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THE CIVIL ENGINEER AND ARCHITECT'S JOURNAL. 



[April, 



CANDIDUS'S NOTE-BOOK. 

 FASCICULUS XXXVI. 



" I must have liberty 

 "Withal, as large a charter as the winds, 

 To blow on whom I please." 



I. It would seem that architects neither keep any journals, nor 

 carry on any correspondence relating to their professional pursuits and 

 engagements, for nothing of the kind has at any time been communi- 

 cated to the public, not even as regards such men as Adam, Wyatt, 

 and many others whose intercourse with the higher ranks of society 

 must have given some sort of historical interest to their epistolary 

 correspondence, supposing they ever wrote any letters not strictly 

 confined to mere matters of business. While Joey Grimaldi the pan- 

 tomime clown obtains a biographer who bestows upon him a couple of 

 volumes. Sir Jeffry Wyatville has not been thought worthy of any such 

 compliment, notwithstanding that he was for some time within the 

 sphere and atmosphere of a court, and that a life of him would, no 

 doubt, serve as an excellent peg on which might be hung numerous 

 anecdotes relating to very distinguished personages, including the 

 conversations which he must no doubt have held from time to time with 

 his royal patrons on the subject of architecture. Seme day or other, 

 perhaps, the world will yet be enlightened, and some fortunate publisher 

 will be able to announce the "Wyatville Papers and Correspondence." 

 n. It is excessively provoking to meet so repeatedly with paltry 

 «' put-off" excuses for reticence of criticism in regard to contem- 

 porary works of architecture, as though they were not just as much 

 amenable to opinion and comment as the productions of any other art, 

 but were entitled to especial forbearance. It is after such fashion 

 that Gauthier apologizes for not offering any remarks on the design 

 of the new theatre at Genoa (erected by Carlo Barabino, 1S26-8), 

 saying he chooses " to abstain alike from commendation or from cen- 

 sure, leaving it to the public to appreciate its merits" ! Leaving it 

 to the public, forsooth I— and how is the public to form its judgment 

 if critical inquiry is to be stifled, and those who are, or who ought to 

 be, capable of delivering opinion on such matters, abstain from doing 

 so? Without any great breach of charity, we may, in all such cases, 

 attribute the apparent candour and forbearance either to the writer's 

 having no real opinion of his own to express, either one way or the 

 other, or to a ridiculous excess of cautiousness. Why there should 

 be aught more invidious or indelicate in criticising the productions of 

 a living architect, than in exercising the same freedom of judgment on 

 those of a living painter or poet, it is not easy to perceive. Criticism 

 may knock a poem on the head at once, and cause it to drop dead 

 from the press— but criticism cannot knock down stone walls; a 

 building will remain either to confirm, if correct, or refute, if unjust, 

 the opinion passed upon it. It must be allowed that architectural 

 critics are liberal enough in favouring us with established opinions, 

 which may be come at without other trouble than that of copying 

 them from other books, and which are most conveniently safe, inas- 

 much as the critic himself hazards nothing, for if the opinion be ap- 

 proved, he can take the credit of it, and if taxed as unsound, can throw 

 the odium of it on the stupidity of those from whom he borrowed it. 

 " But," exclaim some, " we do not vi'ant criticism— we have gone on very 

 comfortably without it. Criticism does far more harm than good ; it 

 teaches the public to pry into what they have no business to fancy 

 they can understand, whereas all that we require of them is their im- 

 plicit admiration." 



III. Though we have had many modern architectural works relative 

 to the principal cities of Italy, they have all of them been exclusively 

 retrospective or nearly so, exhibiting only the monuments of former 

 periods of the art, and showing scarcely a single recent example. 

 Admitting that the subjects selected for them are of more intrinsic 

 value as studies than any buildings of recent date, still some of the 



latter would at least possess the interest of novelty. Architecture is 

 not absolutely defunct in Italy, although it might almost be imagmed 

 that it bad not produced a single work of any note since the com- 

 mencement of the present century, so little is the information to be 

 met with relative to any edifices that have been erected there witbm 

 the last forty or fifty years. It would seem to be an express rule 

 adhered to by all our tourists, architects, and artists, who visit that 

 country, not to take any notice of contemporary buildings— on no 

 account to describe or to delineate them, but to bore us for the ten- 

 thousandth time, with their extacies, with the Pantheon, and St. 

