CHAPTER FIFTEEN: STYLE & STYLES OF SEARCHING

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: STYLE & STYLES OF SEARCHING

Awareness of style as a problematic and isolable element in a work of art has emerged in the audience for art only at certain historical moments - as a front behind which other issues, ultimately ethical and political are being debated. The notion of "having a style" is one of the solutions that has arisen...to the crises that have threatened old ideas of truth, of moral rectitude, and also of naturalness. Susan Sontag, On Style.

The architecture of time

If twentieth-century architecture was an attempt to come to terms with space, then nineteenth century architecture was an attempt to come to terms with time. Time in the sense of historical time, the point of accumulation of an historical identity. A preoccupation with time in terms of archaeological reconstruction and cultural affiliation, dominates most of the contemporary discussions about architecture.

From a perspective coloured by the rise of the Modern Movement, where the preoccupation with time manifested itself in the attempt to throw off its “weight” with the new-found confidence in formal nihilism and brusque anti-historicism, it is not difficult to concede to the commonly held charge that Victorian architecture is characterised by the stigma of failure and doubt. [1] This charge, for those who have come to love Victorian architecture, has to be explained. But even when it is explained, it cannot be denied that the contemporary architects were preoccupied with failure and there was a pervasive sense of doubt with regard to the right way ahead for architecture. These concerns presuppose an icon, an ideal which Victorian architecture as it was realised, did not achieve, at least in the eyes of its (contemporary) critics. The two questions which have to be asked therefore are: What was this ideal, and, if Victorian architecture failed in its own eyes, What did it achieve?

Historically the Victorian architectural ideal has been represented in terms of style. The Victorians, so the saying goes, had an intense desire to have a style of their own. Their moral values, their moral aesthetics could not be fully expressed without a style of their own. Indeed the American Thomas Hastings, responded to the debate by saying that style is the problem solved.[2] Summerson believes, and he is probably right, that every Victorian building of any consequence is a statement of stylistic belief- either a belief in one style, or the peaceful coexistence of styles, or in the efficacy of a mixed style. [3] What they all shared in common was the desire for style. The problem of style, having identified a selection of styles became one of choice. The choices involved, due to the archaeology of styles, forced the architect, the critic and the historian to think in terms of a Dilemma of Style. In fact Mordaunt Crook, who chose the phrase as the title of his book, went so far as to use for his motto a quotation by Pevsner who said that if the historian of architecture does not take style dead seriously, he stops being a historian. Style indicates the identity of time and place, and historians reconstruct identities.

Histories of Victorian architecture were consequently structured along a supposed Battle of Styles. [4] This was appropriate as battles represent the conflict of polarities, choices which are clearly defined. The clash of the two polarities is necessarily confused and the common accusation against nineteenth century architecture is that it is confused and full of internal conflict. At the same time it is highly selective and tends to exclude theorists and architects who did not engage in the war but sought to disassemble the metaphysics of dichotomies around which the conflict between styles was waged. But even for them, style, that is its simultaneous profusion and lack was seen as the main problem. Ruskin, in the Lamp of Obedience, dismissed the popular clamour for a new style of architecture but did see the need for some style. His problem was that even his humble demand for a single agreed style, to be exploited across the country, would elude fixation, while the style he would advocate in his Stones of Venice would turn into a Frankenstein monster.[5]

The owning of a style

Victorian architecture should therefore be characterised as a searching architecture, an architecture in search of a rigorous style of its own.[6] The nineteenth century, so conscious of history, felt a desperate need to separate itself. The problem in the eyes of many critics was simply that the architect did not succeed in finding a style which nineteenth century England could legitimately and comfortably call its own.

Many of the central themes in the architectural debate have at one time or another been singled out as the cause of this sense of stylelessness that the century apparently suffered from: the profusion and subsequent confusion of historical styles, the emptiness of their application in a different context with regard to time and place, their irrelevance to modern needs, the romantic self-indulgence they promoted etc.

Being without a style, that is Stylelessness, is merely another way of saying style. [7] The lack of a style in architecture did not actually denote a stylelessness as such, it denoted an undesirableness which the pejorative inflection of the word styleless emphasised. Stylessness could mean anything from confusion to slavery to the past. I shall argue that Victorian architecture, being such a grand failure has opened up a new category of success.

