1839.] 



THE CIVIL ENGINEER AND ARCHITECTS JOURNAL. 



425 



reply by anotlier, \\/.., why are iieoplo so silly and oflieious us by thoii- 

 blunderinn' Marplot couiiiliiiients to thrust sucli comparisons upon us? 

 Some, again, may be of opinion that however splendid Munich may 

 be, there is no occasion for either us or any one to descant upon what 

 has been there achieved, when it seems likely only to put ns out of 

 conceit with ourselves and with our doings here at home. Now, 

 could we impose on all the rest of the world as well as ovu'selves, that 

 argument might be listened to ; yet, whether we choose to make 

 comparisons ourselves or not, we cannot prevent others from making 

 them, and all the more to our discredit, when they find out not only 

 how exceedingly backward we are in art, but that, instead of at all 

 suspecting such to be the ease, we fancy we are at all events in ad- 

 vance of the rest of the world. With the Italy of other ages we do 

 not pretend to compete ; of its former glories in art we have always 

 been accustomed to hear, and we fiu-ther know, that were it not for 

 its lono' accumulated stores, Italy would not, at the present day, acquire 

 reputation by the talent of its living artists ; we may endure, without 

 any very great vexation, to hear Frenchmen boast of their Louvre and 

 Versailles, for, like eels, we are now got used to it; but to be told 

 that the little capital of Bavaria, (whose population is hardly more 

 than that of one of our larger metropolitan parishes,) should have so 

 far got a-head of us, that in the brief space of twenty years, edifices 

 of almost unjiaralleled splendour, such as would formerly have 

 been almost the work of centm-ies, have been nobly conceived and 

 as worthily executed, is, it must be owned, somewhat mortifying. 

 When we look at what has, within the sanu^ space of time, been doni^ 

 here at home, at the works of our Nashes and our Soanes — -at the 

 blundering fragment at the corner of Downing Street — at the feeble 

 and minikin taste displayed in the new palace — at such large masses 

 of frigidity and insipidity as the Custom Hoirse and Post Office — ^at 

 the bare rooms of the British Museum, where Art is provided for like 

 a state pau|)er — at our poverty-stricken pseudo-Grecian buildings — 

 and at most of our beggarly new churches — we Irave to be ashamed, 

 nay shocked, at the contrast. Well would it be could we be made 

 ashamed to some p\n'pose. In what lay the genius of Nash and some 

 others, exceiit in m.iking money and either s|)ending it or hoarding 

 it, it is for their par.isites and flatterers to explain ; but we may assert 

 that the praises bestowed upon them were certainly calculated to lower 

 our ideas of art most prodigiously. If Nash was the genius that was 

 pretended, the inference was that a man might be some degrees infe- 

 rior, and yet a remarkably talenteil fellow after all — a tolerably brilliant 

 star, though not the big full moon itself. 



In almost every thing we have done of late years, even where a 

 building has been u|)on the whole very good as to design, there is 

 something or other left as a blemish in it, sometliing tliat too plainly 

 declares its having been done upon the do-well-enough system, the 

 consequence of which is, that, as a work of art, it is generally " done 

 for." Sometimes we set out as if we really had plucked up courage 

 enough to attempt something grand, yet owing to an untowaril fatality, 

 our courage of that sort has almost invariably oozed away before the 

 work has been completed. Neither is it the least provoking part of 

 the matter, that we go on committing failure after failure without 

 profiting at all by our dearly-bought experience. Of course it is 

 entirely the fault of that eternal mischief-maker — Nouody. Oh, no ! 

 it is nobody's fault; nobody, of course, is answerable for it, nobody in 

 the slightest degree to blame. If, therefore, things happen dirt'erently 

 at Munich, we suppose it is entirely owing to the stars ; for as the 

 facetious editor of the Literary Gazette, or the Athenaeum's pet, Tom 

 Hooil, would say, the stars are of course very obliging and accommo- 

 dating towards Bavaria, because it has Moon-ie\\ for its capital, which, 

 whether a capital pun or not, is here merely borrowed from Jerdan. 

 However, to be more serious — and it really is a serious matter, what- 

 ever else may be plain, it is almost incomprehensible how the present 

 King of Bavaria has lieen able to erect, out of his privy purse, so 

 many of the splendid edifices which now adorn his capital, and which, 

 though they have not, it seems, beggared him, and are likely to enrich 

 his subjects, almost beggar description. Such, at least, is the case 

 with the lately completed Allerheiligen Kapelle, and with the new 

 basilica of St. Bonifacius, by Ziebland, both of which are in the most 

 gorgeous Byzantine style, the latter diyided into a nave with two 

 aisles on each side of it, by sixty-four columns, and an open timber- 

 work roof richly adorned with carving, gilding, and colours, to accord 

 with the embellishment of all the rest, when the walls, like those 

 of tlie Allerheiligen, shall come to be covered with frescos upon a 

 gold ground. How, not these two edifices alone, but so many others 

 of such elaborate pomp and richness, so truly " miirchenhaft schiin," 

 should succeed each other as they have done, is trulv astonishing. 

