Chapter 3: ). In association with Antonio de Simone, Leconte also

decorated rooms in the Bourbon Palace at Caserta,[32] originally built by Vanvitelli in 1752-74, for this Napoleonic brother-in-law. But the finest Empire things in the area were the Sala di Marte and the Sala di Astrea there, which de Simone, working alone, had begun to decorate slightly earlier in 1807 for Napoleon’s brother Joseph Bonaparte (Plate 25). As with so many architectural projects of the brief period of the Empire, it was left to a returning legitimate sovereign, in this case Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies, to finish the job. Unlike the greater part of Percier and Fontaine’s work in the French palaces, these rooms at Caserta are interior architecture, not just interior decoration, and fully worthy in their scale and their sumptuous materials of the magnificent spaces, created almost half a century earlier by Vanvitelli, which they occupy. This is the more remarkable as de Simone was really a decorator not an architect.

The Napoleonic emendation of the Piazza San Marco in Venice calls for little comment. There Sansovino’s church of San Zimignan at the end was removed in 1807 and replaced with a structure by G. M. Solis (1745-1823) more consonant with the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Procurazie by Buon and by Scamozzi along the sides. Solis’s emendation finally completed, and not unworthily, this most magnificent piece of urbanism in the form we now know it. La Fenice, the Venice opera-house, had been rebuilt by Giannantonio Selva (1751-1819) in 1786-92; of his work, however, only the rather dull façade remains. The exquisite Neo-Rococo interior is, rather surprisingly, of the second quarter of the nineteenth century, being by the brothers Tommaso and G. B. Meduna (1810-?), who restored the theatre after a fire in 1836.

Ever since the fifteenth century Italian architects had worked much abroad, generally bringing with them the latest stylistic developments. Now that day was largely over; France, England, and very soon Germany were exporting taste as Italy had done for so many previous centuries. After the Second World War her position as architectural mentor began, at least, to revive again (see Chapter 25).

The employment of foreign architects by Russian Tsars was a well-established tradition by the late eighteenth century;[33] most of them had been Italians, but one, Charles Cameron (_c._ 1714-1812), who represents like Adam the transition from Academic to Romantic Classicism, was Scottish.[34] There had also been a French designer of the most original order working in Russia early in the eighteenth century, Nicholas Pineau (1684-1754); he even formed his mature style there, initiating the ‘Pittoresque’ phase of the Rococo well before he returned to France. Half a century later Catherine the Great acquired the greater part of the drawings of Clérisseau, friend and mentor of Adam and also of Jefferson. Catherine’s grandson, Alexander I, was so esteemed as a liberal ruler in what had once been the most advanced of French architectural circles that Ledoux, long left behind as a builder by Revolution and Empire, dedicated to him his book on architecture in 1804, as has already been noted.

Soon after Alexander’s accession in 1801 he called on a less distinguished French architect, Thomas de Thomon (1754-1813), to design the Petersburg Bourse[35] for him; this structure, built in 1804-16, not Brongniart’s slightly later Bourse in Paris, is the great, indeed almost the prime, monument of Romantic Classicism around 1800 (Plate #8A:pl008A). The blank pediment, rising from behind a colonnade, the great segmental lunette lighting the interior, the flanking rostral columns, the smooth stucco so crisply painted, all establish this as a perfect exemplar of this period, even though every idea in it can be found in projects, if not in executed work, by Ledoux and Boullée dating from before the Revolution. An even more precise prototype is provided by a project for a ‘Bourse Maritime’ by Pompon that won a second Grand Prix de Rome in 1798; this was not published until 1806, after Thomon had begun his Bourse, but he was probably familiar with it all the same. Not only is the Bourse exemplary in itself; Petersburg—already a century old and with many vast Baroque palaces to its credit—rather than the newly founded city of Washington on the other side of the western world, offers the finest urban entity of this brief period and of the following decades during which Alexander and his brother Nicholas I continued for some thirty years major campaigns of construction along Romantic Classical lines.

