, 489–93. 6 The Illustrated London News, 16 November 1850, 11 January 1851 and biweekly updates throughout 1851. 7 On the construction of the Great Eastern see George S. Emmerson, S.S. Great Eastern (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1981). 8 The use of the term ‘monster ship’ was in use by the time the vessel was launched and is noted regularly in accounts of the experience of the steamer; see, for example, ‘Return Voyage of the Great Easter from America in August Last’ by ‘H. B. W.’ in The Nautical Magazine and Naval Chronical, October 1862, 549–53.

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9 The Illustrated Times commissioned Robert Howlett to record the construction of the Great Eastern on camera, as the basis for the engraved views used in publication (often by Henry Vizetelly); see Howlett, Robert, in the Encyclopedia of Nineteenth Century Photography (New York and London: Routledge, 2008), 717–18. 10 The Illustrated London News, 10 March 1877, 220.

Murder Mari Hvattum

I

n July 1843, the Leipzig-based Illustrirte Zeitung told the harrowing tale of a French nobleman murdered under clandestine circumstances in a Brussels flat. The apartment belonged to his mistress, the singer Kathinka Heinefetter; the murderer was her former lover. After describing the uncommon interest that the case had awakened, the Zeitung proclaimed: ‘As the incident itself, as well as the subsequent legal process and the entire court case, is comprehensible only through a thorough knowledge of the crime scene, the illustration shows an image of the house, as well as the living room of Ms Heinefetter, next to a plan of her entire apartment’.1 Alongside descriptions and perspective drawings of the crime scene, then, the reader was treated, not simply to an apartment plan but to a plan diagram annotating the entire course of events. At an approximate scale of 1:65, the plan showed every piece of furniture and domestic equipment, including the plates on the dining table. It also mapped the people present in the room and the key events. ‘A’ marked the spot where the murder took place; ‘B’ indicated where the murderer was seen to ‘wrench the dagger from the wound’, while ‘C’ pointed to the pool of blood in which the victim had expired. In a condensed and diagrammatic form, the plan recounted the entire story, inviting the reader to take part in the domestic drama. As Illustrirte Zeitung selfconsciously proclaimed: How much does not, under such tragic circumstances, pictorial representation contribute, and who would not be interested, when reading about this dreadful case, to see the scene of the crime and even to have the plan of the dwelling in which the tragedy was played out, placed before one’s eyes?2

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Plan of Kathinka Heinefetter’s flat where Count Aimé Sirey was stabbed to death. Illustrirte Zeitung no. 3, 15 July 1843. Printed with the caption: ‘Description: A. The place where the murder was committed. B. The place from which Miss Heinefetter would have seen Caumartin wrenching the dagger from the wound. C. Bloodstain; the place where Sirey died. a. Miss Heinefetter. b. Sirey. c. Madame B. d. Miss J. e. Madam v. K. f. M. D. from Lüttich. g. M. – from Lüttich. h. M.L. i. Guéridon table. j. The place where Caumartin sat while the others dined. k. Heating apparatus. l. Fireplace. m. Sofa. n. Divan. o. A table with two bottles and empty glasses. p. Miss H.’s piano. q. A bed. r. Fireplace. s. A divan. t. A bed. u. A divan. v. A bed. x. A divan.’ Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München 4155697 2 Per. 26-1, p. 39, urn:nbn:debvb:12bsb10498693-2.

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Illustrirte Zeitung’s coverage of the Brussels murder drew on emerging genres in journalism and fiction alike. Only two years before, Edgar Allan Poe had published ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ in Graham’s Magazine, a popular US illustrated periodical. Often considered the first murder mystery, it tells of the violent murder of a mother and daughter in their fourth-floor Paris flat. Poe’s little story pioneered the locked-room mystery, a genre in which every domestic detail offers a potential clue for solving the riddle. He needed not go far for inspiration. Newspapers had long been obsessed with crime, particularly murders, often printing unabridged court transcripts to capture every detail. Broadsides and penny dreadfuls churned out graphic illustrations of assault, murder and execution.3 The new illustrated press emerging in the 1830s and 1840s followed suit, but sought, for the sake of propriety, a more discreet presentation. The murder mystery would come to coin the era. Siegfried Kracauer saw the detective novel as a distorted mirror image of the modern city.4 Walter Benjamin described the etui-like quality of the nineteenth-century bourgeois interior as ‘fittingly housing only the corpse’.5 ‘On this sofa the aunt cannot but be murdered’, he quipped, hailing plush as the murder mystery material par

Dutchess de Praslin’s bedchamber with bloody footsteps and overturned furniture. Illustrated London News, 4 September 1847. © The British Library Board. All rights reserved. Reproduced with kind permission of The British Newspaper Archive (www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk).

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Hôtel Sebastiani, where Duchess de Praslin was killed by her husband. The dotted lines on the plan indicate movement of people in the house at the time of the murder. Illustrated London News, 4 September 1847. © The British Library Board. All rights reserved. Reproduced with kind permission of The British Newspaper Archive (www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk).

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excellence for its capacity to retain traces.6 In the upholstered interiors of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie the modern detective story was born, making the crime writer a ‘physiognomist of the domestic interior’.7 It was to this physiognomy that Illustrirte Zeitung’s carefully annotated plan of Ms Heinefetter’s flat contributed. But why a plan? Architectural plans were rare in the nineteenth-century public press. While both the penny press and the more upmarket illustrated journals were full of architectural images, they were mostly perspectives. Ancient and modern monuments, urban panoramas and exotic street scenes featured in beautiful xylographic engravings, often serving as backdrops to events of various kinds. Only rarely did plans appear, usually in connection with new building types (prisons, factories, etc.), or indeed crime. The first instance is easy to understand, the second more puzzling. Why were abstract plans preferred over more immediate modes of representation in these reportages? Was it a way of making the gruelling stories more palatable to readers, many of whom were women and children? Or was it the source material – most often police reports and court transcripts – that seemed to call for a more ‘scientific’ representation? A case that may begin to answer some of these questions is the Praslin murder of 1847. Involving the upper echelons of French society, this was a considerable scandal, even said to have contributed to ignite the 1848 revolutions. Not surprisingly, it was subject to intense interest by the press, both domestic and foreign. The ILN alone dedicated five full pages and numerous images to the matter. The plot is classic. Duchess de Praslin was bludgeoned to death in her bedroom in Hôtel Sebastiani by her husband; supposedly because he was in love with the governess. It was an uncommonly brutal murder, a violence captured in subtle ways in the two plans shown in the ILN. The first shows the floorplan of the entire Hôtel, with dotted lines indicating residents’ movements at the time of the murder. The second shows only one room: ‘the bedchamber of the unfortunate Duchess, with the places where each article of furniture was placed, and the pieces thrown down in the awful struggle’.8 With each element in the room carefully drawn, including overturned chairs and bloodstains, the reader could follow the violent struggle between murderer and victim, envisage the blood-drenched bed where she died and trace the footsteps of her escaping murderer. Both the drawings and the text in the ILN came from the same source: a proof copy of a ‘quarto volume of two hundred and twenty-six pages’ produced for the court case and containing documents such as police reports and witness statements.9 A specially appointed architect – the ILN named him M. Crétin – had drawn up the floor plans for the volume. Combining scientific exactitude and sensational dramaturgy, the forensic-style drawings fitted the illustrated press perfectly. They conveyed the dramatic act in minute detail and gave the reader a peek into the private life of the well-to-do, yet without violating civic decorum. Unlike the broadsides’ graphic violence, the ILN and its copycats sought a more abstract form. The architectural plan fitted the purpose perfectly, offering both the restraint and the intimacy required to turn these gruesome acts into middle class diversion. If the murder mystery genre was intrinsically linked to the nineteenth-century interior as Benjamin argues, then crime journalism – particularly in the illustrated press – found new ways of representing that interior to the public. And not only the domestic interior. Murder reportages tended also to include, as a kind of dialectical counterpoint, images of the courtroom or prison where justice in the end was done. The narrative order is plain. The reader moves from a violent and disordered space – the bloodsplattered bedchamber of Duchess de Praslin, say, or the disarray in Rue Morgue – to the reassuring

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Interior of Kathinka Heinefetter’s flat juxtaposed with the interior of the court room. Illustrirte Zeitung, no. 3, 15 July 1843. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München 4155697 2 Per. 26-1, p. 40, urn:nbn:debvb:12bsb10498693-2.

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civility of a public institution. ‘Seeing the actual court presented in detailed images, everyone may partake in the public communication of the court-case’, wrote the Illustrirte Zeitung, closing the Heinefetter story with a large perspective of the courtroom.10 Like Poe’s detective (and so many detectives after him) restores order at the end of the story by giving a rational explanation to seemingly incomprehensible events, the press provided catharsis through architectural imagery. The bedchamber and the courtroom encompassed, it is tempting to say, a moral universe both printed and built.

Notes 1 ‘Der Process Caumartin’, Illustrirte Zeitung, no. 3, 15 July 1843, 37. 2 ‘Was wir wollen’, Illustrirte Zeitung, no. 1, 1 July 1843, 1. 3 On crime reports in the penny press and newspapers, see Mason Jackson, The Pictorial Press. Its Origin and Progress (London: Hurst and Blackett 1885); Charles Dickens, ‘The Demeanour of Murderers’ and ‘The Murdered Person’ in Household Words, 14 June and 11 October 1856; Thomas Gretton, Murders and Moralities. English Catchpenny Prints 1800–60 (London: Colonnade 1980); Peter King, ‘Newspaper Reporting and Attitudes to Crime and Justice in Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-Century London’, Continuity and Change, 22(1) 2007, and Richard M. Ward’s Print Culture, Crime and Justice in 18th Century London (London: Bloomsbury 2014). The Wellcome Collection’s exhibition Forensics. The Anatomy of Crime (Spring 2015) showed fascinating examples of nineteenth-century crime coverage. 4 Kracauer, Der Detektiv-Roman. Ein philosophischer Traktat, (1925), in Siegfried Kracauer Schriften 1 (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp 1978). See also David Frisby, ‘Between the Spheres: Siegfried Kracauer and the Detective Novel’, Theory, Culture & Society, 9 May 1992, 1–22. 5 Benjamin, ‘Kleine Illuminationen’, Frankfurter Zeitung, 14 April 1926. 6 Ibid. Benjamin on plush: The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999) envelope I: ‘The Interior, The Trace’, 222. 7 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ‘Paris, the Capital of the 19th century’, part C: ‘Louis-Philippe, or the Interior’, section III, 20. 8 ‘The Praslin Tragedy’, Illustrated London News, 4 September 1847, 151. 9 Ibid. 10 ‘Was wir wollen’, 1.

Pamphlet Irene Cheng

T

he pamphlet is broadly defined as a short printed text on a single subject, unbound or bound in paper, inexpensively produced, and usually intended for a wide audience. Architectural pamphlets, according to this definition, proliferated in the nineteenth century, encompassing manifestoes and counter-manifestoes on national style, scathing building critiques, competition briefs, design proposals, technical and commercial brochures, lecture reprints, reform screeds, antiquarian micro-histories and more. Yet the term ‘pamphlet’, derived from Anglo-Latin in the fourteenth century and popularized in English in the sixteenth, also carries with it the more specific connotation of controversy; it hints of pamphlet wars, pseudonymous libels, and calls for revolution. It possesses, as George Orwell put it, ‘a slight flavor of illegality’.1 The pamphlet is often said to have reached its zenith as a medium of agitation in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries – exemplified by the incendiary and influential tracts of Martin Luther and Thomas Paine – before ceding importance and readership to newspapers and magazines in the nineteenth century.2 Despite this supposed decline of the medium, many architectural writers during the latter period continued to convey their ideas through pamphlets, especially when their intention was to cause a stir, and quickly. A pamphlet could be issued more rapidly than a book – whether printed privately or through an established academic or commercial publisher – an important consideration when a pamphleteer was intervening in an ongoing debate. One of the other distinctive features of the pamphlet was its frequently dialogical nature: Writers used the medium to offer direct ripostes to recent texts, to meticulously deconstruct each other’s arguments and sometimes to launch biting personal attacks, as when an anonymous pamphleteer assailed A.W. Pugin, author of the recently published Contrasts, for his ‘mass of high pretensions’, ‘whining’ and ‘confident dictatorial tone’.3 Even in the second half of the nineteenth century, when

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a burgeoning architectural periodical scene presented alternative venues, the pamphlet still held its own, perhaps because it offered writers a larger canvas, more exclusive spotlight for their ideas, and greater control over distribution and audience.

Cover of Heinrich Hübsch, In Welchem Style Sollen Wir Bauen? (Karlsruhe: Chr. Fr. Müller Hofbuchhandlung und Hofbuchdruckeren, 1828). © Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal.

