Chapter 6: ). Deriving from the more utilitarian arcuated models provided

by Durand (and ultimately from the projects of his master Boullée and other French architects of the 1780s), the _Rundbogenstil_ is still a phase of Romantic Classicism even if in it the Romantic element has risen close to dominance. But in its rigidity of composition, repetition of identical elements, and emphasis on direct structural expression it is wholly in the line of the earlier and more Classical rationalism.

The changing taste of these decades usually demanded ever more and busier detail. Rivalry with the archaeological pretensions of the Greek Revival, moreover, called for a certain parade of stylistic erudition. But the archaeological sources drawn upon were very various and to varying degrees effectively documented. From the Early Christian to the _quattrocento_, most of them were more or less Italianate. However, there were some architects who succeeded—like Gärtner at the Wittelsbach Palace—in using pointed-arched precedent in a characteristically _Rundbogenstil_ way; others elaborated their detail with real originality rather than adhering closely to any past precedent at all.

On its _quattrocento_ side the _Rundbogenstil_ was perhaps most notably represented in Germany by the Johanneum in Hamburg of 1836-9 (completely destroyed in the Second World War), a large building surrounding three sides of a court and incorporating two schools and a library (Plate 11B). This was by C. L. Wimmel (1786-1845), like Hübsch a pupil of Weinbrenner, and F. G. J. Forsmann (1795-1878). This particular _Rundbogenstil_ work can also be classified as belonging, like Klenze’s Königsbau, to the international Renaissance Revival of which Hamburg was rather a centre. For example, the extant Exchange there of 1836-41 by these same architects is of richer and more High Renaissance character and not at all _Rundbogenstil_.

Many houses in Hamburg built by Gottfried Semper (1803-79), Alexis de Chateauneuf (1799-1853), who had studied in Paris, and others in the forties were of elegant Early Renaissance design—one by the former even having _sgraffiti_ on the walls—more like Klenze’s row of shops in the Odeonsplatz. The Rücker-Jenisch house of 1845 by the Swiss-born Auguste de Meuron (1813-98), a pupil of the same French architect, A.-F.-R. Leclerc, as de Chateauneuf, was certainly not _Rundbogenstil_ but rather a version of the Travellers’ Club in London. Thus it followed, in this anglicizing city, an epoch-making model by Charles Barry that dates from fifteen years earlier (see Chapter 4). However, de Chateauneuf’s Alster Arcade beside the waters of the Kleine Alster and his red brick Alte Post (now the Welt-Wirtschafts-Archiv) of 1845-7 in the Poststrasse are both prominent and excellent examples of the _Rundbogenstil_ of this period in Hamburg, the latter being slightly Gothic in its detailing.

The work of Hübsch, Weinbrenner’s successor as State architect in Baden, despite his very serious archaeological study of Early Christian and Romanesque architecture,[47] falls somewhere between Gärtner’s Ludwigskirche and Ziebland’s Bonifazius Basilika without achieving either the crisply Durandesque quality of the one or the relative archaeological plausibility of the other. In his civil buildings, such as the very simple Ministry of Finance designed in 1827 and built in 1829-33, the more ornate Technische Hochschule of 1832-6, the Art Gallery of 1840-9, and the Theatre of 1851-3, all in Karlsruhe, very considerable originality of composition was more and more confused as he grew older by the fussy elaboration of the terracotta ornamentation.

In his later work Hübsch frequently used not the round but the segmental arch—a highly rational form with brick masonry—and was usually somewhat happier than the Bavarians in handling the tawny tonalities of brick and terracotta which so generally replaced the pale monochromy of the Greek Revival in the thirties and forties. A minor but especially fine example of his most personal manner is the Trinkhalle of 1840 at Baden-Baden (Plate 11A), rather better suited in its festive spirit to a watering-place than the Classical severity of Weinbrenner’s Kurhaus there of 1821-3. Hübsch’s churches are naturally more archaeological in character and definitely more Romanesquoid than _Rundbogenstil_. Those at Freiburg (1829-38), Bulach (1834-7), and Rottenburg (1834) are typical. The _Rundbogenstil_ railway stations of another Baden architect, Friedrich Eisenlohr (1804-55), at Karlsruhe (1842) and Freiburg precede Bürklein’s in Munich in date and are rather superior to it.

