1843.] 



THE CIVIL ENGINEER AND ARCHITECT'S JOURNAL. 



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ROYAL ACADEMY. 



Professor Cockerell's Lectures on Architecture. 



(From the Athenceum.) 



The Professor began by quoting the regulation of the Royal Academy as 

 to the Lectures on Architecture—"'' That the Professor shall read annually 

 six public lrctures, calculated to form the taste of the students, to instruct 

 them in the laws and principles of composition, to poiut out to them the 

 beauties and faults of celebrated productions, to fit them for an unprejudiced 

 study of hooks on the art, and for a critical examination of structures." It 

 is understood that these lectures were to be given by a Professor in the full 

 practice of his profession, according to the dictum of Vitruvius, " that it is 

 the union of the practice with the theory, that makes the sound architect " ; 

 and although he felt that it was precisely this circumstance that gave all the 

 value in the eyes of the students to these lectures, yet it was obvious that 

 in the midst of the distractions and bustle of professional practice, the Pro- 

 fessor laboured under great disadvantages. It was much to be desired that 

 the means at the disposal of the R'oyal Academy could enable it to extend 

 these lectures according to the model of the French Academy, which, on 

 architecture alone, had established five classes, each having a separate pro- 

 fessor, — namely, 1, Theory; 2, History; 3, Mathematics; 4, Stereotomy 

 and Construction (in which important class two Repet ileum were appointed) ; 

 5, Perspective. Such liberal instruction secured the honour of the pro- 

 fession, and protected the public against empirical practice; and gave the 

 French architects, in particular, that advantage in foreign countries, which 

 the unassisted genius, perseverance, and enterprise of our own countrymen 

 found it difficult to contend with. Aware of this mortifying inferiority in 

 our public education, the students would exert themselves so much the more 

 in their private studies to supply the deficiency, and would learn from this 

 well digested system the course they should pursue. This Academy had, 

 indeed, been founded by an illustrious prince (George III), and great were 

 the obligations of the arts and the public to his memory ; but the means by 

 which it existed were of its own creation, and those means were barely 

 sufficient to fulfil its engagement, to support gratuitously the only school of 

 art which this country possessed. 



It is an axiom with the civilized nations of the Continent, that the fine 

 arts are eminently calculated to increase human happiness and exalt human 

 character, and greatly contribute to the reputation as well as the real interest 

 of a country, especially of a manufacturing country. 



But the austere government of England makes the fine arts no part of its 

 glory, its policy, or of its expense. And were it not for the sympathy and 

 patronage of the public, even this limited institution could not exist ; nor 

 would the country escape the reproach of the Celestials of "outer barbarism." 

 The fine arts have, indeed, the countenance of the supreme head, and of 

 " the powers that be " — the Ministers of the day, who cannot, as gentlemen, 

 renounce the attribute of taste ; but they have uniformly shown by their 

 public conduct, that they do not consider its support amongst the people a 

 political duty. 



It is now more than a hundred years that Thomson, the best informed 

 upon the arts of all our poets, indignantly remonstrated on our national 

 inferiority and neglect of this branch of intellectual culture, and complained 

 with grief, in his Ode to Liberty — 



" That finer arts (save what the Muse has sung, 

 In daring flight above all modern .ving,) 

 Neglected droop their head." 



Foreigners have attributed this disregard of the rulers of an ingenious and 

 a great people to various causes — to physical insensibility, to the sordid 

 nature of our commercial habits, or the adverse propensity of the Protestant 

 religion — to which objections the history of the ancient dynasties of this 

 country (never inferior in the fine arts), the abundant enthusiasm of indi- 

 vidual artists of our own times, and the public sympathy, are direct contra- 

 dictions. Finally, they have fixed the reproach on the government, by 

 pointing at the Schools of Design established by parliament ; for they say, 

 truly, that so soon as the inferiority of our design in manufactures drove us 

 from the foreign markets, we took the alarm, and immediately formed 

 schools of design, a Vinstar of those on the continent; not from a generous 

 love of art, but, confessedly, from the well-grounded fear of loss in trade. 

 The members of this Academy hailed the measure with joy, as the harbinger 

 of a better sense of what is due to our intellectual position in Europe, and 

 they have willingly given their gratuitous attention to its conduct. But the 

 instruction of youth must be accompanied with the higher prospect of em- 

 ployment and honour in national works ; and we are happy in the reflection 

 that the decoratiou of the parliamentary palace at Westminster, and the in- 

 terest taken by an illustrious personage in that great object, hold out to us 

 the hopes of equality at least in these noble studies with the improving 

 countries of the continent, and the opening of a new career for genius and 

 industry. 



But an erroneous and mischievous scepticism as to the utility of Acade- 

 mies of fine art altogether, has long been fashionable, which has not, how- 

 ever, been applied to others, for no one has ever yet despaired because a 

 Newton or a Locke are not annually produced from Cambridge and Oxford ; 

 but of these it has been plausibly said, that no Michael Angelos, Raphaels, 



or Palladios have been produced by them since their foundation in the 17th 

 century; it is forgotten, however, that the patronage and immense employ- 

 ment which elicited the talents of those masters, have also been wanting ; 

 and that without the field for their development, and all the expensive ma- 

 chinery by which they can be brought to bear, Academics can do little more 

 than preserve and transmit the rudiments of art. 