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The best-known architectural ‘pamphlet wars’ in the nineteenth century were carried out over the question of national style. The tone of these printed skirmishes varied widely depending on cultural, political and national context. In Germany, for example, Heinrich Hübsch’s 1828 tract In What Style Should We Build sparked a heated discussion among academically oriented German architects and art historians.4 Published in a small-quarto format with two copperplate engravings and bound in pale green paper covers, the pamphlet was produced for a gathering of Nazarene artists at a Dürer festival in Nuremburg.5 Its influence exceeded its small circulation. Like Goethe (who had written the pamphlet On German Architecture at age 23), Hübsch published his polemical tract early in his career. The pamphlet was an ideal medium for a young thinker to stake out some renegade ideas, even if it provoked an authority of the previous generation to dismiss Hübsch and his peers as ‘scribblers and dilettantes’.6 Hübsch’s pamphlet was far from a radical rant, though, instead carefully observing the conventions of Enlightenment-era philosophical argumentation. It addressed an ideal reader, whom the author described as ‘an open-minded person’ capable of engaging in ‘unbiased reflection’. Hübsch suggested that critical reason would enable his readers to arrive at a consensus regarding the objective truth of an appropriate style for his day, thereby demonstrating his adherence to the Habermasian ideal of the eighteenth-century public sphere, a space restricted to a propertied and educated few, despite its putative openness. Indeed, elsewhere Hübsch held that debates about style were best carried out among what he called an ‘intellectual aristocracy’ where ‘sober reflection’ would prevail over untrained sentiment. Hübsch would come to associate the latter with the penny press, whom he accused of turning architecture into a parade of stylistic reflections, unmoored from reason.7 If Hübsch clung to an older, restricted vision of public sphere discourse, other architectural pamphleteers of the period embraced a more expansively defined public. In England, a lively debate between classical and gothic partisans centred on a series of prominent competitions for government buildings. In contrast to Hübsch’s relatively expensively printed tract, the English pamphlets on style tended to be shorter, smaller, cheaper, and were filled with references to ‘the public’ and the need to educate popular taste. These pamphlets also employed more colourful and accessible language designed to appeal to a broader segment of the population, as when Arthur Hakewill provocatively compared Gothic architecture to a ‘clump of thistles’ – a metaphor which opposing pamphleteers such as Pugin found especially egregious.8 Hübsch issued his pamphlet through an established academic publisher in Karlsruhe; Hakewill turned to John Weale, a publisher of popular scientific and architectural works. As the publishing industry became more consolidated and corporatized in the late nineteenth century, some authors sought out less traditional avenues for printing short tracts. In England, for example, William Morris’s Kelmscott Press and John Ruskin’s self-published serial pamphlet Fors Clavigera were manifestations of a private press movement that attempted to resist the commodification of the commercial press. Artisan-run presses produced beautiful hand-printed pieces that were often criticized for being paradoxically out of reach to their intended working-class readers.9 In the United States, an early anarchist and inventor named Josiah Warren took a different tack, constructing his own printing machines to make the power of print more accessible to all. In 1873, he self-published a forty-eight-page pamphlet entitled Practical Applications of the Elementary Principles of ‘True Civilization’ to the Minute Details of Every Day Life (1873). In the text, Warren

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Ad for a handpress designed by the American anarchist and pamphleteer Josiah Warren, from The Circular, 15 April 1854. Courtesy of Swarthmore College Peace Collection.

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explained that he had not been able to get a hearing for his ideas in the ‘common mercenary Newspapers’. He therefore began printing his own pamphlets, newspapers and books, but finding that few could be compelled to buy them, he resorted to giving them away.10 Elsewhere, Warren defended the crude quality of his printed output, scoffing at those who would dismiss the ‘voice of poverty and suffering because it cannot speak with “new type”, “fine paper”, “large sheet” ’.11 Warren used his home-made printing machines to publicize his own radical social ideas and experiments, which included an alternative currency based on labour, ‘time stores’ and several utopian communities in Ohio and New York. Practical Applications also included a proposal for a hexagonal city that would help enact an ideal society of ‘individual sovereigns’ unhindered by a central government.

Hexagon city, from Josiah Warren, Practical Applications of the Elementary Principles of True Civilization to the Minute Details of Every Day Life: And the Facts and Conclusions of Forty Seven Years Study and Experiments in Reform Movements through Communism to and in Elementary Principles … (Princeton, MA: J. Warren, 1873). Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University.

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The expanse between Hübsch and Warren indicated the wide range of roles that the pamphlet could play as medium of architectural provocation during the course of the nineteenth century, from a forum of enlightened bourgeois debate over style to a self-printed utopian text that circulated in a sea of mass print alongside evangelical, abolitionist, feminist, socialist and other radical and counter-public tracts. The pamphleteers discussed here addressed very different readerships and conjured distinct modes of publicness, whether in the form of rational deliberation or radical opposition. Yet what they shared was a belief in the pamphlet as a medium for insurgent discourse. They all had something urgent to say, and the pamphlet offered the best way to say it.

Notes 1 George Orwell, ‘Introduction’, in British Pamphleteers, vol. 1 (London: A. Wingate, 1948), 8. 2 S.H. Steinberg, Five Hundred Years of Printing, 3rd edn. (New York: Penguin Books, 1974), 325. 3 Anonymous, Reply to ‘Contrasts’ by A. Welby Pugin (London: J. Masters, 1837), 5 and 21. 4 Heinrich Hübsch, In Welchem Style Sollen Wir Bauen? (Karlsruhe: Chr. Fr. Müller Hofbuchhandlung und Hofbuchdruckeren, 1828). Subsequent text references are to the English translation in In What Style Should We Build?: The German Debate on Architectural Style, ed. and trans. Wolfgang Hermann (Santa Monica, CA: The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1992). 5 The occasion is indicated in the dedication of the book. Jürgen Hiedeking has described this event as one of a series of nineteenth-century German festivals that were bourgeois attempts to consolidate a sense of social stability and national unity. Hiedeking, ‘Festive Culture and National Identity in America and Germany, 1760–1860’, in Republicanism and Liberalism in America and the German States, 1750–1850, ed. Jürgen Hiedeking and James A. Henretta (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 230. 6 Quoted in Wolfgang Hermann, ‘Introduction’, In What Style, 9. 7 Heinrich Hübsch, ‘The Differing Views of Architectural Style in Relation to the Present Time’, in In What Style, 172, 174, 175. The quoted phrases are from Hübsch’s Die Architektur und ihr Verhältniss zur heutigen Malerei und Skuptur (Stuttgart and Tübingen: J. G. Cotta, 1847). 8 Arthur William Hakewill, Thoughts upon the Style of Architecture to be Adopted in the Rebuilding of the Houses of Parliament (London: John Weale, 1835), 15. 9 For a sympathetic reading of this movement, see Elizabeth Miller, Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013). 10 Josiah Warren, Practical Applications of the Elementary Principles of ‘True Civilization’ to the Minute Details of Every Day Life: And the Facts and Conclusions of Forty Seven Years Study and Experiments in Reform Movements… (Princeton, MA: J. Warren, 1873), 16. 11 Josiah Warren. The Peaceful Revolutionist (1, no. 4), 5 April 1833.

Paratexts Helen Smith

R

enaissance books presented themselves visually and textually as buildings; writing was a process of laborious construction. Defending his extensive Latin quotations, Minister Richard Flecknoe proclaimed his right ‘as a builder … to provide my materials, when I supposed them at best hand to be got’, reflecting that without the ‘foundation and cement’ of scripture, ‘works of this fabrick … are worthily esteemed, but weake and loose-written things’.1 Flecknoe’s comments close a prefatory address ‘To the Towne-Reader’, and follow a simple title page and a dedication ‘To the truly Noble, and Vertuous Lady, The Lady Nevill Brooke’. These are paratexts: elements in that zone of meaning which Gérard Genette, using his own architectural metaphor, describes as ‘a threshold, or … a “vestibule” that offers the world at large the possibility of either stepping inside or turning back’.2 Flecknoe concludes his preface by comparing it to one such vestibule: ‘I detaine thee too long in the porch … . Enter the work’. This bookish building is an artisanal construction, and an imaginative dwelling space. Playing with the metaphor of the preface as porch, writers emphasized the need for proportion. William Bradshaw announced: ‘AS the Portall is to the house in Architecture, so should the Preface to a Treatise be answerable and sutable’3; Andrew Willet declared: ‘The length of the Worke, doth make me more short in the Preface: a smal entrance in, may serue to a large house: and the greatest cities haue not the greatest gates’4; Isaac Allen promised: ‘We shall not present the Rooms and model of the whole house in the Porch’ (a pledge followed by an ominous ‘yet … ’).5 Author after author dwells in and on their prefatory matter, ‘dawdling on the threshold of the threshold’.6 John Walsall concluded a lengthy dedication to Anne, Lady Bacon, by expressing his fear that ‘the portall shoulde be as great as the house’.7 Walsall’s title page sites the book within a wellknown architectural setting, telling readers that the sermon it prefaces was ‘preached at Pauls

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Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 1469. Frontispiece, attrib. Giovanni Vendramin. Inc. 670/I, p. I. Istituzione Biblioteca Classense, Ravenna.

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Crosse’, an open air pulpit in the grounds of St Paul’s Cathedral. In the copy held at the Bodleian Library, Walsall’s sermon is bound with another, preached by the controversialist William Fulke ‘within the Tower of London’.8 One London landmark follows the next. Proximity is paratext. Ben Jonson compared writing to building, insisting that the scale of the book must suit its genre and subject matter. ‘If a man would build a house, he would first appoint a place to build it in … . But, as a court or king’s palace requires other dimensions than a private house, so the epic asks a magnitude from other poems’.9 Jonson is translating from the Dutch scholar Daniel Heinsius, who draws out this comparison at greater length.10 The building book might also need scaffolding: physician James Hart promised his readers illumination via printed marginal notes, explaining, ‘I have so framed this whole building, that the learned shall finde here and there some marginall refreshings’.11 Perhaps the most striking paratext of the building book is the architectural title page. This form did not originate with print: in north-east Italy manuscript illuminators experimented with titles that appeared to be painted on stone or antique figural friezes. In the late 1460s and early 1470s, the ‘Master of the Putti’ in Padua and Giovanni Vendramin in Venice introduced enlarged architectural frames: ornate entrances invoking the triumphal arches of the ancient world. Hand-illuminated printed books featured columns surrounding the title-page text. As Jonathan G. Alexander concludes, ‘The architectural frontispiece and title-page is perhaps the most significant contribution of Paduan antiquarianism to the history of the Renaissance book’.12 Many architectural title pages were self-consciously classicising. A commendatory epigram in John Guillim’s popular A display of heraldrie explains its frontispiece. A triumphal arch, crowned by the king, represents England, while the arms of nine noble families deck the columns and base. The poem refers to Pindar’s sixth Olympic ode, whose opening lines compare the eternizing power of poetry to a gorgeous porch on golden columns. The noble Pindare doth compare somewhere, Writing with Building, and instructs us there, That every great and goodly Edifice, Doth aske to have a comely Frontispiece.13 The arches that adorn architectural title pages share many of the features of pegmes: temporary triumphal arches for pageants and processions. Entry through these arches was often illusory, blocked by banners or plinths, as is also true of many bookish ‘gateways’. Stephen Harrison, joiner and architect, provided images of the pegmes constructed for King James’s 1603 entrance into London in The arch’s of triumph (1604). In a vivid twist on the trope through which books aspire to the eternizing power of monuments, Harrison closes his book by telling his ‘Lectori Candido’: ‘The limmes of these great Triumphall bodies (lately disioynted and taken in sunder) I haue thou seest (for thy sake) set in their apt and right places againe: so that now they are to stand as perpetuall monuments, not to be shaken in peeces, or to be broken downe, by the malice of that enuious destroyer of all things, Time’.14 In Harrison’s formulation, the book rebuilds ‘real’ structures, preserving them against an uncertain future. Copies of the book could be bought ‘at the Authors house in Lime-Street, at the signe of the Snayle’, the emblem of nature’s builderly ingenuity. Houses pile upon houses, mapping out the streets and signs of London in the truncated space of the colophon.

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Architectural title page to John Guillim, A Display of Heraldrie (London, 1611). Folger Shakespeare Library STC 12501 Copy 1. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0).

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Wenceslaus Hollar, ‘Venite ad me omnes qui laboratis & onerati estis, Matt. 11’ (Antwerp, 1651). Folger Shakespeare Library ART Box H737.5 no. 23 pt.5r (size L).