The concept of style as a stable entity is, to a large extent a red herring, an antiquated explanatory principle. Even so it is a useful word. Style should be a word which, with the benefit of hindsight can be adduced to a period or place. It represents the recognition of a differentiated pattern, an order. Elements separate and reconfigure and come to stand for a new whole. To make style into a normative concept which projects such differentiations into the future changes the nature of the insight irretrievably. The two sorts of style, the hindsight and the foresight are not the same. When a style is felt lacking, the search for a future style becomes itself an element of the hindsight-style. The normative and historical styles intersect only at the point where they both represent an instance of order. But the kind of order each represents is completely different in each case.

Style represents something in terms of something else. It is form representing political, social, cultural and moral aspirations. In the nineteenth century the concept of style was asked to represent the thing that was being aspired to, the ideal that was being searched for: the achievement of aspirations. As such the style of the nineteenth century could not be other than faceless and its achievements could only be seen as a failure. The architects thought their search for a style would entail a search for a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, something tangible and whole that was there, if only they could get to it. Now with the benefit of hindsight we can say that their search for a style constituted their style. Their fault, if such it was, was to search in the past. They identified, constructed homogeneities, aesthetic units in terms of period and place which they called styles. Then they projected those homogeneities onto their own times and felt depressed. They were not able to see their own unities. The flaw was based on the incredible confidence that their copies were indistinguishable form the true objects. That style of the nineteenth century represents not the product of aspirations but the process of aspiration itself in a way that is more abstract than the way the Gothic style they so admired stood for the process of aspiration was lost on them. Victorian architecture is the architecture of aspiration and search. But without a concomitant belief.. It is a tragic architecture in that sense, and truly heroic in its bewilderment. For the doubting contemporary critics and for the certain and self-congratulatory modernists, the gap between the process and the product represents the supposed failure. But that is precisely what constitutes its success. Victorian architecture constitutes an analysis of process which, as far as its theoretical foundations are concerned, stands unequalled. It is nineteenth century theory which constitutes modern theory. The architecture of the nineteenth century continually achieved its projected end but that end, when it presented itself, was rejected and went unrecognised. As it stands, Victorian architecture is a monument to time: the eternal unfulfillment of desire. It is the architectural equivalent of Plato's Eros, the demi-god whose eternity had to be spent being an in-between, always aspiring, always unsatisfied and never realising that he was desiring desire itself.

Fragmentism or Disfigurism

The history of the concept of Style could be interpreted as the history of the attempt to overcome the duality between content and form, either by acceptance of that duality or by its rejection. [8] The symptoms of style, by being separated from their genitive principles, disfigured both the content and the form of an object. These disfigurements represent the style of the nineteenth century, a nostalgic historicism of fragments, often put together uncomfortably to compose some of the most sweeping and moving buildings of all time, buildings exuding an air of helpless energy, bewilderment and even disillusionment. Many Victorian buildings were snubbed in their attempt to be what they were not. The most poignant examples being Street's Law Courts and Pugin's churches. [9] Buildings practising their disappointment: but never giving up. If ever there was an architecture of desire, of intense hero-worship, an architecture reaching out to emulate, it was the architecture of the nineteenth century. Never before had there been such a need for buildings and never before had there been such a desire for style and these were factors curiously compatible with the energy and hope which the architects invested in their designs.

The Victorians, just as the Moderns, were immediately given what they wanted: a style of their own. Only when they saw the style they had asked for, many no longer wanted it.

Dressing with the sum of details

If one defines style as John Summerson did with reference to G.G. Scott and many of his contemporaries, as the sum of details, or, as a question of ornament, then one is naturally forced to talk of architecture in terms of surfaces, elements and accretions. [10] Architecture, to use the contemporary satirical analogy of Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, was no more than a way of dressing up a frame and the architect was no more than a tailor. This is consistent with Ruskin's definition of architecture as no more than a dummy dressed in clothes, and not as Mies would argue later, a question of the unalterable relation between skin and bones. Buildings, structures, could be dressed in a consistent style and change their clothes even after the designing process had been completed. [11] Style as such was superimposed on walls, just as Palazzo Rucellai is the engraving of a (mathematical and therefore universal) order onto an otherwise useless and referenceless map [12]