Fleets and armies arc necessary for war, and without these the greatest 

 captain of his day might have been nothing more than an eminent professor 

 at Sandhurst. 



Academies were established as depositories of learning and practice in the 

 fine arts, and the means of their preservation and transmission through the 

 vicissitudes of the times. The enlightened and commercial Colbert had seen 

 how in Greece and ancient Rome, and in modem Rome, under his own 

 countryman, the Constable Bourbon, a public calamity might disperse and 

 ruin them for half a century, without some fixed and corporate body and 

 abode. He never dreamt that, in the absence of the fostering patronage 

 and employment of government, the Academy could do more than fulfil these 

 negative objects. The Royal Academy bad done much more than this— it 

 had sustained the credit of the country in fine art, and had reared talents 

 which were now part and parcel of English history. Through good and evil 

 report it had nourished the flame; and it was consolatory to find that they 

 had transmitted it to better times, through long and adverse circumstances ; 

 for now they had the happiness to see two Professors in the Universities of 

 London, the British Institute of Architects, large public patronage in Art- 

 Unions, &c, and a growing interest in the Universities of Oxford and Cam- 

 bridge towards fine art generally. 



But Architecture, as a science dignified by an intimate connexion with the 

 exact sciences, and by her acquaintance with those eternal laws of mathe- 

 matics and of physics which are obeyed throughout the universe, was, in this 

 Academy, regarded only as a fine art, and these lectures were designed to 

 illustrate Architecture in that capacity alone. Dealing with the phenomena 

 of beauty and ideality in the form and aspect of her contrivances, she be- 

 comes an essential member of the fine arts, the more essential since her con- 

 clusions are more undefined and remote than any other branches of the fine 

 arts, save Poetry and Music, with whom her nearer relationship than with 

 painting and sculpture, is sustained by many. But in all that respects the 

 beauty of forms and their combinations, she must never forget her obligations 

 to her sisters painting and sculpture, by whose aid alone she becomes the 

 ars regma, and keeps in view her prototype, Nature, ever equally solicitous 

 of beauty and of use. And the moment she declines their counsels, her 

 proportions become anomalous, and she descends to the mere building art. 



In Egypt, where painting and sculpture were in comparatively small es- 

 teem, and again in the middle ages, proportions were wholly capricious, and 

 subject to no order or regularity ; nor have any been ever attributed to them 

 even by the greatest admirers of Egyptian or Gothic architecture. On the 

 contrary, the Greeks, aided by the union of the three arts, soon established 

 that analogy with the organized productions of nature, which fixed the pro- 

 portions of architecture in so determinate a form as not to be safely departed 

 from, and which, whether in the days of Phidias, or Raphael and Michael 

 Angelo, or any other renowned period of art, has been approved and adopted 

 as just and incontrovertible. 



The fulfilment of the duty of the Professor under a limited number of 

 lectures, had been a subject of some anxiety and difficulty. The history of 

 the art was the only safe foundation of the study, and had, therefore, formed 

 his first course. " Architecture," says Sir C. Wren, " is founded on the ex- 

 perience of all ages, promoted by the vast treasures of all the great monarchs, 

 and the skill of the greatest artists and geometricians, every one emulating 

 each other. And experiments in this kind being greatly expenceful and 

 errors incorrigible, is the reason that architecture is now rather the study o 

 antiquity than fancy." With respect to the duration and progress of this 

 art, it might he said that a hundred years were but as a day ; being made 

 for ages, it could not, therefore, be subjected to the vicissitudes of fashion; 

 and the slowness of its progress and invention ought to inspire us with 

 respect for antiquity and the authority of example, and to repress that pre- 

 sumption which too often assumes to dispense with them. 



In fact, at every epoch in which the art bad raised itself to its highest concep- 

 tions, we find not only artists but tlieoricians, archaeologists, and historians, 

 occupied in describing its progress and inventions, illustrating its monuments, 

 and seeking out its antiquities. There are many histories of architecture more 

 or less complete ; Canina's work promises to supply the history of ancient archi- 

 tecture which Winkelmann had left very insufficient. D'Agincourt's " His- 

 toire de l'Art par ses Monumens" was an admirable work; it treated of the 

 art from its decline to its revival and restoration. Durand's " Parallel des 

 Edifices anciens et modemes," on the same scale, is highly illustrative of the 

 history of architecture. 



The second course (that of last year) hail treated chiefly the literature of 

 the art ; following out the Academic instruction quoted above, namely, " to 

 tit the students for an unprejudiced study of books in the art." It had been 

 well said by a learned prelate, " that we do not live in an ignorant age, but 

 certainly not in a learned one;" and it was painful to see those authors who 

 had been cauoni/.ed by ages, cither attacked and discredited, a- Vitruvius, or 

 held to be antiquated and obsolete, as the old Italian and French authors, 

 and above all. the admirable Alberti, the Bacon of the art, anil otili i 

 greatest interest. i ■ ■ ■ isequeni was, that new lights, fashionable 



conceits, and heretical opinions, were conducting us into the large ocean of 

 error. As well might the lawyer or the divine dispense with 



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