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Title pages moved between books and built spaces: copies of the engraved frontispiece to Jonson’s 1616 Works were sold separately from the text, whilst engravings by Wenceslaus Hollar are framed with borders that strikingly recall printed books. Stuck to walls, detached frontispieces set the architectural imagination at play within domestic and tavern space. Architectural ideas and paratextual conventions travelled together across Europe: literally in the case of Sebastiano Serlio’s The first booke of architecture, whose woodcut illustrations and titlepage border, featuring the architect’s tools and elaborate carved scrollwork, were first used in the 1606 Dutch edition, then in Basel in 1608 and London in 1611. This title page is a bravura display of skill: of the architect, but also of the engraver. In 1634, Henry Peacham offered to teach readers how to draw ‘all manner of Beasts’, and blazon coats of arms, suggesting that these skills would serve ‘diuers Trades-men and Artificers … for the farther gracing, beautifying, and garnishing of all their absolute and worthy pieces, either for Borders, Architects, or Columnes, &c’.15 As Amanda Lillie reminds us ‘An architectural imagination is not the prerogative of architects’.16 Borders and columns could be applied across media, mobile tricks of the trade. Especially on theological texts, mottos prompted readers to examine their own construction: Robert Barrell’s The spirituall architecture used I Corinthians 3.9 to remind readers ‘ye are Gods husbandry, and Gods building’.17 But if the paratext is a building, can the building be a paratext? ‘Epigraph’ referred to inscriptions on buildings, tombs and statues as much as to the quotations which fronted so many books. And Thomas Cockeram defined ‘Frontispice’ as ‘The forepart of a Booke, or House’.18 Many of the carved frontispieces of Renaissance buildings feature books: on Notre Dame cathedral, for instance, rows of saints sit with volumes splayed in their laps. I am out of room. Let me conclude with Edward Blount, who published, in 1600, an English translation of Tomaso Garzoni’s The hospitall of incurable fooles: erected in English, as neer the first Italian modell and platforme, as the vnskilfull hand of an ignorant architect could deuise. The last page offers to usher us out of this unsettling building: ‘Let vs therefore now put to the gates of this Hospitall, and roaue abroad at large’.19

Notes 1 Richard Flecknoe, The affections of a pious soule (London, 1640), A5v; A6r. 2 Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 3 William Bradshaw, A discourse of the sinne against the Holy Ghost (London, 1640), A2r. 4 Andrew Willet, Hexapla in Danielem (London, 1610), 4r. 5 Isaac Allen, Excommunicatio excommunicata (London, 1658), b2r. 6 Genette, Paratexts, 15. For further examples, see William H. Sherman, ‘On the Threshold: Architecture, Paratext, and Early Print Culture’, in Sabrina Alcorn Baron, Eric N. Lindquist and Eleanor F. Shevlin (eds), Agent of change: Print culture studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, in association with The Center for the Book, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., 2007), 67–81. 7 John Walsall, A sermon preached at Pauls Crosse (London, 1578), A7r.

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8 The volume is (OC) 1 g.112. 9 Ben Jonson, Workes (London, 1641), R4r. 10 Daniel Heinsius, Aristoteles de poetica liber … accedit Daniel Heinsius, de tragoedia constitutione (Lyon, 1611), ch. 4, 41–2. 11 James Hart, Klinike, or The diet of the diseased (London, 1633), A4r. 12 Jonathan J.G. Alexander, The painted book in renaissance Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 257. 13 John Guillim, A display of heraldrie (London, 1610), (a)2r. Marjorie Corbett and John Lightbown borrow from this poem for the title of their classic study The Comely frontispiece: The emblematic title-page in England, 1550–1660 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979). 14 Stephen Harrison, The arch’s of triumph (London, 1604), K1r. 15 Henry Peacham, The Gentlemans Exercise (London, 1634), title-page. 16 Amanda Lillie, https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/research/exhibition-catalogues/buildingthe-picture/introduction. 17 Robert Barrell, The spirituall architecture (London, 1624), title-page. 18 Henry Cockeram, English dictionary (London, 1623). 19 Tomaso Garzoni, The hospitall of incurable fooles (London, 1600), X3v.

Past Sine Halkjelsvik Bjordal

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n 9 February 1877, a lithograph of the medieval wooden church of Borgund in Norway was issued with The Building News and Engineering Journal. The image was based on a sketch by the architect George Canning Richardson and was accompanied by a short note: ‘There exists in Norway a series of wooden churches of great interest to the antiquary. The subject of our sketch is, perhaps, the most curious of them all’.1 This ‘curious’ church of Borgund was, and still is, a so-called stave church – a peculiar medieval wooden construction found in more or less remote parts of Norway. Borgund dates back to the twelfth century and is one of the best-preserved stave churches in the country. Because of its characteristic appearance and its position close to one of the main routes between eastern and western Norway, it was famous already in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1870, a local teacher described the ‘many travellers from all over Europe who flow through our valley and do not pass the ancient monument without looking at it and drawing it’.2 In 1855, twenty-two years before the lithograph in The Building News, the Norwegian publisher Christian Tønsberg finished the ‘thoroughly revised’ and lavish second edition of his popular Norge fremstillet i tegninger (Norway Illustrated), a collection of Norwegian prospects accompanied by short descriptions.3 One of the prospects showed the same church that had been published in The Building News, only from a different angle. The plate was made after a drawing by the artist Franz Wilhelm Schiertz. Schiertz’s drawing had actually been published for the first time eighteen years earlier, in the first scholarly publication on the Norwegian stave churches: the painter J.C.C. Dahl’s Denkmale einer sehr ausgebildeten Holzbaukunst aus den frühesten Jahrhunderten in den Landschaften Norwegens.4 This book made the Norwegian stave churches known to an international public, defining them as objects of art, knowledge and, even most importantly, as objects of the past.

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The ‘curious’ church of Borgund. Sketch by George Canning Richardson, Building News, 9 February 1877. Courtesy of the Directorate for Cultural Heritage in Norway.

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The stave church of Borgund, drawn by the painter and architect Franz Wilhelm Schiertz. From Christian Tønsberg, Norway Illustrated (1855). Courtesy of the National Library of Norway.

Nineteenth-century architects, antiquarians, artists and many others all had an interest in these ‘remarkable’ buildings from remote times. At the same time, the stave churches – including the church of Borgund – were still in use, functioning as places of worship and important meeting places for local communities. For the people in Borgund, the church was first and foremost a part of their religious and public life. They recognized the church’s connection with a past, but this past was not remote and distant. Rather, it was their own past; that is, the church was a product of their ancestors’ culture and craftsmanship. In An eight week’s journal in Norway, the British author Sir Charles H.J. Anderson describes not only the church of Borgund, but also a meeting with the local peoples’ conception of time: ‘In the roof over the chancel, is a stuffed rein-deer; about which I could make out nothing, except, as the woman who showed the church said, that it was “gamlè, gamlè,” old, very old, which they apply equally to a term of thousand or fifty years’.5 The antiquarians, historians and architects had a less all-inclusive view of what was old. For them, what made Borgund interesting as an object of ‘the past’ was its exemplary status within medieval art and architecture, in line with the general fascination for the Middle Ages among European artists and intellectuals at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

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The church of Borgund as it was believed to have looked in the Middle Ages. Drawing by architect Georg A. Bull. Courtesy of G. Reubke/NTNU University Library.

A couple of years after Tønsberg’s publication, yet another lithograph of Borgund was published, this time in the annals of the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Norwegian Monuments (SPANM). In 1854, SPANM had sent the Norwegian architect Georg Andreas Bull on a tour to survey medieval architecture in Norway, and Borgund was one of the many stave churches he visited. The plates in the 1857 annal show some of Bull’s findings. As we can see from the Borgund plate, it is quite a different church from the one printed in 1855 and 1877. This is not only due to the nature of the drawings (Bull is obviously a trained architect and the drawings are meant to display knowledge about the particular wooden constructions); the actual building is different too. As the small elevation shows, the church is drawn as it was presumed to have looked in the past, more specifically before 1537. Apparently, post-reformation additions were not considered ‘past enough’ to be included in the survey. At the height of nineteenth-century nation building, it seems, certain pasts were more important than others. In this case, the past prior to Norway’s annexation under Denmark was considered a privileged object of study. The past was, of course, also about the future. In 1867, a new, bright and bigger church was consecrated in the parish of Borgund, situated only 50 metres from the old one. It was designed by Christian Christie, another architect hired by SPANM to survey medieval architecture. Like several of Christie’s churches, the new church of Borgund was inspired by forms and motifs from the old stave churches. In the last half of the nineteenth century, the stave churches played an

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important role in public discussions about a ‘national style’ in architecture, and stave church motifs were presented in several industry and arts exhibitions in Norway and abroad. The old church of Borgund, for its part, became the prototype of the Norwegian stave church, in print and in practice. It even served as a model when other not so well-preserved stave churches were restored back to a supposed past form. This prototype was not, however, Borgund as it appeared in the Building News of 1877. By this time, the church had actually undergone extensive restoration, which involved stripping it of all its post-reformation additions. When The Building News published Richardson’s drawing in 1877, then, the actual church looked more like what Bull had (re)presented in 1857. The past in print and the past ‘in practice’, then, is not necessarily the same thing. And the relationship between them is not constant: What the lithograph in The Building News from 1877 shows is a past existing only in print, while Christian Tønsberg’s 1855 representation of Borgund showed the church as it ‘actually was’ at Tønsberg’s time. In a new edition of Norway illustrated, moreover, issued in 1889 with the same lithograph of Borgund and the same accompanying text as in the 1855 version, the print, like the one in The Building News, was preserving a past no longer existing. Bull’s ‘reconstructed’ church in the publication from 1857, on the other hand, showed our past’s conception of the past, which at that point was to become a future present. Even today, Bull’s drawing of Borgund looks more or less like the past that is present for us in the still existing church of Borgund.

Notes 1 G.C.R., ‘A Norwegian Timber Church’, The Building News and Engineering Journal, 9 February 1877, 144. 2 The Society for the Protection of Ancient Norwegian Monuments’ archives: Letter from N.O. Rødning to Rev. Dahl, 26 April 1870. 3 Christian Tønsberg, Norge fremstillet i Tegninger: Med kortfattet opplysende Tekst (Christiania: Chr. Tønsberg, 1853–1855). 4 J.C.C. Dahl, Denkmale einer sehr ausgebildeten Holzbaukunst aus den frühesten Jahrhunderten in den Landschaften Norwegens (Dresden: published by author, 1837). 5 Sir Charles Henry John Anderson, An Eight Week’s Journal in Norway (London: F. & J. Rivington, 1853).

Review Wallis Miller

Architecture Exhibition of the City of Berlin, Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung (1901), models of Ludwig Hoffmann projects including the Märkisches Museum (center). From Hans Schliepmann, ‘Die Architektur auf der diesjährigen Grossen Berliner Kunstausstellung’, Berliner Architekturwelt 4, no. 4 (1902): 121. Courtesy of the University of Kentucky Design Library.

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Reviews of Ludwig Hoffmann’s 1901 ‘Exhibition of the City of Berlin’ at the Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung [Great Berlin Art Exhibition] appeared in virtually every major newspaper and professional journal in Germany. The coverage was unusually broad and almost exclusively in text; images were rare. Most impressive was the fact that the German newspapers turned any attention at all towards gallery exhibitions focusing on architecture, typically seen at art salons, professional associations or world’s fairs. In the second half of the nineteenth century, reviews of all kinds of architecture exhibitions appeared in the new professional journals, but the German daily press gave them little attention outside of reports on world’s fair pavilions. This changed with Hoffmann’s exhibition. The exhibition gave the public its first view of the profound transformation in store for Berlin, displaying forty-six new projects for municipal buildings such as schools, hospitals, bridges and government administration buildings, all overseen by Hoffmann, Berlin’s building commissioner [Stadtbaurat]. The recognition that these projects had an impact outside of architectural practice led to the expanded coverage beyond the professional journals that included major newspapers in Berlin and across Germany. Furthermore, the exhibition’s focus on one architect’s body of work rather than on a collection of independent designs, itself unusual, changed the structure and content of the reviews. It allowed the critics to identify major themes and draw conclusions concerning the architectural significance of the exhibition. Often framed in political and social terms, this approach to the reviews was of particular interest to feuilleton writers and their readers. The broader discussions came to replace the incidental descriptions and evaluations of individual projects, which had been typical of the professional reviews up to that point. Hoffmann’s exhibition marked a transition. It not only transformed the architecture exhibition review in the architectural and art press, but its special eye for the public and their concerns precipitated what Hoffmann scholar Dörte Döhl has identified as the emergence of architectural criticism in the popular press.1 The reviews of Hoffmann’s exhibition in the popular and professional press were surprisingly similar. For all of them, the justification for the exhibition and the attention it commanded lay in the significance of Hoffmann’s enormous building program for the citizens of Berlin. The art critic Max Osborn, writing in the newspaper National Zeitung, acknowledged the importance of the citizenry – exhibition visitors and, by extension, newspaper readers – by noting that the broad audience was one of the exhibition’s accomplishments.2 Resonating with the architects’ longheld concerns about their lack of popularity, the reviews, especially those in the newspapers, supported Hoffmann’s decision to communicate with the Berlin public rather than limiting his audience to professionals or, as one critic put it, ‘friends of art’.3 The consensus was noteworthy given the broad and heterogeneous readership of the publications, whose political views varied widely, albeit within the boundaries of the centre and the left. The exhibition was definitely a success as a publicity campaign for Berlin’s new architecture – one that was long overdue, according to a Hamburg newspaper – but many critics believed that it had a more profound effect.4 They agreed that Hoffmann did not simply speak to the public with his exhibition but that he spoke clearly, the newspaper Berliner Zeitung praising him for cultivating ‘the difficult art of understanding what one sees’.5 Many critics extended their compliments about the accessibility of Hoffmann’s exhibition design to his practice, pointing out his concern for the future occupants of his buildings as he developed his designs. According to the critic from the Strassburger Zeitung, Hoffmann’s attention to the people who would see and use his buildings is what made him a great architect.6