 Peter's, with Palladio and Michel Agnolo. If they can bring home 

 nothing less stale, they would do well neither to take up their pens 

 nor open their mouths. Of Cagnola they of course have never heard, 

 Possagno they have never visited, nor have they ever stumbled upon 

 the Cafe Pedrocchi at Padua-a palazzo in appearance, and a sufli- 

 ciently striking specimen of the modern Greco-Italian school-with 

 much elegance to recommend it, though not free from defects. Al- 

 thoucrh it mav not be ranked among the public edifices of that city,U is, 

 as a piece of architecture, quite as conspicuous an object as the Retorm 

 Club House, which last, perhaps, a tourist through Pall Mall would 

 not have eves to discover. A work containing examples ot the Italian 

 architectui'e of the present century, would be a welcome novelty, and 

 though the buildings themselves may be comparatively few and tar 

 between, still, ample materials for the purpose are to be coUected 

 between Milan and Naples, from the structures by Bianchi and Nicco- 

 lini, in the last mentioned city, to Buonsignore's church, the Madre dl 

 Iddio, at Turin, and Canova's Doric rifacciamento of the Pantheon, at 

 Possagno. But ! and that, if not the most satisfactory, is 



certainly a most omnipotent reason wherefore nothing of the Kina 

 either is, or is likely to be undertaken. 



IV That theory which would base architectural beauty upon uttlity 

 and fitness, is so far from being satisfactory as clearly tracing the 

 source of the former quality to the two latter, that, instead of removing 

 perplexity, it rather increases it. In direct opposition to such doc 

 trine, every-day experience convinces us that so very far from consti- 

 tuting esthetic beauty, mere utility and fitness contribute very little at 

 all towards it, even in architecture, where, as far as the purpose of 

 building is concerned, they might seem to be not only indispensable, 

 but all-sufficient, and afford all the pleasure which the mind can derive 

 from examining and contemplating edifices of any kind. Yet such is 

 assuredly not the case; on the contrary, it is only when it aims at 

 something more thah utility, when it indulges in the superfluous-or, 

 if you will, the useless-in short, when it steps into the province of 

 art, and aims at the idle gratification of the eye, that architecture is 

 entitled to the high distinction claimed for it, and the lofty pretensions 

 set up in its behalf. Upon .the utility principle of beauty, a turnip 

 field would be a far more agreeable prospect than any to be met with 

 in Swiss or Italian scenery; and upon the common-sense fitness and 

 utility principle, a modern church erected according to the "cheap and 

 nasty" svstem, and according to Islington or Bethnal Green taste, ought 

 to delight quite as much as, if not more than, any of those glorious ex- 

 amples of our ancient ecclesiastical architecture which so wonderfully 

 impress the mind. Unless the word " utiHty " be exceedingly elastic, 

 indeed, and its meaning so ductile that it may be drawn out like gold 

 to a most prodigious exteuf, utility cannot at all be said to recommend 

 the dome of St. Paul's, it adding nothing whatever to the serviceable- 

 ness of the building; while on the other hand, the unsightly platforms 

 or galleries with which our churches are encumbered, ought to be 

 accounted beautiful, since they certainly have the plea of being useful, 

 as far as affording sittings goes. 



V. What a writer in the Art Union has remarked relative to works 

 of sculpture exhibited in this country, will apply equally well to archi- 

 tecture. "Tiie last slight which this noble art sustains remains un- 

 told; see our daily and weekly papers, nay, our journals of art and 

 science, see the column after column noticing thp productions of the 

 pencil, and the infantile paragraph, stating simply that sculpture too 

 is there." By merely changing a single word, and reading "archi- 

 tecture," or "architectural drawings," instead of "sculpture," we 



