Jonathan Glancey wrote a nice little piece in Saturday’s Guardian on Kerry Downes’ new book on Borromini. For anyone who doesn’t know, Downes is one of this country’s greatest and best architectural (and art) historians having written pioneering monographs on Hawksmoor, Vanbrugh and Wren among others. His books on Hawksmoor and Vanbrugh in particular remain essential reading for anyone working on them.
What unites Borromini with Hawksmoor, Vanbrugh et al is, Glancey observes, the Baroque – that most dramatic, illusionistic and sensational or artistic styles. The continental Baroque is broadly speaking usually seen as the artistic outpouring of the Counter Reformation. This was shock and awe of the highest artist intent. That England, a Protestant country, had its own Baroque has only recently been posited. It was Downes’ own book, English Baroque Architecture (1966), which sought to position the drama, monumentalism and licentiousness of late-Wren, Hawksmoor London churches and Vanbrugh’s great houses as the visible manifestation of our very own Baroque age.
If there was a Baroque age in England it was a short-lived one. Soon, so the old story goes, the Palladian straightjacket of Lord Burlington’s aristocratic taste clamped down and extinguished the Baroque’s flame of English individuality. For the Palladians, the Baroque was ugly, luxurious, decadent, even Catholic. Yet while the latter suggests the English Baroque as the product of irresistible urges of the Baroque spirit lapping onto English shores from the Catholic continent, the English and the continental Baroque were quite different.
None of Wren, Hawksmoor or Vanbrugh ever visited Italy to experience the Baroque spirit in its full glory. Wren did meet Bernini while in Paris in the 1660s, but his work shows little trace of the great Italian’s influence. English architects certainly knew of the work of Bernini, Borromini and others through prints and written accounts. But without seeing their buildings in the flesh they would hardly have discerned the sheer drama and delight of these works no matter how vivid their imaginations. The English Baroque was instead a quite insular development.
By the late seventeenth classical architecture had begun to lose its position as signifier of elite status it had had when imported into England by Inigo Jones at the beginning of the century. Classical elements – columns, friezes, consoles, etc – could now be found adorning the houses of even the middle classes: the houses in Spitalfieds’ Fournier Street (above) are prime and still-surviving examples. The Baroque developed out of this context as a grander, more opulent and monumental form of classicism, one quite unavailable to all but the social and cultural elite. Importantly, and this distinguishes it in many ways from many continental variations, it also drew from the architecture of the past, especially the medieval past for the residual authority it still held; many of the country’s most important buildings were, and still are, medieval ones.
However, the English Baroque moment was a brief one. An architectural style which relied on grandiose and individual effects to distinguish the elite status of its owner or patron was to be both economically and aesthetically unsustainable.
Baroque approach to architecture was to create an ambiance of uniform lighting with highly repetitive, equally spaced out and sized windows in a row. This was just as dramatic and innovative as creating areas of light and dark, but in a different way.
The writer appears to have ignored the revival of the baroque by architects such as Herbert Gribble, J.M. Brydon and George Goldie during the period 1880-1914. I have given 1880 as the start date because that year marked the beginning of work on the Church of the Oratory, Brompton Road. The end date is the year of publication of Geoffrey Scott’s “The Architecture of Humanism”, probably the only text from this period with a surviving reputation.
Hi Roger,
Thanks for your comment. The question of the Baroque revival is an interesting one. My assertion here was that while the architecture of Wren, especially, was known in the late C19 and appropriated in the Edwardian Baroque of the early C20, the idea of an ‘English Baroque’ as equivalent to those of the continent did not exist. It’s not purely a question of nomenclature either. Grouping the work of several architects as ‘Baroque’ has far-reaching epistemological effects to do with the idea of ‘Baroque as discourse’, concerning the construction from the work of several architects of a singular historical body or archive, as opposed to Baroque as simple style signifier. ‘Baroque as discourse’ is producing some interesting reappraisals of the period.
Scott is an interesting and underrated figure – agreed.
Owen
Hi Owen
You raise some interesting ideas there, providing food for thought. To raise a different but related point, the term “Baroque” was not employed by architectural historians such as James Fergusson who, in his “History of the Modern Styles of Architecture” first published in 1869, uses “Renaisance” without much precision. It was left to historians such as Jacob Burckhardt and Heinrich Wolfflin to provide a more nuanced terminology. I think that Fergusson’s want of precision in his widely circulated and much re-printed “History” led the Fathers of the Oratory in their “Instructions to architects” to prescribe “the style of the Italian renaissance” for their new church. The church which emerged is nothing if not Mannerist (it may be argued!)
Roger