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The installation was crucial to the accessibility of the exhibition. Previously the installation – the selection and arrangement of the objects and the design and placement of the armatures that displayed them – had not been a prominent part of discussions about exhibitions in the professional journals. When Hoffmann’s installation turned the critics’ heads, it gained the status of an architectural project. Past exhibition reviews had mentioned individual models, called attention to specific drawings and, from time to time, described the design of the galleries. But discussions of the installation were nowhere to be found, overlooked in favour of evaluations of the building designs. In contrast, the reviews of Hoffmann’s exhibition featured the installation – without images, except for those accompanying an article in the Berliner Architekturwelt – praising him for using it to communicate with the public. Especially in the professional journals the critics claimed that the huge plaster models on high pedestals and the enormous full-scale mock-ups gave visitors a sense of what it would be like to experience the buildings. Carl Zetsche, the critic for the Architektonische Rundschau, called the installation ‘evocative’ and even suggested that it was a part of Hoffmann’s architectural oeuvre, ‘a brilliant testimony to the artistic spirit of the work of the City Building Administration’. In the Berliner Architekturwelt, Hans Schliepmann described the exhibition as a ‘masterful diplomatic move’ because of the ‘impressive and complex presentation’.7 The installation led the critic and editor Albert Hofmann, who organized other architecture sections at the 1901 exhibition, to set his own work aside and put his stamp of approval on Hoffmann’s show: ‘We are not worried that anyone will object if we call this exhibition a classic.’8 The attention to the audience shifted the discussion away from the contentious issue of style towards a consensus about the functional nature of Hoffmann’s buildings. Hoffmann was a transitional figure. He depended on historic forms but freely adjusted them to accommodate function, a move which, at the time, was viewed as pragmatic but also expressive of the character of the building.9 Discussions about style in the reviews were divisive, some critics insisting on the contemporary nature of Hoffmann’s architecture and others criticizing him for being behind the times. But the comments on style were secondary to the high praise not only for his creativity, which weakened the identification of his architecture with the past, but also for his attentiveness to the people in and around his buildings, which the reviews equated with a functional sensibility.10 Under the rubrics ‘function’, ‘use’ or ‘purpose’, the critics commented on the fundamental role of the plan, the correspondence between interior and exterior, as well as on Hoffmann’s manipulation of massing, profiles, surface and space to create the most advantageous visual and physical experience of his buildings.11 The critics’ association of this array of attributes with function verified the contemporary relevance of his architecture, whatever their perception of his stylistic choices. They recognized that Hoffmann’s respect for the various demands of potential users was more important than the cultivation of a uniform architectural style. Although a focus on principles would soon emerge from the a priori ideological positions of architecture critics, the focus on function and the public that characterized the reviews of Hoffmann’s exhibition was the result of particular circumstances and a particular architect. There was a lot at stake at the exhibition. It was a big-budget affair displaying a huge collection of projects for a major city, undertaken in the hope the projects would be the beginning of a great new building program underwritten by Berlin taxpayers. For the architect, the exhibition was a publicity tool that would ensure his contemporary relevance and keep his career as the chief municipal architect alive. It was an opportunity for him to showcase his design approach with an installation that offered a

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Hans Schliepmann, ‘Die Architektur auf der diesjährigen Grossen Berliner Kunstausstellung’. Berliner Architekturwelt 4, no. 4 (1902): 115. Courtesy of the University of Kentucky Design Library.

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broad audience an experience of his architecture. For the reviewers, the monographic exhibition allowed them to raise public interest in the broad themes and principles that characterized a body of work. For both, the focus on the public was a social and political move, and it transformed the review as a genre, giving it a new role as a forum for the discussion of architecture as a public matter and a new home in the popular press.

Notes 1 See Dörte Döhl, Ludwig Hoffmann: Bauen für Berlin 1896–1924 (Berlin: Wasmuth, 2004), 186. 2 Max Osborn, ‘Die große Berliner Kunstaustellung. II’, National Zeitung, 16 May 1901. 3 B., ‘Hier und Dort’, Berliner Börsen Courier, 23 June 1901. 4 O.R., [no title], Hamburger Fremdenblatt, 10 May 1901. The publicity was welcome because Berlin’s architecture was virtually unknown compared to Hamburg’s. 5 Ph.St., ‘Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung. Berlin als Bauherrin’, Berliner Zeitung, 20 June 1901. 6 ‘Große Berliner Kunstausstellung. II’, Strassburger Zeitung, 12 May 1901. 7 Carl Zetsche, ‘Die Architektur auf den Deutschen Kunstausstellungen des Jahres 1901’, Architektonische Rundschau, 18, no. 2 (1902): 12. 8 H. [Albert Hofmann], ‘Die Architektur auf der Grossen Berliner Kunstausstellung 1901’, Deutsche Bauzeitung, 35, no. 52 (June 29, 1901): 325. 9 Osborn talked about the character of the building, implying its links to purpose. Osborn, ‘Die große Berliner Kunstaustellung, II’. 10 Alfred Dresdner, ‘Die Berliner Kunstausstellungen. IV. Schlußbericht’, Breslauer Morgenzeitung, 19 September 1901; Hans Schliepmann, ‘Die Architektur auf der diesjährigen Grossen Berliner Kunstausstellung’, Berliner Architekturwelt, 4, no. 4 (1902): 120. 11 See, for example, H. [Albert Hofmann], ‘Die Architektur auf der Grossen Berliner Kunstausstellung 1901’: 325; Friedrich Schultze, ‘Die Baukunst auf der diesjährigen Grossen Berliner Kunstausstellung’, Centralblatt der Bauverwaltung, 21, no. 55 (13 July 1901): 340; Deutsche Lesehalle, 17 June 1901; V.A., Berliner Börsen Zeitung, 24 May 1901; Vorwärts, 3 July 1901.

Sex Barbara Penner

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here is no more revealing case study of the intimate intertwining of building, public print culture and private sentiment than the Victorian honeymoon suite in America. Honeymoon suites – known as bridal chambers – first appeared in the 1840s on Hudson River palace steamboats, multidecked boats that were effectively floating hotels, accommodating hundreds of overnight guests in spectacular gilded settings. When, in 1855, an attendant allowed the English traveller Charles Weld to peek at the bridal chambers aboard the Lake Erie steamer, the Western World, he was overwhelmed by their ‘regal splendour’: The beds [in the bridal-chambers] are covered with white satin, trimmed with gold lace: painted Cupids are suspended from the ceiling; the toilet furniture of the finest china; hot and cold water are laid on, and flow by pressing ivory knobs; the chairs and sofas are covered with the richest velvet; the carpets are of the softest pile; and walls display beautiful flower designs.1 Opulent bridal chambers like these quickly spread around the country. By the late 1840s, they were a fixture of the palace steamships plying, not only the Hudson River, but the Great Lakes and possibly the Mississippi River as well. Around this period, they also began to be adopted in the palace hotels then springing up in major American cities and watering places, especially those built in advance of the 1853 Crystal Palace Exhibition in New York.2 Bridal chambers were ostensibly meant to serve the small but growing number of newlyweds who began married life with a wedding tour, a month-long choreographed visit to America’s and Canada’s best-known attractions, the highlight, of course, being Niagara Falls. There is little evidence,

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‘The Bridal State-room of the Francis Skiddy’, Illustrated News, 28 May 1853. Private collection.

however, that they were ever much in demand. Instead, their value to palace proprietors at this time appeared to lie not in their use, but rather in what Roland Barthes calls ‘dream’ potential.3 These high-profile, gorgeous spaces were the star attractions of steamship captain’s tours and hotel opening days when literally thousands would traipse admiringly through them. And yet many thousands more took virtual tours of these spaces in ladies’ magazines and the illustrated weeklies, which seemed to have an unlimited appetite for describing them. Instead of practically accommodating honeymooning couples, then, bridal chambers served to project to the sentimental public an ideal of what the conjugal relationship was to be, one in which the enjoyment of sex, tourism and consumer goods played an increasingly privileged and, crucially, acceptable part. Except for the inevitable Cupid armed with a phallic arrow and the purposely overlarge bed, however, sex was not openly evoked in the bridal chamber, but was displaced onto expensive objects and ornate décor. Bridal chambers were deliberately created as showcases for the very finest furnishings and goods. Writers focused on the sensual effects of expensive materials, making sure to mention that sofas were of the ‘richest velvet’, or carpets of ‘the softest of pile’. One journalist’s description of a steamboat bridal chamber perfectly encapsulates these anthropomorphizing invocations: ‘Such a bed! rosewood, gilt to the carpet, with a blue satin spread covered with real lace … and a rug soft as the tenderest sigh ever breathed by love-stricken swain’

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[emphasis mine].4 The bridal chamber’s abundance of soft, deep and yielding surfaces, so at odds with the uprightness of genteel settings, denoted this as an environment for indulging both in goods and in affective pleasures, all sanctified by marriage. In this conflation of conjugal passion and luxury, we find a powerful example of how the contemporary mass media sought to naturalize, legitimate and promote the link between ‘eros’ and goods under commodity capitalism. The obvious feminization of the bridal chamber reinforces the fundamentally sexed and gendered nature of this relationship. These were bridal chambers after all: their elaborately layered white interiors resembled nothing so much as a bride’s gown, and served to remind spectators of the act of bridal unwrapping that would later take place. At the prospect of this unwrapping, however, a note of ambivalence seeps in. One 1878 engraving of a palace bridal chamber, for instance, focuses on the moment that the bride bids adieu to two women, likely relatives, one of whom appears to be crying.5 Despite his absence, we are aware of the groom, traces of whom are positioned in the foreground, as if to remind us that he is not far away. In stark contrast to the celebratory descriptions found in earlier journalistic puffs, this image gives a decidedly more somber view of the events that will later unfold there.

‘The Famous Bridal Chamber of the Steamer “Drew”’, Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, 21 September 1878. Private collection.

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The uncertain nature of this scenario is not a coincidence. By the time of this engraving, the golden age of the bridal chambers was already past, in part due to a determined campaign on the part of middlebrow domestic advisors and social commentators who united from the mid-1850s on to condemn them. Since its origins in the 1820s, domestic reformers questioned the wisdom

‘Lorrimer Captivates Mary Arlington’s Imagination’, From George Lippard, Dora Livingstone, the Adulteress, or the Quaker City (1848). Private collection.

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of honeymooning on the grounds that it was exhausting, expensive and exposed the bride to prurient public scrutiny. But if they found the honeymoon troubling, they found the bridal chamber downright treacherous: it confirmed their worst fears about how commercialism would undermine the purity of marriage itself. The chamber’s supposed ability to incite indulgence in particular went against every quality they believed was necessary for successful marriage, replacing home love, modesty and restraint with materialism, display and wantonness. Fears about how the chamber might encourage wantonness may well have been justified by the bridal chamber’s decorative resemblance to rooms in the upper-class brothels (‘parlour houses’) usually found in the streets around the palace hotels. While middlebrow critics hesitated to openly make the comparison between bridal chamber and brothel, contemporary sensation writers had no such qualms. In works like George Lippard’s The Quaker City (1845) and George Thompson’s The Bridal Chamber and Its mysteries (1856), extravagant bridal chambers, both real and fake, emerged as favourite settings for stories in which sentiment was pretended, love deceived and virtue lost, inevitably resulting in madness and murder.6 Despite the violence of these narratives, their conclusions were surprisingly prim: they ended as cautionary tales, warning of how lavish interiors could undo innocent women or dangerously ‘inflame’ the passions of new brides. Above all, such narratives exposed the voraciousness of sentimental culture itself, revealing how private sentiments were being materialized and transformed via new commercial architectures and their representations into spectacles for public enjoyment. Intimate displays like these drew the latent conflict between domestic and commercial cultures into the open and help explain why the middlebrow printed press’s enthusiasm for bridal chambers turned so quickly. Whereas in 1853 Putnam’s was prepared to defend the respectability of bridal chambers (‘commendable things … which no right-minded man or woman can make any objections to’), just one year later we find Godey’s Lady’s Book decrying them as a ‘modern abomination to good taste and common sense’.7 Even if bridal chambers did not disappear entirely, after the 1850s, they were never regarded as star attractions again; and even if the commercialization of weddings did not go into retreat – it was too firmly established a phenomenon for that – the brief heyday of the bridal chamber reveals that the relationship between eros and commodity was a fraught and unstable one, requiring mediation and constant calibration in both building and print.