Such a conception of style did not allow for purities and contaminations other than the cultural or political, whereby the wrong choice of style could wound national, social or cultural aspirations. Architecture's truth, in the way that, for example, Garbett speaks of architectural truth, was controlled by the consistency in primitivist, nationalist or even metaphysical perceptions of the past and their consequent projection onto the present. Contemporary reconstructions of origins encouraged a view of style as a collection of details united by their concurrence in place and time. That concurrence could be culturally determined or completely fortuitous: the intersecting round arches in Norman and Romanesque architecture were supposed to have suggested the pointed arch; avenues of trees suggested the lofty vaulted procession of a nave. The moment of suggestion is arbitrary, but the effect of that suggestion is a determinant of the culture. Fortuitous concurrences were linked to cultural aspirations by the idea that search is rewarded by appropriate discoveries: Decorative invention stands the service of desire, vision and belief. [13] This makes it all the more tragic that the nineteenth century searched so desperately and did not seem to find, working themselves up into a dislike of the haunted places where they were constantly looking.

Stylism

It has been argued by many previous historians that the process of historical and geographical differentiation in terms of disciplines like history, geography and anthropology caused a multiplication of styles by way of cell-division; periods and their products were divided from the continuum and further subdivided until the process went too far and started to undermine itself. This was a process of division informed by a specific aesthetics. When the choice of style was being rationalised in terms of the way each style answered its aspirations, the solving of the dilemma of choice encouraged a form of political polarisation which was fought out on the grounds of historical (read mythological) allegiance. The Greek was set up against the Goth by setting up the nineteenth century image of the Greek against the nineteenth century image of the 12th, 13th or 14th century "Goth". It was not a battle of styles but a battle of mythologies whereby the Greek and the Goth both represented contemporary national, political and economic aspirations much in the way a two party system divides social ambitions into left and right.

Those political possibilities were further subdivided, within one camp; Early Gothic was set up against Late Gothic as the most appropriate model for the architect. Now the choice was determined by the mechanism of historical perfectibility. Early Gothic stood for progress to perfection while Late- Gothic stood for capitulation and decline. The choice was easy. When French Gothic was rejected in favour of the Gothic of England this was done on the basis of national sympathies.

In order to understand what style meant it is necessary to inquire into what the idea of nation meant, one has to inquire into the nineteenth century understanding of the mechanics of history and into the nostalgic or primitivist attitudes towards various episodes in history. Style thus becomes part of a social history. It is a truism to point out that Pugin's Contrasts of 1836 exhibits not so much a contrast in architectural styles as much as a contrast in social, ethical and political attitudes. [14]

The dilemma with regard to design is then defined in terms of consumer choice. The question becomes: Do we want this style, or do we want that style? Such questions reduce architecture to a series of enclosed and enclosing surfaces which can be made to speak through painting and sculpture. In fact hat had been Ruskin's definition of architecture in the preface to the second edition of The Seven Lamps of Architecture written in 1856. In his Lamp of Sacrifice of a few years earlier, Ruskin had already launched the idea of architecture being that which was added to a basic structure. This was implied by the distinction between architecture and building based on the unnecessary detail. [15] If architecture then was reduced to a series of choices much as one is faced with in a hair design studio, how did architects choose?

Structure

During the 1840's Pugin made an attempt to deepen discourse with regard to choice. He tried to formulate structural purities but made the mistake of applying the epithet of structural purity exclusively to Gothic building methods. That was because his predilection for Gothic had already been determined by a connection between religion and its setting. It is not for nothing he called Gothic Christian architecture. Hitchcock rightly observed that the precepts Pugin wanted to reserve for Gothic construction and decoration were often equally applicable to any other style. [16] Style, or rather Gothic, for Pugin represented a complex flowering of tradition; maybe even in Eliot's understanding of the word as the presence of the past. Style consisted of a grammar of details which had converged in time and place because of cultural forces. They were therefore emblematic of those cultural forces and helped to define social norms. Pugin demanded that the grammar of details be seen as consistent with the structural demands of a building, while both had to be seen as peculiarly expressive of a state of mind.

The Ecclesiologists were not so concerned with structure. But they followed out the implications of Pugin's ideas. For the Ecclesiologists style was the shape of habit, the shape and differentiation of space demanded by a special liturgy. The purpose of form was to be found in the religious circumstances in which it originated. Form as such symbolised a sense of belonging to a particular configuration of high Anglican beliefs. The nineteenth century architect, headed by Pugin and the Ecclesiologists, thought that if they could retrieve the style, purely, that is in all the aspects they were able to consider, they would retrieve the concomitant cultural values.