Thomon’s chief Russian rival, Nikiforovich Voronikhin (1760-1814), was French-trained, a pupil of de Wailly. His Kazan Cathedral at Petersburg of 1801-11 is still rather Baroque in its obvious reminiscences of St Peter’s in Rome. But the Academy of Mines, which he began ten years later, although somewhat heavy-handed in the way Romantic Classicism tended to be, away from the great cultural centres, is almost as exemplary as Thomon’s Bourse. More characteristically Russian in its incredible extension and the great variety of its silhouette is the Admiralty[36] of 1806-15 by Adrian Dimitrievich Zakharov (1761-1811). But the end façades successfully enlarged to monumental scale the theme of the arched entrance to the pre-revolutionary Hôtel de Salm in Paris by Pierre Rousseau (1751-1810). Altogether the Admiralty exceeded in quality as well as in scale almost everything that Napoleon commanded to be built in France, except perhaps the Arc de l’Étoile.

Thus Romantic Classicism before Waterloo had major representatives all the way from Latrobe and Mills in America, the one a foreigner, the other a native, to Thomon and his two native rivals in Russia; while the work of Leconte in Naples could once be matched by that done by Ramée in Hamburg and Denmark before he went to America and by the projects, at least, of Desprez in Sweden (see below). Other Frenchmen were working throughout Napoleon’s realm and outside it as well; but the most distinguished architect of this period hitherto unmentioned was a Dane, C. F. Hansen (1756-1845). The design of his Palace of Justice of 1805-15 in the Nytorv in Copenhagen, with its associated gaol, derives from the most advanced projects made by Frenchmen in the earlier years of Romantic Classicism before 1800. The gaol and the arches of its courtyard are more definitely Romantic than anything executed in France under Louis XVI, for they specifically recall the ‘Prisons’ of Piranesi, those strange architectural dreams in which the Baroque seems to become the Romantic before one’s very eyes. The gaol also resembles a prison designed for Aix by Ledoux and owes a certain medieval flavour, one must presume, to Hansen’s first- or second-hand knowledge of the projects of Boullée.

Still finer, because more homogeneous in conception if less pictorially Romantic, is the principal church in Copenhagen, the Vor Frue Kirke in the Nørregade, designed in 1808-10 by Hansen and built over the years 1811-29. The severely plain tower above the Greek Doric portico at the front illustrates the more primitivistic and Italianate aspects of Romantic Classical theory—more precisely it might seem to derive from the tower of a project for a slaughterhouse by F.-J. Belanger (1744-1818),[37] a pupil of Leroy. The interior, eventually furnished with statues of Christ and the Twelve Apostles by one of the greatest Romantic Classical sculptors, the Danish Thorwaldsen, raises its ranges of Greek Doric columns to gallery level above a smooth arcuated base (Plate 4B). These carry a coffered Roman barrel vault in a way that follows quite closely, although with some change in the proportions, Boullée’s project for the Bibliothèque Royale. Not the least successful and original feature of the exterior is the plain half-cylinder of the half-domed apse broken only by a portal of almost Egyptian simplicity. But in Copenhagen, with its old tradition of building in brick, the characteristic Romantic Classical surfaces of smooth stucco seem alien and the curious pinky-brown that Hansen’s buildings are painted is certainly a little gloomy today.

In Sweden the Rome-trained French architect Desprez, whose projects of the 1780s have been mentioned, was largely occupied not with building but with theatre settings; however, there is at least the excellent Botanical Institute that he built in Uppsala, designed in 1791 and completed in 1807, with its characteristic Greek Doric portico and plain wall surfaces. More notable was his grandiose project, also of 1791, for the Haga Slott in the form of a very long peripteral temple with an octastyle pedimented portico projecting in the middle of the side. But Sweden saw no such monumental example of Romantic Classicism carried to execution. Typical of actual production is the country house at Stjamsund built in 1801 by C. F. Sundahl (1754-1831); this is more English than French in character, indeed with its plain rectangular mass and central portico almost literally Anglo-Palladian.