Notes 1 Charles Weld, A Vacation Tour in The United States and Canada (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1855), 184. 2 For a fuller discussion of mid-nineteenth-century bridal chambers, see Barbara Penner, Newlyweds on Tour: Honeymooning in Nineteenth-Century America (Hanover, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2009), 124–56. 3 Roland Barthes, ‘The Eiffel Tower’, in trans. Richard Howard, The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 6. 4 ‘An Englishman’s First Impressions of American Marine Travel’, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, (21 September 1878): 199. 5 This engraving accompanied a written piece entitled ‘An Englishman’s First Impressions of American Marine Travel’. While the narrator, allegedly an Englishman on his first Hudson River

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THE PRINTED AND THE BUILT steamer trip, is shown the ‘blue’ bridal chamber by the captain, there is nothing in the piece which explains the scenario depicted here. Ibid.

6 George Lippard, The Quaker City or, the Monks of Monk Hall: A Romance of Philadelphia Life, Mystery, and Crime, ed. David S. Reynolds (1845; Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995). No full copy of George Thompson’s The Bridal Chamber and Its Mysteries: or, Life at Our Fashionable Hotels is known to be extant, though its gruesome fifth chapter can be found in the New York Atlas, 7 (January 1855): 4. 7 ‘New York Daguerreotyped’, Putnam’s Monthly 1, no. 4 (April 1853): 359; and ‘Decorated Parlor Windows’, Godey’s Lady’s Book 48 (February 1854): 166.

Silhouette Richard Taws

Das fürchterliche Raubnest, oder die Ruine der Grossen Kaiserburg des Universalmonarchen, c. 1814, etching. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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An anti-Napoleonic satire published in Germany around 1814 by the Nuremburg print publisher Friedrich Campe depicts a ruined castle in a landscape, its contours revealing the unmistakable silhouette of the Emperor. In the early decades of the nineteenth century printed silhouette portraiture of this kind became established across the continent, and further afield, as a genre that regularly combined personal reminiscence and political critique. Occupying a space within established forms of print culture, it overlapped too with new forms of mechanical reproduction, such as the physiognotrace.1 Here, however, the profile portrait has been integrated into a scenario that is predominantly architectural. In its play between the two-dimensional abstraction of the profile and the fully three-dimensional body this etching speaks to the complex interaction between print and the built environment in this period, staging the ruined figure of Napoleon at the centre of this relationship.2 Referencing Napoleon’s exile on St Helena, the print represents a band of robbers fearfully negotiating the structure of the ‘universal monarch’, wherein they plan to hide their loot. Some versions of the etching have been hand-coloured.3 In these images, the pink lips and mossy hairline of ‘Napoleon’ have the curious effect of rendering the structure less architectural, and more like a portrait. The uncoloured image, on the other hand, by registering little distinction between the structure and its background, locates the work within a more easily digestible architectural milieu. The variable prioritization of the languages of either portraiture or architecture – blurred irrevocably in this image – is accentuated further by the placement of the text, with legends on both the left-hand vertical axis and the print’s longer bottom edge. This creates the possibility of a vertical orientation in which a reading of the image as a likeness predominates, as well as a ‘landscape’ one that situates the recumbent figure of the Emperor within a scene, wherein its function as architecture takes over. Furthermore, whereas the horizontal title, in German, is more clearly descriptive, the legend to the portrait orientation, in French – ‘Ah, c’est Monsieur Nicolas!’ – is presented as if vocalized as speech, in keeping with the profile’s animation as a human face when viewed in this position. This inscription likely refers to Nicolas Edme Rétif de la Brétonne’s eccentric autobiography Monsieur Nicolas, ou le Coeur humain dévoilé, published in 1796 and 1797. Divided into ten ‘eras’, Monsieur Nicolas comprised the sixty-year-old Rétif’s reflections on ethics, politics, religion and society, as well as diverse remembrances, accounts of sexual liaisons and opinions on various matters. Largely unknown at the time, the book nevertheless reached a German-speaking audience, counting Schiller among its readers. Announcing, in its cheerful, if ambiguous, recognition of Monsieur Nicolas, a sense of revelation shared by Rétif’s candidly autobiographical book and the ‘hidden’ Napoleonic profile, the legend also situates the image within a transnational, multilingual print culture. The uncoloured version of this print held at the British Museum has a complex and traumatic history: in 1933 it was confiscated by the Gestapo from the collection of Eduard Fuchs, whose stamp is visible on the verso side. Four years later, in October 1937, Walter Benjamin’s essay on Fuchs, ‘Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian’, was published in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung.4 As Benjamin described it, Fuchs’s practice as a collector intersected in important, if unresolved, ways with his historicism, and with the possibility of a historical materialism that paid attention to ‘the afterlife of that which is understood and whose pulse can be traced in the present’.5 Crucial, for Benjamin, was Fuchs’s interest in marginal artistic practices such as caricature and pornography, for ‘these border disciplines sooner or later meant the ruin of a series of clichés in traditional art history’.6 The architectural motif of ruination, and its production of unexpected, picturesque

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Peltro William Tomkins, after Dr Edward Daniel Clarke, Silhouette Portrait of Napoléon Bonaparte as First Consul, 1802, stipple engraving. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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The Maison Napoleon, Saint-Riquier, France. Photograph by author.

outlines, coincide here with a metaphorical language derived from mechanical reproduction – the cliché, or stereotype, a relief printing surface cast from an original plate and used for producing prints in large quantities. Moreover, there is a logic to Fuchs’s collection of this ruined silhouette; an image preoccupied with borders and margins, it evinces too a clear sense of the ‘afterlife’ of things.

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Yet this was not, of course, the only time that the Napoleonic silhouette took architectonic form. For instance, in the shadow of the Gothic cathedral that dominates the small town of Saint-Riquier, in the Department of the Somme, Louis-Joseph Petit, a former soldier in the Grande Armée, reconstructed his house around 1840 to pay homage to the Emperor, on the occasion of the return of his ashes to France. Its eaves shaped in the distinctive outline of the Napoleonic bicorne, this hat-house is topped by a small statue of the Emperor. As with many printed silhouettes, this iteration of the Napoleonic outline operated as a mnemonic recalling a vanished object, whose return was dearly desired. Around the same time that Petit was constructing his homage, Louis-Napoléon Geoffroy-Château’s Napoléon et la conquête du monde, 1812 à 1832: Histoire de la monarchie universelle, of 1836, offered an alternative take, projecting a future rather than seeking to recuperate the past.7 Geoffroy-Château’s text is acknowledged as the first book-length iteration of what we might now term alternate or counterfactual history. It relates what would have happened had Napoleon not delayed at Moscow in 1812, and had he not been defeated subsequently at Waterloo. Geoffroy-Château recounts the invasion of Britain, and a number of other imagined Napoleonic successes and inventions. In the counterfactual history the projection of a silhouette effectively models the form of the narrative, for, as Catherine Gallagher has noted, ‘each encounter with a character [thus] revisits and revises the historical personae; everyone we meet is shadowed by a double’.8 In one chapter, titled ‘Apparition’, Napoleon and his army, returning to Europe from St Helena, are embroiled in a terrible storm off the coast of Senegal. For contemporary readers, this would hardly have been a coincidental location, for it was the site of a newsworthy shipwreck in 1816 – of the frigate La Méduse – that determined the narrative form of such events for time to come, most notably in Théodore Géricault’s painting, shown at the Salon of 1819. Mists and clouds descending, Napoleon’s crew suddenly spied a massive rock ahead, looming into view. They were staggered to note that this mountainous mass was in the silhouette of the Emperor himself. Heading towards this apparitional saviour, the ship reached land, where the crew discovered that it was, in fact, the island of Tenerife, and that the mountain – presumably the volcanic Pico del Tiede – had been chiselled by the artists of Europe, led by Jacques-Louis David, into this form, as a gesture of gratitude to Napoleon and as a marker of the meeting point between Europe and Africa. The architectural silhouette of the Emperor exists here only on the printed page. And it does, too, in the satirical print from 1814. Perhaps such an image prompts us to recognize that all image making is not only anachronistic but, reclaiming the term from its conservative origins in military strategy or theology, in some ways counterfactual too. The architectural silhouette of the Emperor, which never existed as such, responds to the potential demands of other media and other places, as well as other times.

Notes 1 See, among others, Allison Goudie, ‘Smuggled Silhouettes: Opacity and Transparency as Visual Strategies for Negotiating Royal Sovereignty during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars’, in Visual Culture and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, eds Satish Padiyar, Philip Shaw and Philippa Simpson (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 40–55 and Guillaume Mazeau, ‘Portraits de peu. Le physionotrace au début du XIXe siècle’, Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle 45, no. 2 (2012): 35–52.

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2 On this topic, see Iris Moon, The Architecture of Percier and Fontaine and the Struggle for Sovereignty in Revolutionary France (London and New York: Routledge, 2017). 3 See, for instance, the print at Bibliothèque nationale de France, Réserve QB-370 (75)-FT 4. 4 Walter Benjamin, ‘Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian’, trans. Knut Tarnowski, New German Critique 5 (Spring 1975): 27–58. On this essay, see Frederic J. Schwartz, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Essay on Eduard Fuchs: An Art-Historical Perspective’, in Marxism and the History of Art: From William Morris to the New Left, ed. Andrew Hemingway (London: Pluto Press, 2006), 106–22. 5 Benjamin, ‘Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian’, 29. 6 Ibid., 37. 7 Louis-Napoléon Geoffroy-Château, Napoléon et la conquête du monde, 1812 à 1832: Histoire de la monarchie universelle (Paris: H.-L. Delloye, 1836). 8 Catherine Gallagher, ‘What Would Napoleon Do? Historical, Fictional, and Counterfactual Characters’, New Literary History 42, no. 2 (Spring 2011), 327.

Street Views André Tavares

Rae’s Philadelphia Pictorial Directory & Panoramic Advertiser (1851). Chestnut Street. © Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal.

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Tallis’s Street Views (1838–40). Façades along King William Street framed with a map of the immediate area and a vignette of the New London Bridge. © Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal.

Architectural books employ a variety of languages, visual and textual, to convey meaning and thus demand a structured system to organize the content. Tallis’s London Street Views,1 published by John Tallis (1817–76) between 1838 and 1840, is an example in which architecture has been successfully adopted to structure a book.2 Issued weekly in eighty-eight parts, its main element was a horizontally oriented two-page spread showing elevations of buildings along a commercial London thoroughfare. The street elevations are carefully detailed to give a lively picture of the street. At the extremities of each spread are complementary images – usually a perspective and a location map – that, in combination with the elevations, immerse the reader in the urban area. This central plate, accompanied by a synthetic historical text, was bound with four pages of advertisements inside a cover printed on coloured paper. Although its purpose was covered by a long charming subtitle superseding the mere practical use of commercial directory – ‘exhibiting upwards of one hundred buildings in each number, elegantly engraved on steel; with a commercial directory corrected every month, the whole forming a complete stranger’s guide through London’ – Tallis’s was essentially an illustrated predecessor of the Yellow Pages and thus foreshadowed Google Street View. Each weekly issue required a significant amount of survey work, but the initial investment was recouped in advertising sales. Each storefront could pay for the privilege of having its name and address printed on the elevation, and that income plus the advertisement pages made the booklets a profitable venture. With a ‘street layout’ where the ads follow the orientation of the street view instead of that of the book, architecture was used in Tallis’s to structure the booklet’s content and to overcome the limitations of a simple indexed directory. Tallis’s was addressed to a popular audience and thus widely printed and distributed. A contemporary reviewer testified that it was ‘a fund of entertainment … executed with a style that renders it worthy of a place on the drawing room table’.3 His enthusiasm is contagious: Now, at what rate per number is such a novelty charged? Two shillings? No. – One shilling? No. – Sixpence? No. Our readers will be amazed to learn that the faithful outline representation of any street and a beautiful view of some prominent edifice, a net plan of the locality, and historical description, are supplied at the wonderfully cheap rate of three half-pence!4

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Unlike expensive architectural books, the booklets were so cheap that almost anyone could afford them. In addition to their accessibility, readers of Tallis’s seem to have appreciated the attractive design of the booklets, the educational value of the text and the practical use of the directory. In each issue short, written descriptions accompanied the street views providing historical information, such as the notice that ‘New London Bridge was commenced in 1825, and completed in 1831, at the expense of the city … It was opened with great splendor by King William the fourth, accompanied by Queen Adelaide … August 1st, 1831’.5 Tallis’s also provided an alternate mode of experiencing the city. The depiction of street façades does not correspond to the experience of a pedestrian, whose perception is dictated by the flow of successive storefronts rather than an overall view. Still, the orthogonal projections offer an abstract representation that readers could connect to their recollection of a given street. Studying the central spread could be as instructive and as surprising as looking at the city itself, and in Tallis’s the two physical spaces converge in one booklet. The nineteenth-century city was in a state of a flux; by mid-century, an increased retail demand for industrially produced goods generated rapid and constant changes in urban commercial areas.6 To represent something so fluid as a commercial streetscape through a fixed medium such as print therefore appears now somewhat paradoxical. The booklet was perhaps a too stable counterpart to the growing industrial city, and issues of Tallis’s quickly fell out of date. Although the regular format and numbering implied the possibility of binding the eighty-eight parts into a complete set, today, these are rare, and the bound volumes often lack several fascicules.7 Reprints were updated and adjusted frequently enough to drive today’s bibliographers to despair.8 Moreover, being cheap, the booklets were not usually treated with great care. Even so, Tallis’s remains a rich resource that gives scholars access to a picture of London frozen in time, combining a faithful rendering of its architecture with precious information on the city’s commercial activities. The quality and success of Tallis’s generated other street-view ventures in Bristol, Bath, Manchester and Dublin, as well as in New York, Boston and Philadelphia.9 Philadelphia’s Rae’s Panoramic Advertiser,10 published in 1851, was a more upscale publication with larger plates. To include an unusual eight-storey building in one sheet, Rae’s used an oversized leaf of paper, which was then trimmed and folded to fit into the book. Such adjustments were made in other plates as well, and these deviations from the standard were costly and certainly played a role in limiting the

Tallis’s Street Views (1838–40). Façades along Piccadilly Street framed with a map of the immediate area and a vignette of Swaine & Isaac, whip manufacturers. © Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal.