Linguists and national unity

To diffuse the polarisation made necessary by style-apology, a number of Victorians promoted an architectural multi-lingualism and internationa-lism, as Donaldson did in his Preliminary Discourse of 1842:

Styles in architecture may be compared to languages in literature. There is no style, as there is no language, which has not its peculiar beauties, its individual fitness and power...as the traveller who is master of several languages finds himself at ease among the people with whose language he is familiar, so the architect is the more fitted for the emergencies of his difficult career, who can command the majesty of the classic styles, the sublimity of the Gothic, the grace of the Revival, or the brilliant fancy of Arabic. And to pursue the analogy still further, as no scholar can fully master a language who is not familiar with the literature and manners and religion of a people, so no architect can fully appreciate any style of art, who knows not the history of the country and the habits of thought, the intelligence and customs of the nations... [17]

A good architect was a good linguist: He spoke languages, many languages.. [18] The geographical division of language and the relation between climate and its architectural response caused many to question the appropriateness of different styles of architecture to be adopted by England. The alleged absurdity of the Greek style for our climate was illustrated in both Pugin's True Principles of Pointed or Christian architecture of 1841 and earlier in John Robison's System of Mechanical Philosophy edited by David Brewster, Edinburgh 1822 and quoted extensively by Bartholomew in his Specifications.[19]

Ruskin used the linguistic analogy to sketch a model for an architectural education whereby the pupil was to learn the grammar of architecture in the same way he would learn to read and write Latin. A style had to be learnt thoroughly by copying it out endlessly in the hope that the repetition and the endless reproduction would eventually be turned into an understanding of the style. [20] Significantly Ruskin dropped the linguistic analogy when he wanted to promote the idea of a single style for England. Ruskin was concerned architecture only in so far that it could affect the moral character of England. He wanted an England which could unite under a single moral banner represented by an architecture made vital by his precepts and made uniform by applying those precepts to a single style. The moral unity he was after could not be represented by something dissolute and it was this emblem of unity which he was not able to recognise in the stylistic pluralism exhibited in contemporary buildings and therefore thought lacking. Ruskin does not see the writing of the nineteenth century. Because of his identification of style with a set of details he could not see the style of the nineteenth-century in terms other criteria. The architects of the nineteenth century had changed the metaphysical nature of style without being aware of it. For Ruskin there was no gap between Gothic and Neo-Gothic, unless that gap represented the failure of contemporary architects to emulate the forms and design procedures of yore, or the failure of the social structure to allow the carver to derive the same satisfaction from his labour. As such the Nineteenth century, according to Ruskin lacks a style of its own, it lacks an identity because of its narrow conception of what identity means. The nineteenth century was seen to feed upon a multitude of identities from other ages. Ruskin does not see, or does not want to see that it is precisely the encyclopaedic historicism rather than the particular styles that were used that constitutes the style of the nineteenth century.

What is interesting is that Ruskin did not feel that the linguistic analogy was strong enough to enforce a single style of architecture. To enforce the need for a single style he uses the analogy of justice. Any code of laws, he writes, if they are good laws will do, but that code, once adopted must be enforced from Cornwall to Northumberland. [21] A multiplicity of codes would be disastrous to a nation. We have learnt to cope with the Babylonian curse by inventing translation, and linguists are the medium. But a multiplicity of codes of laws would worsen the confusion. Style may have been a language, but the language had to be made uniform by law. Ruskin realised, as opposed to Pugin who did not, that his prescriptions for good architecture could be applied to any style, that is, the principles of architecture he laid down preceded any formal language of forms and ornaments. Principles constitute the axioms, the grammar of style. The actual language used, like dress appropriate to an occasion, was a question of convention, a social contract.

Mechanics and the two pure styles

How did Garbett respond to the problem of style? Put bluntly, Garbett’s approach rubbished the duality between content and form. His definition of style did not contradict the linguistic analogy, rather it developed that analogy to incorporate the logic of etymologies. His definition stems from the rationalisation of the Gothic as more than just a system of decoration, more than just the result of quick and accidental associations, more than just the expression of social and religious aspirations. [22] It recognised Gothic as a clever mechanistic system of construction, a discovery that descends from Wren, Laugier, Cordemoy, Soufflot, Lodoli and Rondelet and which later found its most powerful advocate in the writings of Viollet-le-Duc. [23] This approach had led to the recognition that Greek architecture, as opposed to Roman architecture, was also derived from a single constructive principle and the problem of gravity in relation to the strength and behaviour of materials and that Roman architecture basically represented a mixed style moving from the one to the other. One could go as far as to say that the hegemony of Rome as the icon of aesthetic refinement had blurred or veiled the structural or rationalist investigation of architecture. This is because Garbett’s vision of architectural style did not rest solely on the mechanistic interpretation of Gothic but also on Greek. It was the recognition of two pure styles which led to his theory of the nature of style.