The _Rundbogenstil_ was particularly dominant in the southern German states, overflowing also into Switzerland, where the Federal Palace in Berne, built in 1851-7 by Friedrich Studer (1817-70), is a particularly extensive and nobly sited example. It was, however, in Prussia in the north of Germany that the greatest architect who worked in this mode was active, and he owes his reputation largely to his Grecian work.

Karl Friedrich von Schinkel, the only architect of the first half of the nineteenth century who can be compared in stature with the English Soane, was the great international master of two successive phases of Romantic Classicism, first of the programmatic Greek Revival, with which the post-Napoleonic period began almost everywhere in the second decade of the century, and then of the more eclectic phase that followed. Born in 1781, a generation later than Soane, Schinkel’s serious architectural production began only in 1816. His relatively early death in 1841 truncated his career; but his pupils and his spirit dominated Prussian, and indeed most of German, architecture for another score of years and more.

Somewhat as the long-lived Titian stood to the short-lived Giorgione stood Schinkel in relation to his near-contemporary and associate Friedrich Gilly, whose projects have already been mentioned (Plate 9A). Indeed, Schinkel showed almost as great a capacity to absorb and continue the revolutionary architectural ideals of the 1780s in France as Gilly—more, certainly, than most of the foreigners who visited Paris during the unproductive years following the Revolution, or even those who stayed on to study there.

Schinkel, however, soon to be one of the most architectonic of architects, made his earliest mark not with architectural projects but, like Inigo Jones in England before him, as a designer of theatre sets. Down to 1815 he executed no buildings of any consequence; but in his paintings of these years, even more perhaps than in his stage sets, he established himself as a High Romantic artist of real distinction. At their best these follow in quality very closely after the master works of German Romantic landscape by Caspar David Friedrich. Characteristically, buildings play an important part in Schinkel’s pictures, and vast Gothic constructions in the ‘Sublime’ spirit of Wyatt’s Fonthill Abbey are actually more frequent than Grecian or Italianate fabricks.

Figure 5. Karl Friedrich von Schinkel: project for Neue Wache, Berlin,
1816
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But if Gothic projects form a more important part of his production on canvas, and also on paper, in the first decades of the century than is the case with any other architect of the period, even in England, Schinkel made his formal architectural debut as a Grecian and a rationalist. Named by Frederick William III State architect in 1815, his project of the next year for the Neue Wache (Figure 5), Unter den Linden, facing Frederick the Great’s opera house, is especially notable in the use of square piers—a Ledolcian extreme of rationalist simplification—beneath the Grecian pediment. His intense Romanticism also reveals itself in the heads of Pergamenian extravagance that writhe forth from the frieze above. Not surprisingly, in the building as executed, and happily still extant, Greek Doric columns replace the square piers. But the broad plain members that frame the cubic mass behind and, above all, the superb proportions of the whole reveal a surer hand than any other architect of the day in Germany possessed. The contrast with Klenze’s Glyptothek, begun the same year, is notable.

Schinkel’s Berlin Cathedral, as rebuilt in 1817-22 beside the Baroque Schloss of Andreas Schlüter, was a modest work and none too successful; its replacement in 1894-1905 by the enormous Neo-Baroque structure of Julius Raschdorf was no great loss.

There followed after the Cathedral a work of much greater scale, the Berlin Schauspielhaus, designed in 1818 and built in 1819-21 (Plate 12). Here the complexity of the mass diminishes somewhat the clarity of the geometrical order in the separate parts; but Schinkel’s rationalistic handling of Grecian elements is nowhere better seen than in the articulation of the attic by means of a ‘pilastrade’ of small antae or the reticulated organization of the walls of the side wings. The interior of the auditorium boldly combines very simple and heavily scaled wall elements with very delicately designed iron supports for the ranges of boxes and galleries.

Characteristic of the many-sidedness of Schinkel’s talent, if very much smaller and intrinsically less happy, is the War Memorial, also of 1819-21, on the Kreuzberg in Berlin. This is a Gothic shrine of the most lacy and linear design, 111 feet high and entirely executed in cast iron.

