In Germany, and especially at Berlin and Munich, the Greek revival took hold of architecture in the early part of the century in a more decisive but also in a more academical spirit than in England. The movement is connected more especially with the name of one eminent architect, Classical revival in Germany.Karl Friedrich Schinkel, who must have been a man of genius to have so impressed his taste on his generation as he did in Berlin, where he was regarded as the great and central power in the architecture of his day; yet his buildings are marked by learning and academical correctness rather than original genius. Elmes’s St George’s Hall, already referred to as one great English work of the classic revival, is by no means a mere piece of academical architecture; it exhibits in some of its details a great deal of originality, and in its general design a remarkably fine feeling for architectural grouping. In particular, the solid masses and the heavy square columns at the ends of his building, which seem like Greek architecture treated with Egyptian feeling, give support to, while they form a most effective contrast with, the richer and more delicate Corinthian order of the central portion. The only work of Schinkel’s which shows something of the same feeling for contrast in architectural composition is one of his smaller buildings, the Königswache or Royal Guard-house, in which a Doric colonnaded portico is effectively flanked and supported by two great masses of plain wall. But in general Schinkel does not seem to have known what to do with the angles of his buildings, or to have realized the value of mass as a support to his colonnades. This is strikingly exemplified in his museum at Berlin, where the tall narrow piers at the angles have a very weak effect, and are quite inadequate as a support to the long open colonnade. His Royal theatre also (fig. 87), though the central portico is fine, is monotonous and weak in its two-storeyed repetition of the small order in the wings, and it has also the fault (which it shares, no doubt, with a great many theatres, large and small) that its exterior design gives no hint of the theatre form; it might just as well be a museum. His Nikolai Kirche (1830–1837) at Potsdam (fig. 88), which has considerable celebrity, though not so merely academical in character, and in fact possessed of a certain originality, has a fault of another kind, in its entire lack of architectural unity; the dome does not seem to belong to or to have any connexion with the substructure, while the portico is quite out of scale with the great block of building in its rear, and looks like a subsequent addition. The fault of the Schinkel school of architecture is an almost total want of what may be called architectural life; it is an artificial production of the studio. The same kind of cold classicism prevailed at Munich, where Leo von Klenze (1784–1864), though a lesser man than Schinkel, played somewhat the same part as the latter played at Berlin. His Propylaea (fig. 89), in which Greek and Egyptian influences are combined, is a characteristic example of his cold and scholastic style. His well known Ruhmeshalle, with its boldly projecting colonnaded wings and the colossal statue of Bavaria in front of it, is in its way a fine architectural conception—perhaps finer and more consistent in its kind than any one work of Schinkel, though he evidently did not exercise so wide an influence on the German art of his day. A third eminent name in the German classic revival is that of Gottfried Semper (1803–1879), somewhat later in date (Schinkel was born in 1781), but more or less of the same school. Semper practised successively at Dresden and at Zürich, but finally settled in Vienna, where, however, he did not live to see the execution of his two most important designs, the museum and the Hofburg theatre, which were carried out by Baron Karl von Hasenauer (1833–1894) from his designs, or approximately so. Semper’s theatre at Dresden, however, shows that he could recognize the practical basis of architecture, as the expression of plan, in a way that Schinkel could not; for in that building he frankly adopted the curve of the auditorium as the motif for his exterior design, thus producing a building which is obviously a theatre, and could not be taken for anything else, and putting some of that life into it which is so much wanting in Schinkel’s rigid classicalities.
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| From a photograph by Ferd. Finsterlin. Fig. 89.—Propylaea at Munich. (Von Klenze.) |
In spite of the Romanizing influence of the First Empire, the classic revival did not leave by any means so academical a stamp on French as on German architecture of the early period of the century. French architects in the main have always had too much original genius to French classicism.be entirely taken captive by a general movement of this kind. There is the weak classicism of Bernard Poyet’s façade to the chamber of deputies, a very poor affair; and there are two important buildings in the guise of Roman peripteral temples, devoted respectively to business and to religion—the Bourse, by Alexandre Théodore Brongniart (1739–1813), and the Madeleine, begun under Napoleon, as a “Temple de la Gloire,” by Pierre Vignon (1763–1828), and completed as a church in 1841 by Jean Jacques Huvé (1783–1852). Both of these are very well carried out externally, and enable us to judge of what would be the effect of a Roman temple of the kind. It must be admitted that the plain oblong mass of the Bourse has really been very much improved by the recent addition of the two wings, carried out by Cavel, though there was a great deal of opposition at first to meddling with so celebrated a building. Unfortunately, the exterior of the Bourse is a mere piece of architectural scenery, quite unconnected with the internal object and arrangement of the building. The Madeleine is a really fine exterior in its way; if a modern church was to put on the guise of a pagan temple, the task could hardly have been better carried out; and the interior might have been as fine if properly treated, but it has little artistic relation with the noble exterior, and is spoiled by poor architectural treatment and bad ornament. The church of St Vincent de Paul, by Jacques Ignace Hittorff (1792–1867), an architect who was one of the most learned students of Greek architecture of his day, is another important example of the French classical church of the period (Plate XII., fig. 125). In this the interior is more consistent with the exterior than is the case in the Madeleine; and by adding a tower at each angle of the façade, above the colonnaded portico, the architect gave it more the expression of a church, which the Madeleine wants. In the Arc de l’Étoile, by Jean François T. Chalgrin (1739–1811), we have a really great, even sublime work, which, though suggested by the Roman triumphal arches, is no mere copy, but bears the impress of the French genius in its details as well as in François Rude’s grand sculptures on the east face, while its great scale places it above everything else of the kind in the world. It is only after ascending the interior and seeing the vaults carrying the roof that one fully realizes what a stupendous piece of work this is. Under Napoleon there was at least no jerry-building.[1]
- ↑ A remarkable instance of this is shown by the railway viaduct at Passy, a large and monumental piece of work in itself, which is built along the centre of the roadway of Napoleon’s bridge. It was’ at first proposed to have a steel railway viaduct parallel with the old bridge, but it was found that the latter, both in respect of solidity and spacious dimensions, would fully bear the erection of the railway viaduct along its centre.