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success of Rae’s Panoramic Advertiser when compared to Tallis’s. Even more peculiar than Rae’s is the leporello-bound Grand Architectural Panorama of London.11 Designed by R. Sandman in 1849, the long, narrow print (14 × 679 cm) depicts a lively journey along Regent Street from Westminster Abbey to All Souls’ Church, featuring advertising in the form of discrete labels below the image. Despite its unique format and high-quality etchings, Sandman’s panorama is awkward when unfolded and read in a single glance, and thus seems an oddity compared to the functional Tallis’s.12 Street-view books profited from a growing interest in descriptive representations of cities. However, because depicting streets in detail required a large investment in surveys and constant updates, the fashion soon faded. It is worth stressing the fundamental difference between streetview books and guidebooks, in which the structure is based on the relationship between a general map and the indexed content. While in the street view the architectural representation drives the page layout and sequence, in guidebooks the flow of textual information prevails. In Tallis’s it is architecture that structures the content, translating the experience of a building or buildings onto the page while organizing and presenting the information to the reader.13

Notes 1 John Tallis, Tallis’s London Street Views: Exhibiting Upwards of One Hundred Buildings in Each Number, Elegantly Engraved on Steel; with a Commercial Directory Corrected Every Month, the Whole Forming a Complete Stranger’s Guide through London… To Which Is Added an Index Map of the Streets… (London: John Tallis, 1838–40). 2 Peter Jackson, introduction to John Tallis’s London Street Views, 1838–1840: Together with the Revised and Enlarged Views of 1847 (Richmond: London Topographical Society, 2002), 11–36. 3 Ibid. 4 Quoted from ibid., 11. 5 Tallis, Tallis’s London Street Views, n. 1, King William Street, London Bridge, quoted from ibid., facsimile. 6 Jeffrey A. Cohen, ‘Corridors of Consumption: Mid-Nineteenth Century Commercial Space and the Reinvention of Downtown’, in Visual Merchandising: The Image of Selling, ed. Louisa Iarocci (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013), 19–36. 7 Jackson, introduction to John Tallis’s London Street Views, 1838–1840, 16. The plates were updated for a complete reprint in 1847, which is the edition reproduced in the 1969 and 2002 facsimiles. 8 ‘This mercantile approach had advantages of the buyer, who was able to purchase the subsidised parts at three-halfpence each, but has resulted in a great many variants to confound the bibliographer.’ Royal Institute of British Architects, Early Printed Books, 1478–1840: Catalogue of the British Architectural Library Early Imprints Collection, 5 vols. (London: Bowker-Saur, 1994– 2003). 9 Cohen, ‘Corridors of Consumption’, 31. 10 Julio H. Rae, Rae’s Philadelphia Pictorial Directory & Panoramic Advertiser: Chestnut Street, from Second to Tenth Streets (Philadelphia: Julio H. Rae, 1851). 11 R. Sandeman, Grand Architectural Panorama of London: Regent Street to Westminster Abbey (London: I. Whitelaw, 1849).

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12 The Grand Architectural Panorama is a forerunner of Ed Ruscha’s famously deadpan Every Building on the Sunset Strip, which had a profound impact on Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour’s influential Learning from Las Vegas. 13 This text is an abridged version of the section ‘Building the book form’ published in The Anatomy of the Architectural Book (Zurich/Montreal: Lars Müller Publishers/Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2016), 276–291.

Tidings Mathilde Simonsen Dahl

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llustreret Udstillings Tidende (Illustrated Exhibition Tidings) was published in 1883 during the course of the Norwegian Industry and Art Exhibition in Christiania, present-day Oslo. Patterned on the illustrated magazine Ny Illustreret Tidende and issued two to three times a week from 16 June to 13 October 1883, Illustreret Udstillings Tidende disseminated news from the exhibition and reports on the various manufacturers, while also publishing criticism and comments from newspapers and visitors. As the editor Jonas Rash announced in the opening issue: ‘Literary and belletristic content will offer a pleasant entertainment at moments when the visitor might seek some rest from the more strenuous examination of the objects on display’.1 The Industry and Art Exhibition took place in the western part of the Norwegian capital, nestled between two of the city’s most important new civic buildings, the University and the Sculpture Museum, and only a few blocks away from the Royal Palace. A stave church portal connected the main boulevard Karl Johansgate to a part of the palace garden temporarily allocated for the event. The exhibition buildings consisted of three pavilions designed by architect Adolf Schirmer: a restaurant and art pavilion in the Palace garden and a main pavilion filling Tullinløkka, an open space behind the Sculpture Museum. Though central, Tullinløkka was a contested space in the urban development of Christiania. Several public buildings had been proposed here, only to end up on more favourable spots; the site was considered an eyesore. After considerable political wrangling the Sculpture Museum – designed by Adolf and Heinrich Ernst Schirmer and originally intended on Karl Johansgate – had been placed here, but filling only a fraction of the large site it had not resolved the situation. The exhibition buildings, then, served to temporarily harmonize and complete a contentious place within the city, incorporating the Museum and the University into

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‘The Entrance Portal in the Park’, Illustreret Udstillings Tidende, no. 6 (1883). The National Library of Norway.

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Situation plan, Catalogue for the Industry and Art Exhibition in Christiania, Summer 1883 (Christiania: Mallingske Bogstrykkeri, 1883). The National Library of Norway.

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a short-lived totality. As Illustreret Udstillings Tidende reported from a viewpoint in the park: ‘The complete building complex comes to its own right as one harmonious unity’.2 Marketed as a guide to the exhibition and a supplement to the official catalogue, Illustreret Udstillings Tidende was sold on site and in newsstands across the city. It was published independently from the exhibition and on the editor’s personal initiative, thus depending entirely on sales. Individual copies cost 10 øre per issue, while distributed to subscribers for 4 kroner, with an additional postage fee for sending out of town. In addition, bound copies of all issues were sold in retrospect, as if offering a substitute for the ephemeral display: ‘A bound copy will be the best souvenir’, Rash told his readers in an opening remark, while assuring his advertisers that ‘advertisements in a bound magazine can last for years’.3 Advertisements were offered to a set fee of 25 øre pr. petit line, strategically placed amongst illustrations and other content to heighten the reader’s attention. This jumbled display was carefully considered. As Rash explained: ‘The front page will be printed with larger illustrations, accompanied with text, while on the other pages drawings, texts and advertisements will be placed in a disorderly manner, to make sure that the advertisers are not left on appointed pages as usual, but come into its own and be more striking for the eyes’.4 Initially, the magazine planned to review the exhibition systematically according to the displays’ appearance on-site and numbering in the catalogue – the latter ordered mainly by production process and raw material. This proved to be impossible, however, as the exhibitors’ willingness to pay for more prominent positions meant that the arrangement of the stands was continuously altered. Furthermore, many products were for sale, meaning that the exhibition was changing as things were sold and replaced. Both main categories and sub-categories were in a state of flux, and the whole event appeared as a hybrid between a fair and an exhibition. The Engineer and Architects Association´s journal Teknisk Ugeblad was dismayed, calling for a more orderly display that could better represent the state of the nation’s production. To put some order into the chaos, Teknisk Ugeblad printed its own site plan, and raged against the organizers for not providing a better guide. ‘This lack of total overview complicates a detailed study of the display’, the editors lamented.5 While Teknisk Ugeblad complained, Illustreret Udstillings Tidende adapted well to the exhibition’s seeming disorder. Instead of describing the exhibition display itself, the Illustreret Udstillings Tidende used the exhibits as narrative points of departure to tell stories about production methods, manufacturers and localities. The descriptions of displays were supplemented by cross references between objects in the exhibition as well as to things reviewed in previous or coming issues. Accompanied by vivid descriptions of the places and processes from which they originated, the exhibition displays were framed as it were within the history of human production. The portal leading from Karl Johan into the exhibition area is a good example of the multifaceted environment evoked by the Illustreret Udstillings Tidende. An image of the portal adorned the front page of the magazine on 26 June 1883, with a caption stating that ‘architect Holm Hansen Munthe has in this portal, while showcasing sawmill products, in the same manner as in a showcase inside the exhibition lifted the shapes in old Norwegian style from plates in a publication by the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Norwegian Monuments’.6 In one short paragraph, the editor succeeded in connecting modern sawmill production with ancient Norwegian building traditions and to link the preservation of national monuments with the showcasing of modern, industrial produce. Connecting motifs from printed plates and built structures across space and time, the magazine established a bridge between ancient traditions and modern commodities.

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Illustreret Udstillings Tidende, no. 9 (1883). Printed with the caption: ‘This plate is engraved by Mr. Garmann for the work “The Art of Norwegian Wood Carving” by Prof. L. Dietrichson, issued by Malling Bookstore´s publishing house. See also Udstillings Tidende, no. 7, page 35. Due to the size of this drawing it was not placed on the front page.’ The National Library of Norway.

The reciprocity between the nineteenth-century industrial exhibition, its buildings and its publication culture is played out in interesting ways in the Norwegian Industry and Art Exhibition of 1883. If the exhibition strove to present a coherent picture of modern Norwegian manufacture, and its buildings were designed to give unity to a disjointed part of the city, the publications tried – each in their own way – to turn the chaotic event into a meaningful totality. While Teknisk Ugeblad called for and gave account of a fixed display sorted according to material and production technique, using taxonomy as an ordering device, Illustreret Udstillings Tidende chose a more fragmented approach in keeping with the exhibition and its site. Just as the exhibition connected

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central spaces in the city by means of a sequence of architectural fragments, the illustrated magazine assembled a dispersed collection of things – goods, ads and gossip – into a new printed totality. With unexpected juxtapositions and graphic arrangements aspiring to entertain and surprise, rather than enlightening the readers, the Illustreret Udstillings Tidende provided, then, a guide not only to the exhibition but to the city, perhaps even to modern commodity culture at large.

Notes 1 Illustreret Udstillings Tidende, ed. Jonas Rash, Kristiania: Det Mallingske Bogtrykkeri, no. 1, 16 June 1883, 1. 2 Ibid., 2. 3 Ibid., no. 57–58, 13 October 1883, 245. 4 Editorial, Illustreret Udstillings Tidende no. 1, 16 June 1883. 5 Teknisk Ugeblad, no. 15, 27 July 1883, 57–58. 6 Illustreret Udstillings Tidende, no. 6, 26 June 1883, 29.

Xylography Iver Tangen Stensrud

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n November 1851, the Norwegian illustrated journal Illustreret Nyhedsblad published its second issue. Among its miscellaneous content, one item stood out: a full-page image of the interior of the Crystal Palace in London, accompanied by a detailed description of the event.1 The coverage was by no means original. Opened in London in May 1851, the Great Exhibition had been an international media event, triggering a veritable explosion of printed imagery. If anything, Illustreret Nyhedsblad – a small and provincial publication with about 1,500 subscribers – was somewhat delayed, as the Great Exhibition had closed already in October. Nonetheless, the image is a good reminder of the way nineteenth-century developments in printing and image distribution made architectural images available to an ever-expanding readership across the world. How was this image made? And how did it end up in a small, Norwegian journal? The nineteenth century witnessed an illustration revolution. For the first time, printed images became available, not only to those who could afford books and fine prints, but across the population. The principal reason was the development of new image making techniques, most notably xylography or wood engraving, making the printing and distribution of images cheaper and more efficient.2 Let us look more closely at this process. Used in China and Japan from the ninth century, the art of printing from woodblocks arrived in Europe around the thirteenth century. From the late fifteenth century onwards, woodcuts became linked with the new book trade. The fact that woodcuts could be printed along with movable type on the same press made them an economic choice in book production. However, by the seventeenth century, the woodcut tradition had largely collapsed across Europe, replaced by copper engraving and other image-making techniques. While still used for decorative letterheads and borders,

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Interior of the crystal palace, wood engraving. Illustreret Nyhedsblad, no. 5–6, 15 November 1851. The National Library of Norway.