With these two discoveries the whole history of architecture could be rewritten in terms of the struggle with gravity with the development of the arch from the post and lintel as its main theme. One formal attempt at such a history, referred to by Bartholomew, is Seroux d'Agincourt's Histoire de l'art, par les monumens, depuis sa décadence au 4e siècle jusqu'à sont renouvellement au 16e. (Paris 1823) It is illustrated by plates in which every architectural theme is shown in a chronological succession. But this history deals only with the fall of Rome onwards. Even so, one of d’Agincourt’s illustrations traces the development of the arch. Samuel Ware attempted a sketch of a similar history in his Observations on Vaults and on the Origin of the Principal Features of Decorative Architecture which he read before the Royal Society of Antiquities in March 1812. [24] He, following Robison, saw the Gothic arch as derived from the catenary principle as formulated by Robert Hooke and David Gregory in the seventeenth century and Giovanni Poleni in the eighteenth. The Gothic arch was to be interpreted simply as a geometric variation easily constructed with the use of a compass, while the curve of the catenary was incorporated into the mass of the building's masonry. Even earlier attempts to view Gothic architecture from a structural point of view were made by Michael Young in his "The Origin and Theory of Gothic Architecture" of 1790 and to James Andersen in his "Thoughts on the origins, excellencies, and defects of the Grecian and Gothic Styles of Architecture," of 1800-1801. [25] John Robison and before him the engineer James Rennie the elder, should, I think, be credited with re-introducing this concept into British thought, even if they did not invent it themselves. Robison's articles for the 3rd edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica were revolutionary and found a large following of which Willis, Bartholomew and ultimately Garbett are the offspring, In fact it is highly probable that Pugin based some of his ideas for The True Principles on the writings of Robison.

But even for John Robison the idea that Gothic was more than just a system of decoration would not have been new. [26] Wren had exhibited the rational of Gothic architecture in St Paul's? The French had certainly admired his exposé, especially Soufflot in his Ste. Geneviève. The Abbé de Cordemoy, and others had formulated that rationalism preparing for its domination of architectural theory in the writings of Viollet-le-Duc. Giovanni Poleni, who was part of the circle around Carlo Lodoli also made use of the catenary principle. [27] But it was Robison and those architectural writers who modelled themselves on his ideas, such as Samuel Ware, Bartholomew and Garbett who used such principles to modify the idea of style.

Style

Style began with an integrated conception of the Vitruvian triad. It was a system of related forms in the service of convenience and dictated by the behaviour of materials under the force of gravity. Style was structure (incorporating both organisation constructional aspects) in the service of desire. Structure became the core of a system from which a centrifugal logic could derive every detail of a building. As a direct consequence of this they came with very different solutions to the contemporary dilemma of style.

This is a definition in which style, as Roland Barthes pointed out assumes and informs the contrast between form and content, it is the surface of an underlying structure. Such a conception of style focuses on the structural principle from which a linguistic code is deduced by composing on a single theme, such as the pointed arch in all its constructive and decorative variations. This approach to style derives from the extreme reductionism to which both aesthetics and science were subject to in the eighteenth century whereby les Beaux-Arts [sont] réduit à un même principe, a reductionism which in Architecture had been attempted by Laugier.[28]

If the eruption of a style can be related to a single principle, namely the integrity of the Vitruvian triad, then the argument which is unleashed will run along the lines of truths and purities measuring the varying degrees of deviance from a meridian defined by that principle. The structural definition of style seeks out the bones and organs beneath the skin as Mies was later to realise. Garbett, following the ideas of Robison, Samuel Ware and Bartholomew defined style in terms of structure, or rather defined structure in terms of style. Style was the emanation of forms from a single static principle by which forces exerted by materials which were piled or tied came to terms with gravity and found their appropriate form. This allowed Greek to be as pure as Gothic, and allowed a third principle of construction to give a glimpse of a future and become the hope of that future. As soon as purities and their antithesis assemble around structure as the cause of truths and purities, and specifically not around the idea of a style as a purely formal index of a Zeitgeist or Volksgeist it is no longer satisfying to take sides in a battle of styles, this battle becomes irrelevant. Thus, in Garbett, and to a lesser extent in Bartholomew, one can recognise a school which engages in a different battle, not the battle of styles but a battle against ignorance. Bartholomew and Garbett opened up the search for a new style, based on a new conception of what style was. The main protagonists of this conception, despite Garbett and Bartholomew, would not be English. Garbett gained such popularity in America, precisely because he was a supplement to the slightly later writings of Viollet-le-Duc.