The Singakademie in Berlin of 1822 and a large house in Charlottenburg for the banker Behrend, on the other hand, are very accomplished exercises in a rigidly Classical mode such as his French contemporaries were currently essaying with markedly less elegance of proportion. The Zivilcasino in Potsdam, begun the next year, where an awkward site forced—or perhaps merely justified—an asymmetrical juxtaposition of the parts, illustrated an aspect of Schinkel’s talent that is particularly significant to his twentieth-century admirers: the imposition of coherent geometrical order upon an edifice markedly irregular in its massing. This was something the English were only playing at in these years when they designed Picturesque Italian Villas such as Nash’s Cronkhill or loosely composed Castellated Mansions such as Gwrych (Plate 49).

It is characteristic of Romantic Classicism that Schinkel’s masterpiece—and, with Soane’s later Bank interiors, the masterpiece of the period—should be a museum. The Altes Museum, designed in 1823 and built in 1824-8, faces the Schloss across the Lustgarten, to which Schinkel’s just completed Schlossbrücke gave a dignified new approach. The Museum quite outranked his rather undistinguished cathedral; yet at first glance it may seem one of the least original and most tamely archaeological of Romantic Classical buildings (Plate 13). Substituting for the paradigm of the pedimented peripteral temple that of the stoa, Schinkel evidently counted on the prestige of a giant Grecian order to impress his contemporaries, quite as Brongniart had done at the Paris Bourse (Plate 8B). But the Museum retains the admiration of a twentieth century usually bored, and even shocked, by such stylophily because of the extraordinary logic and elegance of its total organization.

The frontal plane of superbly detailed Ionic columns is not weak at the corners, as colonnades seen against the light generally are, for here spur walls ending in antae firmly enframe the long, unbroken range. And if this frontal columnar plane is unbroken—and also seems to deny by its giant scale the fact that this is a two-storey structure—within the dark of the portico, made darker and more Romantic by a richly coloured mural designed by Schinkel and executed under the direction of Peter Cornelius, one soon becomes aware of a recessed oblong where a double flight of stairs leads to the upper storey. Moreover, lest this façade be read, like a stoa, as no more than a portico, there rises over the centre, still farther to the rear, a rectangular attic.

Figure 6. Karl Friedrich von Schinkel: Berlin, Altes Museum, 1824-8
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It is characteristic of the purism of Schinkel’s approach, a purism not archaeological but visual, that this attic masks externally a Durandesque central domed space (Figure 6). Such circular central spaces, so recurrent in Romantic Classical planning, had been a favourite setting for classical sculpture, the principal treasure of most art collections of this period, ever since the Museo Pio-Clementino was built at the Vatican. None is finer than this in the proportional relationship of interior colonnade, plain wall above, and coffered dome with oculus. Most, indeed, are but feeble copies of the Roman Pantheon; this exceeds in distinction, if not in scale, its ancient original.

But the Museum, unlike the Munich Glyptothek, had to have picture galleries as well as sculpture halls; and Schinkel’s organization of these, so much less palatial than Klenze’s in his Pinakothek, is a technical triumph of the rationalistic side of Romantic Classicism. Screens at right angles to the windows, and thus free from glare, provided the greater part of the hanging space, a premonition almost of the movable screens of mid-twentieth-century art galleries (Figure 6).

The external treatment of the rear walls of the Museum, moreover, achieved a clarity of mathematical organization and a subtlety of structural expression in the detailing which was also hardly equalled before the mid twentieth century. Tall windows in two even ranges express clearly the two storeys of galleries behind; the stuccoed walls between delicately suggest by their flat rustication—so like that Soane used on the Bank of England—the scale of fine ashlar masonry. But the giant order of the front is also clearly echoed in the flat corner antae just short of which the string-course between the storeys and the rustication of the walls are stopped. A prototype of such detailing can be seen in the Athenian Propylaea, no doubt familiar to Schinkel through publications; a derivation—or at least a superb twentieth-century parallel—is the way Mies van der Rohe handles the juxtaposition of steel stanchions and brick infilling in his buildings erected for the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago in the last fifteen years (see