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woodcut illustrations became synonymous with low-quality images in cheap broadsheets and pamphlets.3 In the late eighteenth century, a new method for cutting images in wood was developed. The most important figure in this development was the Newcastle engraver Thomas Bewick. Woodcuts were most often cut by knife on the side of a softwood board. Bewick’s innovation was to apply sharp tools like the ones used in metal engraving on the end grain of hardwood blocks, preferably boxwood. The compact end-grain allowed the engraver to cut very fine lines, producing work with far greater detail than traditional woodcuts. Bewick’s method also relied on the development of smoother paper, which allowed the detail to come through. By varying the pressure used to cut the lines, varying the distance between lines, creating different patterns of parallel and crosshatched lines, and lowering parts of the surface with scrapers so that they would print more lightly, the skilled wood engraver could produce tonal effects.4 By the 1830s, several of Bewick’s apprentices had established themselves in London, producing elaborate engravings which shared the syntax and style of the copper engraving.5 The most successful use of the new wood engraving technique was found in the Penny Magazine published by Charles Knight and the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, which reached

Wood engraved printing block showing the conflagration of the city of Hamburg. Published in the first issue of the Illustrated London News, 14 May 1842. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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200,000 subscribers in its first year of publication in 1832. While faster and more effective than copper or steel engraving, wood engraving was still a labour-intensive process. Every white line and white space in the image had to be cut out by hand. Larger images required multiple blocks that had to be glued or stitched together. An 1842 panorama of London, distributed with The Illustrated London News in January 1843, was made up of over sixty boxwood blocks and was engraved by eighteen men.6 The Illustrated London News played a crucial role in the development of the wood engraving trade into an industry.7 Large workshops of wood engravers, like those of the Dalziel brothers, were set up to supply the magazine with images. Especially before and during the Great Exhibition, the demand for images was phenomenal. Relying on a large workforce of semi-skilled apprentices, the work of the engraver became increasingly mechanized. While Bewick and his students had controlled the whole work process, wood engravers in large workshops were more specialized. Apprentices were often trained to engrave specific subject matter; some cut human flesh, some sky and clouds, others specialized in machinery or indeed buildings. The practice of facsimile engraving made the process more repetitive and time consuming, limiting the work of the engraver to cutting out the parts not drawn on the woodblock. Making elaborate images was less a question of skill and more a question of having a large workforce. From the 1840s onwards, several innovations contributed to the mechanization of the xylography trade. New ways of assembling and disassembling of blocks were developed, enabling the workshops to produce large engravings faster. The blocks were now fitted together

Extract from a series of articles on the history of wood engraving. Engravings showing a wood engraver at work and his tools. Supplement to the Illustrated London News, 6 July 1844. Private collection.

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before the image was drawn, then taken apart and worked on by several engravers in parallel. New ways of developing photographs directly on the woodblock gradually eliminated the need for a draughtsman to translate the photograph into drawing. The success of xylography relied to a large extent on technologies for casting printing plates. Casting copies of printing plates in metal, a process known as stereotyping, had been known at least since the early eighteenth century, but it was with the Penny Magazine in the 1830s that stereotyping became tied to xylography. Stereotyping allowed the Penny Magazine to use several presses simultaneously, and protected the woodblocks from wear. An added bonus of stereotyping was that it allowed the magazine to sell engravings across Europe and the United States, prompting a vigorous international circulation of images. ‘The art of wood engraving is imperfectly understood in France and Germany’, proclaimed Charles Knight, considering that by selling wood engraving casts ‘at a tenth of the price of having them re-engraved’, they could assist ‘foreign nations in the production of “Penny Magazines.”’8 By the 1850s, electrotyping, a chemical process that produced more exact copies of the printing plate, had surpassed stereotyping. The trade in wood engravings, whether stereotyped or electrotyped, was important, not least for establishing illustrated magazines in places that could not support a large wood engraving trade. In Norway, for instance, the early illustrated press was based almost exclusively on images bought from abroad. No surprise, therefore, to learn that the image we encountered in the introduction had been recycled. We find it in The Illustrated London News for 25 January 1851, printed as part of a series on the building of the Crystal Palace. About nine months later the same image appears in Illustreret Nyhedsblad, accompanying a series of articles on the Great Exhibition. Electrotyped or stereotyped by printers, these images were made specifically for sale and circulation. Trading in xylographic stereotypes was one of the principal ways in which architectural images travelled in the nineteenth century.

Notes 1 Although less used in modern English, ‘xylograph’ or ‘xylography’ was frequently used in the nineteenth century to denote wood engraving. It is derived from the Greek xylo, meaning wood, and graph, generally expressing a sense of ‘that which writes, portrays or records’. 2 Michael Twyman, ‘The Illustration Revolution’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Vol. 6: 1830–1914, ed. David McKitterick (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 117–43. 3 Antony Griffiths, Prints and Printmaking: An Introduction to the History and Techniques (Berkley: University of California Press, 1996), 16–21. 4 Ibid., 22ff.; The techniques of wood engraving is also explained in a number of treatises that came out during the nineteenth century. The most extensive of which is: John Jackson, A Treatise on Wood Engraving: Historical and Practical (London: C. Knight, 1839) (with a second edition in 1861). Compared to lithography, another important new printing technique in the nineteenth century, relatively few treatises on wood engraving was published, this indicates that the trade of wood engraving was generally learned by apprenticeship. 5 Gerry Beegan, The Mass Image: A Social History of Photomechanical Reproduction in Victorian London (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 50; Celina Fox, ‘Wood Engravers and the City’,

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THE PRINTED AND THE BUILT in Victorian Artists and the City: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Ira Bruce Nadel and F.S. Schwarzbach (New York: Pergamon Press, 1980).

6 Patrick Leary, ‘A Brief History of The Illustrated London News’, Illustrated London News Historical Archive. Essays, 2011, http://find.galegroup.com/iln/. 7 The increased mechanization and industrialization of the wood engraving industry is described in: Michael Twyman, Printing 1770–1970: An Illustrated History of Its Development and Uses in England, new ed. (London: British Library, 1998), 92ff; Beegan, The Mass Image, 47–71. 8 ‘The commercial history of a Penny Magazine’, The Penny Magazine of the Society for Diffusion of Useful Knowledge II, no. 107 (1833), 471.

Index Ackermann, Rudolph 57, 58, 65 Adelaide, Queen 285 Alberti, Leon Battista 147–9 Albertini, Francesco 145–7, 149 Album, L’ 103–5, 108–11, 113, 114 Alembert, Jean d’ 19, 190, 192 Alexander, Jonathan James Graham 253 All Souls’ Church, London 286 Allen, Isaac 251 Allgemeines Magazin für die bürgerliche Baukunst 10, 12 American Architect and Building News 16 Anderson, Sir Charles Henry John 261 Andrew, John 37–9 Angelis, Giovanni di 114 Angers, David d’ 44–5, 47 Anstey, Tim 19, 231 Ape italiana delle belle arti 103–4 Applegath, Augustus 1–2 Architectural Magazine, The 10–16 Athenaeum 12, 211 Aubencour, Larché d’ 85 Aubert, L. 127 Augusta Victoria 123 Aurenche, Marie-Laoure 38 Aux Artistes 27, 31, 36–7 Azeglio, Massimo d’ 114 Bacon, Francis 190, 192 Baker, Benjamin 234 Balbo, Cesare 114 Balzac, Honoré de 201, 203 Bann, Stephen 51 Barfreston Church 70 Barrault, Emile 36–7 Barrell, Robert 256 Barthes, Roland 51, 183, 272 Bastille 18, 73–6, 78–82, 84, 85, 88–90 Baudelaire, Charles 202, 203 Beatty, John W. 152–4 Belli, Pasquale 98, 101

Benedetto, San 104 Benjamin, Walter 203, 239, 241, 278 Berceau d’Henri IV 89 Bergdoll, Barry 7, 18, 20, 27 Berliner Architekturwelt 265, 267, 268 Berliner Zeitung 266 Berthault, Pierre-Gabriel 181 Best, Jean 37–9 Bewick, Thomas 297, 298 Bey, Clot 107, 108 Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève 29–31, 39, 45 Bichat, Marie François Xavier 44 Bjordal, Sine Halkjelsvik 19, 259 Blondel, Jacques-François 190 Blount, Edward 256 Bolivar, Simon 45 Botta, Carlo 101 Bournon, Fernand 85 Bradshaw, William 251 Brake, Laurel 3 Brayley, Edward Wedlake 59 Bressani, Martin 55 Brétonne, Nicolas Edme Rétif de la 278 British Quarterly Review 34 Britton, John 52–60, 65, 69 Brouwer, Petra 10, 19, 211 Brunel, Isambard Kingdom 232, 234 Buchanan, James 153 Builder, The 16 Building News and Engineering Journal, The 259, 260, 263 Bull, Georg A. 262, 263 Burke, Edmund 57 Burney, R.C. 57–65 cablegram 19, 151–5 Calvi, Antonio 111, 112 Campe, Friedrich 278 Canterbury Cathedral 67, 69 Captain Cialdi 112 Carnegie, Andrew 153

302

INDEX

Carpo, Mario 3, 175 Carter, Henry 232 Cathala, Étienne-Denis-Louis 85 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand 155 Chalon, J.J. 57–65 Chambers, William 14 Champollion, Jean-Francois 106–8 Charton, Edouard 31, 36–9, 44–5 Chatterton, Thomas 53 Cheatle, Emma 19, 205 Cheng, Irene 19, 245 Chevalier, Michel 195 Christie, Christian 262 chromolithography 18, 168, 169 cinematography 129 Civil Engineer and Architect’s Journal, The 15, 36 Clarke, Edward Daniel 279 Clarkson, Thomas 45 Cloots, Anacharsis 79 Cockeram, Thomas 256 Colomina, Beatriz 3, 18, 121 Column of Liberty, Paris 74, 76, 80 Column of Trajan, Rome 80 Commission des Monuments Historiques 38 Condorcet, Nicolas, marquis de 45, 79 Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers 38–9, 45 Constant, Sépulture de Benjamin 44 Contandriopoulos, Christina 19, 177 copper engraving 167, 295, 297 Corbusier, Le 133, 139 cosmography 192 Crétin, M. 241 Crookes, William 126 Cruikshank, George 159, 160 Crystal Palace, London 1, 2, 4, 20, 128, 129, 161, 168, 195, 197, 271, 295, 296, 299 Cuoco, Vincenzo 101 Cuvier, Georges 44 Czas 125 Daguerre, Louise 51 daguerreotype 18, 52 Dahl, Johan Christian Claussen 259 Dahl, Mathilde Simonsen 19, 289 Daily Universal Register 171 Daly, César 15–16, 39 David, Jacques-Louis 44, 281 Defoe, Daniel 186, 187 Delamotte, William Alfred 63 Delbeke, Maarten 18, 20, 73 Della Rovere, Galeotto Franciotti 147 Denina, Carlo 101

Derby Mercury 226, 227 Dernière mode, La 203 Deutsche Bauzeitung 16 Diario di Roma 102, 103, 105, 108, 109, 114 Diderot, Denis 19, 190, 192 Didot, Firmin 37 Dietrichson, Lorentz 293 Duban, Félix 31, 45 Duc, Louis 31 Duchess de Praslin, Françoise 240, 241 Dulaure, Jacques-Antoine 177–9 Eastman, George 128 Ecole des Beaux-Arts 45, 153 Economist, The 2, 8 Eder, Josef Maria 125, 126 Edison, Thomas 128 Eiffel, Alexandre Gustav 195 Eisenstein, Elizabeth 77 Encyclopédie Nouvelle 36, 38 Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers 191 Encyclopédie pittoresque à deux sous 38 Engelmann, Godefroy 168 etching 52, 66 Eugene IV, Pope 147 Evelyn, John 185–7 Fantascope 39 Farnsworth, Edith 135, 136 Fauerbach, Ulrike 167 Fergusson, James 211, 212, 214, 215 Ferrey, Benjamin 67 Ficino, Marsilio 147 Flecknoe, Richard 251 Fortoul, Hippolyte 7, 14, 18, 27, 31, 44–5 Forty, Adrian 19, 183 Fowler, I.J. 14 Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper 227, 228, 273 Frankfurter Zeitung 125 Franklin, Benjamin 45 Freud, Sigmund 155 Fritzsche, Peter 8 Fuchs, Eduard 278, 280 Fulke, William 253 Gallagher, Catherine 281 Garmann, Carsten 293 Garzoni, Tomaso 256 Gell, William 104 Genette, Gérard 251 Gentleman’s Magazine, The 12, 16, 17, 211