[1]. Our failure to appreciate that early and mid Victorian architecture was, in its own time and in the eyes of its own best- informed critics, horribly unsuccessful. Summerson (1970) p. 1. also p. 5: The Conception of the Victorian age as the age of doubt is, of course, familiar-crucially in the sphere of religious belief. Summerson goes on to quote House (1949) p. 71-77.

[2]. Gill (1980) p.88. I am indebted to Dr. T.A.P. van Leeuwen for this reference.

[4]. cf. J.D. Kornwolf (1975) pp. 37-47. and Crook (1987); Eastlake (1970) is the first to provide a historical chapter with the title "The Battle of Styles" Chapter VII, p. 132 ff. Robert Kerr used the phrase as a title to a paper he read at the Architectural Exhibition and which was published in The Builder (1860) 292-294, cf. Summerson (1970) p. 7; Collins (1965) provides a very clear and coherent classification of the several problems of style in the nineteenth century.

[6]. Seven Lamps, "The Lamp of Obedience," § VI, p. 232.

[9]. Pugin had complained in The Rambler about the fact that lack of money often spoilt the realisation of initially good designs. Pevsner (1972) pp. 104, 114 and p. 222.

[11]. cf. the famous story of Pugin's condemnation of the Houses of Parliament, see Ferrey (1861).

[12] cf. Rykwert, “Alberti” Leonis Baptiste Alberti, AD Profiles 21, ed. J. Rykwert.

[14]. Collins (1965) p. 100 f. & Macleod (1971) chapter 1.

[18]. On the various aspects of the linguistic analogy see: Vidler (1977) pp. 37-41, Guillerme (1977) 21-26.

[19]. Pugin (1841) p. 56 fig. 3 the subject is also discussed earlier on p. 12. It would seem very likely that Pugin used Robison as a source for his functionalist theories as there are quite a few similarities in their ideas.

[20]. Seven Lamps, "The Lamp of Obedience," § VII, p. 236.

[21]. Seven Lamps, "The Lamp of Obedience," § IV, p. 232.

[22]. Mark (1977) p. 52: Following soon after its genesis as a romantic literary movement, the Gothic revival kindled a number of serious investigations of the organisation and construction of medieval building. The bulk of these early studies have been so far surpassed by modern scholarship that they remain merely as interesting curiosities... Willis may well have been a direct source for Viollet-le-Duc, but he must be seen as part of a tradition which, in England at least, starts with John Robison or even Sir Christopher Wren. Willis was certainly not one of the first to provide a functionalist or mechanistic interpretation of Gothic architecture. He was one of the most lucid, and one of the most widely read but his ideas feed on the writings of both John Robison, Samuel Ware and others.

[24]. It was published as "Observations on the Origin of the principal Features of Decorative Architecture," Archeologia, XVIII (1817) Archeologia, XVIII (1817) § XL. and was published in Ware (1822) A first attempt at such a history on his part is the appendix to Ware (1809) entitled "The Inquiry into the origin of the pointed arch," pp. 57 ff.

[25]. The rev. Michael Young is not mentioned by Frankl, see Pevsner (1972) p. 16-17 for a brief treatment, the paper appeared in the Transactions of the Hibernian Academy, III (1790) 55 ff. On Andersen see Frankl (1960) pp. 493-496. Andersen is also mentioned by Pevsner (1972) p. 17. The paper appeared in Recreations in Agriculture, Natural History, Arts and Miscellaneous Literature, London, ii, pp. 187, 280, 418; iii, p. 115, iv, 272, 382, 448.

[27]. Poleni (1748); for background on Poleni see Rykwert (1982) pp. 115-122 & Collins (1979) pp. 367 ff. who also mentions Hübsch (1838) and Millington (1839).

[28]. Batteux (1746) The idea that a single principle underpins the whole of creation is a theological and cosmological notion which, historically, has proved difficult to let go of, going back all the way to the idea of The One as formulated by Plato, Plotinus and the early theologians.