 It is so mysterious, that we might be excused for fancying the Kiitml- 

 Itehtnd sovereign has discovered either Solomon's ring (jr Aladdin's 

 lamp. Yet, perhaps the secret, after all, may be explained by the 



proverb, " where there's a will there's a way." Had George IV. 

 really possessed the taste and love of art so liberally ascribed to 

 him by his flatterers, his privy purse would surelv have been a 

 match for that of Ludwig; but he, poor man, had other and more 

 expensive tastes, and his chief title to fame is that bestowed upon 

 him by Carcme, who assures us that among the \ery few real 

 proficients in gastronomy in his time were the Emperor Alexander, 

 George IV, and the Marquis de Cussy. How Ludwig ilines, or whe- 

 ther he has to provide a cuiirerl every day for his Lord Melbourne, we 

 have not heard, and still less do we care. 



All this may not be flattering to our national pride ; still it ought to 

 open our eyes a little, and make us ask ourselves the question where- 

 fore it sliould be so, and more especially whether it is always to con- 

 tinue so. The opportunities we have already, from time to time, 

 flung away, cannot now be recalled ; yet that is no reason why we 

 should despair, on the contrary, a very great reason indeed wherefore 

 we should begin to exert ourselves, and put forth all our energies in 

 art. If not, we must be content with admiring ourselves, and be 

 laughed at by the rest of Europe — at all events, sneered at by little 

 Bavaria. 



An unusually full account of the public buildings at Munich, has 

 just appeared in the Penny Cyclopaedia, illustrated with a niluatwii's 

 pliin of the palace and surrounding edifices, as also with a plan of the 

 up])er floor of the Pinacotheca. By way of specimen of that article, 

 which we need hardly recommend further than by so quoting, to our 

 readers, we extract what is said (jf one work now in progress, and also 

 copy the architectural table at the end. 



"The new basilica of St. Bonifacius, now in progress, promises, 

 when completed — which it is expected to be in 1842 — to surpass every 

 other religious edifice in the city, hardly excepting the Allerheiligen 

 Kapelle itself. Like that building, it is in the Byzantine or Lombard 

 taste, both as to architecture and decoration, but is upon a much more 

 extensive scale, being 25a feet long and 12ll feet wide ; and is divided 

 within into a nave and two aisles on each side of it, by sixty-four 

 marble cohunns of a greenish tint, disposed in four rows. Of the 

 middle aisle, or nave, the width is 51 feet and the height 7(i ; of the 

 four others, the width 15 feet and the heightli 40 feet. The pave- 

 ment is of marble mosaic, and the roof of open timber work, the beams 

 of which are not only carved, but richly decorated with painting and 

 gilding, and the ceiling between them azure, with gold stars. The 

 walls of the outer side aisles are stuccoed with scagliola, in imitation 

 of ilirterent coloured nrarbles, but those of the otlier parts of the liuild- 

 ing will be painted in fresco by Hess, with subjects from the history 

 of St. Bonifacius. In the rear of this magnificent church (the front of 

 which, towards the Karls-strasse, has a portico of eight Corinthian 

 colunms with three bronze doors) will be another building attached to 

 it, intended as a theological seminary, directly facing the Glyptotheca, 

 to which it will form a corresponding piece of architecture, on the 

 south side of the Kiinigs Platz." 



"On comparing a map of London with that of Munich, the latter, 

 though so very nuich smaller a city, strikes the eye by the number of 

 public buildings and the great space which they occupy. The plan 

 of Munich, ]iublished in the series of maps liy the Society for the Dif- 

 fusion of L'seful Knowledge, will be useful to those who take any in- 

 terest in the present article. This plan does not however show the 

 situation of all the buildings here mentioned, not any of those beyond 

 the Kriegs Ministerium in tin; Ludwigs Strasse, nor the Basilica of St. 

 Bonifacius, being then erected. But two very conspicuous features 

 in it suggest the propriety of mentioning the spacious new Friedliuf, 

 or public cemetery, and the beautiful park near the north-east angle 

 of the Hofgarten and Picture Gallery, called the English Garden. The 

 latter is laid out with plantations, intersected by strearjis of water, and 

 embellished with statues and various ornamental buildings, the most 

 remarkable of which is the circular monopteros of twelve Ionic 

 colunms, erected in 1833, as a monumental temple in honour of the 

 elector Karl Theodore, the founder of the garden; nor is it so re- 

 markable on account of its design, as for exuiliiting the first modern 

 application of Greek architectural polychromy, tlie capitals of the 

 colunms and the mouldings of the entablature being enriched with 

 various colours painted in encaustic. The other spot, the Pcre la 

 Chaise of Munich, has, at its southern extrenuty, an extensive range 

 of building consisting of a chapel and range of arcades, disposed in 

 the form of a crescent about 550 feet in diameter." 



"The following architectural synopsis, on the ))lan of that accom- 

 panying the article London, will serve as a general recapitulation, and 

 facilitate reference with respect to the architects and the dates of the 

 buililiugs, as far as it has been possible to ascertain the latter correctly-" 



N.L). The measurements are reduced to English feet. 



a N 2 