INDEX Geoffroy-Château, Louis-Napoléon 281 George III 159, 219 Géricault, Théodore 66, 281 Gering, Ulrich 45 Gibbs, James 14 Gilpin, John 57 Gioberti, Vincenzo 102, 114 Gleason’s Pictorial 225, 226 Godey’s Lady’s Book 275 Godwin, George 16 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 53, 165, 247 Graham’s Magazine 239 Grandville, Jean-Jacques 39 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, see Crystal Palace Grégoire, Abbot 45 Gregory XVI, Pope 98, 99, 102–9, 111, 113, 114 Gropius, Walter 132 Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung 265, 266 Grøtta, Marit 19, 175, 201 Guidi, Silvestro 106 Guillim, John 253, 254 Guizot, François 44 Gutenberg, Johannes 29, 45–7, 79, 175 Haggard, Rider 112 Hakewill, Arthur 247 Halleman 73, 79, 80 Harding, James Duffield 65–70 Hardy, Leopold 195 Harper’s Magazine 16, 232 Harper’s Weekly. A Journal of Civilization 6 Harrison, Stephen 253 Hart, James 253 Haussmann, Georges Eugène 160, 201 Hawks, Herbert 129 Hayward, Abraham 20 Heinefetter, Kathinka 237, 238, 241–3 Heinsius, Daniel 253 Henderson, Linda 126 Hennemeyer, Arnd 167 Hills, R. 57 Hittorff, Jaques-Ignace 165, 167–9 Hobsbawm, Eric 29 Hoffmann, Ludwig 265–7 Hoffstadt, Friedrich 10, 11 Hofmann, Albert 267 Hogarth, William 157–9 Hollar, Wenceslaus 255, 256 Hommes du 14 juillet 73–80 Horace 185 Horne, Herman Harrell 124

303

House Beautiful 135 Hübsch, Heinrich 246, 247, 250 Hugo, Victor 19, 29, 31, 90 Hullmandel, C. 52, 65–70 Hultzsch, Anne 171, 225 Hurst 52, 54, 56 Huth, Johann Gottfried 10 Huxley, Aldous Leonard 205 Hvattum, Mari 165, 237 Hyde, Timothy 2, 19, 219 Illustrated London News 1–3, 5–6, 8–9, 20, 44, 152, 171, 173, 225–7, 230–5, 239–41, 297–9 Illustrated Times 234 Illustrated Weekly News 227 Illustration, L’ 6, 9, 44, 130, 196–8, 227, 228, 230 Illustrazione Italiana, L’ 229, 230 Illustrerad Tidning 6 Illustreret Nyhedsblad 6, 295, 296, 299 Illustreret Udstillings Tidende 289, 290, 292–4 Illustrirte Zeitung 6, 7, 9, 227, 228, 230, 232, 237–9, 241–3 Ilustración Española y Americana, La 6, 229–30 Ingram, Herbert 227 intaglio technique 167 Jackson, Mason 152 James I 253 Janinet, Jean-François 180 Jannière, Hélène 3 Jefferson, Thomas 45 Jerrold, Douglas 160 Johnson, Philip 133, 135 Johnson, Samuel 171 Jones, Ernest Charles 205–7, 209 Jones, Owen 168, 169 Jonson, Ben 253, 256 Jordheim, Helge 19, 189 Josephe Gaitte, Antoine 85 Journal des bâtiments civils et des arts 10 Journal pour Rire 160 Julius II 147 Karl Johan 292 Kersaint, Armand-Guy 89 Keux, John le 53, 55 Kircher, Athanasius 106 Knight, Charles 32, 35–7, 297, 299 Koch, Robert 136 Kolliker, Albert von 123 Korn, Arthur 131, 132

304

INDEX

Kracauer, Siegfried 239 Krantz, Jean-Baptiste 195 Kugler, Franz 214 La Fayette, Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de 44–5 Labrouste, Henri 29–31, 39, 44–5 Lady’s Magazine 16 Lamb, Edward Buckton 14 Lanci, Michelangelo 107, 108 Launay, Bernard-René Jourdan de 89 Ledoux, Claude-Nicolas 177, 179 Leeds, William Henry 14, 36 Leloir, Isidore 37–9 Lenardi, G.B. 184, 185 Lending, Mari 19, 151 Lenoir, Albert 27, 31, 38–9 Leo XII, Pope 97, 98 LePlay, Frédéric 195, 197 Lequinio, Joseph 79 Leroux, Pierre 37 Letheringham Church 51 Levine, Neil 29, 39 Lewis, Morris 45 Lillie, Amanda 256 Lincoln Cathedral 65 Lippard, George 274, 275 Literary Gazette, The 212 lithography 3, 51–70 Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper 3 Longman, Thomas Norton 52, 54, 56 Loudon, Jane Webb 13 Loudon, John Claudius 12–16 Louis XIV 82 Louis XV 80 Louis XVI 76, 77, 80, 81, 88, 89, 177 Lübke, Wilhelm 211, 213, 214 Lüsebrink, Hans-Jürgen 77, 79 Luther, Martin 245 Luxor Obelisk 112, 232 Mackenzie, Frederick 53 Magasin Pittoresque 16, 31, 36–46, 67, 113, 225, 232 Mai, Angelo 106 Malesherbes, Guillaume-Chrétien de Lamoignon de 44 Mallarmé, Stéphane 171, 175, 203 Mann, Thomas 139 Marion, Jean-Roch 148 Martinelli, Fioravante 149 Mastai-Ferretti, Giovanni Maria 114

Mathieu, J. 85 Maupassant, Henri René Albert Guy de 201 Mazzoldi, Angelo 101 Mechanics Magazine 12, 16 Mechanix Illustrated 134 Melchiorri, Giuseppe 102, 104, 105 Mellon, Paul 60, 61, 63, 64, 68, 70, 161 Mezzotint 167 Micali, Giuseppe 101, 105, 114 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 131, 133, 135 Miller, Wallis 19, 265 Mirabeau, Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de 44 Mirandola, Giovanni Pico della 147 Moholy-Nagy, László 125, 132, 134 Monde Illustrée, La 232 Monge, Gaspard 44 Morning Chronicle 14 Moroni, Gaetano 108, 109 Morris, Robert 45 Morris, William 247 Morrow, George 161, 162 Motte, W de. 57, 62 Munn, P.S. 58, 61, 62 Musée de Cluny, Paris 38 Musée des Monuments Français, Paris 38 Museo Gregoriano Profano Lateranese, Rome 114 Napoleon Bonaparte 278, 281 Napoléon III 195 National Zeitung 266 Nattali, M.A. 57, 58, 65 Nelson, Paul 133 New York Electrical exhibition 128 New York Times, The 125 Nibby, Antonio 104 Nodier, Charles 67 Norris, Philip 221 North British Review 211 Norwegian Industry and Art Exhibition 1883 19, 291, 293 Notre-Dame de Paris 29, 55, 256 Nouvelle Minerve, La 44 Ny Illustreret Tidende 289 Orwell, George 205, 245 Osborn, Max 266 Paine, Thomas 245 Palace of Westminster 35 Palais d’Omnibus 195, 197 Pall Mall Gazette 128

INDEX Palladio, Andrea 149 Palloy, Pierre-François 73, 74–6, 79–90 Pantheon, Paris 44–5 Paris Matin 125 Parnell, Stephen 3 Pasha, Mehmed Ali 35, 106–9 Paul, Saint 97, 99, 102, 106, 109 Paxton, Joseph 2, 160, 161, 232 Peacham, Henry 256 Penner, Barbara 19, 271 Penny Cyclopedia 35–6 Penny Magazine 5–6, 12–13, 32–3, 35–7, 67, 113, 225, 297, 299 Pérez-Gómez, Alberto 148 Pétion de Villeneuve, Jérôme 73, 75, 76 Petit, Louis-Joseph 281 Pettegree, Andrew 167 Peutz, Frits 133, 134 Pfennig Magazin 16, 36, 225 photography 18, 39, 84, 87, 95, 125, 183, 214 Physical Society, Berlin 123 Piazza del Popolo 6 Pindar 253 Piranesi, Giovanni 211 Pius VII 104 Pliny the Elder 252 Poe, Edgar Allan 239 Poincare, Henri 123 Poletti, Luigi 98–102, 104–7 pornography 278 Pouzadoux, Charles-Édouard 152–3 Prescott, George B. 153 Presse, Die 125 Presse, La 201–3 Prieur, Jean-Louis 181 Prout, Samuel 57, 65, 69, 70 Pugin, Augustus Welby Northmore 35, 55, 57, 59–61, 67, 245, 247 Punch, or the London Charivari 160 Pyne, W.H. 57 Rae, Julio H. 283, 285–6 Rash, Jonas 289, 292 Ravioli, Camillo 111–13 Rawle, J.J. 55, 57 Redcliffe Church 52, 54, 56 Revett, Nicholas 31, 159, 165 Revue Encyclopédique 36–7 Revue générale de l’architecture et des travaux publics 15–16, 39 Reynaud, Jean 37

305

Reynaud, Léonce 27 Richardson, George Canning 259, 260, 263 Rickman, Thomas 35 Riegl, Alois 51 Röntgen, Bertha 122, 123, 128, 130 Röntgen, Wilhelm Conrad 121–3, 125, 126, 128, 130, 131, 139 Rosellini, Ippolito 107, 108 Rossetti, Annibale di 107 Rossini, Luigi 98 Rosso, Michela 19, 157 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 44 Royal Institute of British Architects 13 Rudwell, J. 65 Ruga, Paolo 112 Rush, Benjamin 45 Ruskin, John 14, 36, 69, 171, 175, 221, 247 Saboya, Marc 10 St. Augustine, Canterbury 67 St. Ethelbert’s Tower, Canterbury 67–9 St. John’s Gate, London 17 St. Louis Dispatch 125 St. Martin des Champs, Paris 38 St. Mary Redcliffe, Bristol 52, 53, 55, 57, 59, 60, 65 St. Paul’s Cathedral, London 159, 253 St. Peter’s Basilica, Rome 104, 106, 108, 109 Saint-Simon, Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de 27, 31, 36–7, 44 Sala, George Augustus 161 San Lorenzo, Florence 147 San Paolo fuori le mura, Rome 18, 97, 100, 103, 114 Sandman, R. 286 Saturday Evening Post, The 136 Schiertz, Franz Wilhelm 259, 261 Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von 278 Schirmer, Adolf 289 Schirmer, Heinrich Ernst 10, 289 Schliepmann, Hans 265, 267, 268 Semper, Gottfried 165, 166, 168, 169 Serlio, Sebastiano 174, 175, 256 Sistine Chapel 39 Skilling-Magazin 4 Smith, Helen 19, 175, 251 Soane, John 220, 221 Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge 32, 34–5, 297 Society for the Preservation of Ancient Norwegian Monuments 262, 292 Sontag, Susan 137, 139

306

Soufflot, Jacques-Germain 44 Southern Illustrated News 227, 230 Stackelberg, Otto Magnus von 167 Statue of Liberty 77, 88 steel engraving 39, 298 Stensrud, Iver Tangen 3, 295 stereotyping 299 Stevens, Francis 18, 52, 57–67, 69 Strasbourg Cathedral 53 Strassburger Zeitung 266 Stuart, James 31, 32, 159, 165 Sydney Telegraph 125 Szacka, Léa-Catherine 7, 195 Tallis, John 284–6 Tavares, André 19, 169, 283 Taws, Richard 19, 75, 80, 277 Taylor, J. 52, 54, 56 Teknisk Ugeblad 292, 293 telegraphy 125 Thompson, George 275 Thompson, James 20 Thompson, John B. 7 Tiberino Il 103–5 Tidskrift för praktisk byggnadskonst 16 Times, The 3, 152 Tomkins, Peltro William 279 Tønsberg, Christian 259, 261–3 Tour du Monde, La 39 Tracy, Destutt de 77 Trader’s Monthly Intelligencer 16 Transactions of the Royal Institute of British Architects 13 Trump, Donald 154, 155 Tschudi, Victor Plahte 19, 145 typography 147, 148 Ungarelli, Giuseppe 104, 105, 107, 108 Valenta, Eduard 125, 126 Varley, C. 57 Vaudoyer, Léon 27, 31, 38–9, 45 Verne, Jules 39 Verniquet, Edme 85

INDEX Verzaglia, Augusto 108 Victoria, Queen 153 Vidler, Anthony 187 Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène-Emmanuel 39, 55, 57 Vitruvius 175, 187 Voce della Ragione, La 103 Voltaire 44 Wallach, Ira D. 158 Walsall, John 251, 253 Warburg, Emil 123 Warren, Josiah 247–50 Washington, George 45 Watson, James Sibley, Jr. 135 Wattier, Edward 40 Weale, John 247 Weber, Johann Jacob 36 Weld, Charles 271 Wendingen 134 Wesemael, Pieter van 195 Westall, Richard 65, 69 Westminster Abbey 159, 286 Whistler, James McNeill 221 Wilberforce, William 45 Wilhelm II 123 Willet, Andrew 251 William IV 285 Willson, Edward 58–60, 62, 63, 65, 67, 69 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 165 Wittman, Richard 3, 7, 18, 40, 97, 179 wood cut 67 wood engraving 2–3, 5–6, 31–2, 37, 39, 225, 227, 230, 295–9 Wotton, Henry 187 Wren, Christopher 227 Wright, Frank Lloyd 29 X-ray 18, 121–6, 128–31, 133–6, 139–41 xylography 3, 10, 18, 165, 227, 241, 295–9 Zeitschrift für Bauwesen 16 Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 278 Zetsche, Carl 267