Harassed and recurrently conquered or _gleichgeschaltet_ though most of the German states were in the Napoleonic Wars (while Sweden eventually received a Napoleonic marshal as sovereign through the testament of her legitimate ruler) there was much more building altogether in these years of the turn of the century in Germany than in Sweden, or indeed in France, much of it of high quality. The frontispiece to Romantic Classicism in Germany is the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, built in 1789-93 by K. G. Langhans (1733-1808). Still somewhat attenuated and un-Grecian in its proportions, this is the first of the Doric ceremonial gateways that were to be so characteristic of Romantic Classicism everywhere and also one of the most complex and original in composition. More ponderous and provincial is Langhans’s Potsdam theatre of 1795; but the Stadttheater at Danzig of 1798-1801 by Held, the City Architect, a cube with a Doric temple portico and a low saucer dome, follows a more Ledolcian paradigm.

David Gilly (1748-1808) was a more advanced Berlin architect than the elderly Langhans; but his best work of these years is the Viewegsches Haus in Brunswick of 1801-5 with its smooth stucco wall-planes, boldly incised ornament, and Greek Doric porch. More elegantly French is another Brunswick house of this period, the free-standing Villa Holland of 1805 by P. J. Krahe (1758-1840).

Gilly would have been overshadowed by his son Friedrich (1771-1800) had the latter lived, or so one must judge, not from his modest Mölter house in the Tiergartenstrasse in Berlin of 1799, but from certain major projects. One, of 1797, is for a monument to Frederick the Great which was widely and deeply influential for many years to come; another, of 1800, is for a Prussian National Theatre, improving upon Ledoux’s at Besançon as regards the interior and very original in its external massing. The monument raised a Greek Doric temple on a tremendous substructure of the most abstract geometrical character, surrounded it with obelisks, and set the whole in a vast open space, unconfined but—as it were—defined by subsidiary structures of very fresh and varied design (Plate 9A). The handsome gateway to the square seems to provide evidence of Gilly’s familiarity with such a highly personal work of Soane as his entrance arch at Tyringham (Plate 6A); however, the general tone of somewhat funereal grandeur recalls rather the monumental projects of Ledoux, Boullée, and the younger men of France who designed so much and built so little in this decade. Other contemporary Berlin architects, such as Heinrich Gentz (1766-1801), who built the old Mint in 1798-1800, and Friedrich Becherer (1746-1823), who built the Exchange in 1801, while up-to-date stylistically, were much less accomplished than Friedrich Gilly. His artistic heir was his fellow pupil Schinkel, whose architectural career really began in 1816 (see Chapter 2).

Figure 1. Friedrich Weinbrenner: Karlsruhe, Marktplatz, 1804-24, plan
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The Baden architect Friedrich Weinbrenner (1766-1826) was already active in Strasbourg in the 1790s, and his monument of 1800 to General Desaix on the Île des Épis, Bas-Rhin, is so French in every way that it properly finds a place in the official publication by Gourlier and others of the public works of France in these years. Returning to Karlsruhe, Weinbrenner began perhaps the most productive architectural career of any German of his generation, transforming the Baden capital into a Romantic Classical city somewhat less monumental, but more coherently exemplary, than Petersburg. His own house there dated from 1801 and his Ettlinger Gate from 1803. In 1804 he began work on the Marktplatz there, basing himself, however, on earlier projects that he had made in 1790 and in 1797 (Plate 10A). A Baroque scheme exists on paper for this square, closing it in with continuous façades and curving them round the ends. Weinbrenner’s characteristically Romantic Classical approach to the design of a square is quite different, similar to if somewhat less open than Friedrich Gilly’s intended setting for the Frederick the Great Monument (Figure 1). Two balancing but not identical buildings, each more or less isolated, face each other across the centre of the oblong space. The other less important structures appear as separate blocks. Their relative geometrical purity is underlined by the even purer form of the plain pyramidal monument erected in the centre in 1823. Such had for some time provided favourite decorations in Romantic gardens, but this was the first to be used as a focal accent in place of an arch, a column, or an obelisk. The City Hall on one side, with the associated Lyceum, was begun in 1804 and completed some twenty years later. The temple-like Evangelical Church which faces the City Hall was built in 1807-16. Something of the grand scale of the Corinthian portico on the front of the church is carried over into the interior, where two tiers of galleries run along the sides behind giant Corinthian nave colonnades. In the circular Rondellplatz, punctuated eventually by an obelisk in the centre, there rose in 1805-13 Weinbrenner’s Markgräfliches Palais, its portico set against the concave quadrant of the front. His domed Catholic church of 1808-17 was unfortunately entirely rebuilt in 1880-3.

Similar to Weinbrenner’s Rondellplatz is the Karolinenplatz in Munich, laid out by Karl von Fischer (1782-1820) in 1808. But this was originally even more Romantic Classical in disposition, since the individual houses were all discrete blocks set in the segments between the entering streets. The 106-foot obelisk in the centre here was erected in 1833 by Leo von Klenze (1784-1864). Fischer’s National Theatre in the Max-Josephsplatz in Munich, projected in 1810 and built in 1811-18—and later rebuilt by Klenze according to the original design after a fire in 1823—is a quite conventional monument of its day dominated by a great temple portico. Though not very crisp in its proportions, this theatre has real presence, particularly in relation to the less boldly scaled Renaissance Revival buildings by Klenze, the Königsbau of 1826 and the Hauptpostamt of ten years later, which flank it on the sides of the square.

Not to extend unduly this catalogue of German work of the very opening years of the nineteenth century, one may conclude with mention of the Women’s Prison in Würzburg by Peter Speeth (1772-1831) built in 1809-10. In this, much of the boldness of design of the French prison projects of Ledoux and Boullée was happily realized, if at a rather modest scale (Plate 17B). Speeth later proceeded to Russia, but what he did there is a mystery.

Austrian production was rather limited and on the whole undistinguished in this period. The extant façade by Franz Jäger (1743-1809) of the Theater an der Wien of 1797-1801 off the Linke Wienzeile in Vienna has a delicacy that is more _style Louis XVI_ than Romantic Classical. Neither the Palais Rasumofsky at 23-25 Rasumofskygasse in Vienna of 1806-7, built by Louis Joseph von Montoyer (_c._ 1749-1811) for Beethoven’s patron, nor his Albertina of 1800-4 on the Augustinerbastei has much character. There is equally little to be said for the Palais Palffy of 1809 at 3 Wallnerstrasse by the other leading Viennese architect of the day, Karl von Moreau (1758-1841). Despite his French name, Montoyer was a Hapsburg subject from the Walloon provinces; Moreau’s origin is uncertain, but he is reputed to have been trained, if not born, in France. If he was not French, Austria would be one of the few countries where no French architect worked in this period.

A certain sort of primacy must certainly be given to France in this period, although less definitely than in the decades 1750-90, because the French became the educators of the world in architecture and the codifiers of style once a new post-Baroque style had been created. Among Napoleon’s new institutional establishments was the École Polytechnique. Here architecture was taught by Durand, a pupil of Boullée, under the Empire and the following Restoration. His _Précis des leçons_ became a sort of Bible of later Romantic Classicism throughout his lifetime and even beyond. Above all in Germany, the instruction of Durand provided the link between the innovations of the creative decades before the Revolution in France and a new generation of architects who matured just in time to take over the building activities of the kingdoms which rose from the ruins of Napoleon’s empire. We may well precede any description of the achievements of Romantic Classicism after 1810 with some consideration of Durand’s treatise.

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