The happiest and most informal example of this modulation is to be seen in the Court Gardener’s House on the Charlottenhof estate of 1829-31 (Plate 14A). The closely associated Tea House and Roman Bath of 1833-4 loosely enclose the square rear garden at the junction of two canals. As the plan of the house itself clearly reveals, this was not a new construction but a remodelling, or encasing, of an earlier gardener’s house; but more important to the total effect than the original solid block is the skilful disposition of the clearly defined voids in the three-dimensional composition, voids which include pergolas of varying height, loggias, and even an open attic below the main roof.

On the one hand, the inspiration for this must have come from Durand’s illustrations of the ‘employment of the objects of nature’ or perhaps from other French works^[51] more specifically dealing with Italian buildings in the countryside. On the other hand, rather more than most English Italian Villas in the line of Nash’s Cronkhill, this seems to be based on some real knowledge of Italian rural, not to say rustic, building. But visually, as at Cronkhill and at Glienecke, the pivot of the whole composition is the tower around which the various elements, solid and hollow, are as carefully organized as in a piece of twentieth-century Neoplasticist sculpture. This Gardener’s House is as much the international masterwork of the asymmetrically-towered Italian Villa mode, one of the more modest yet extremely significant innovations of the first half of the nineteenth century, as is the Altes Museum of formal Grecian Classicism.

At Potsdam and near by Schinkel’s pupil Persius, before his untimely death only four years after Schinkel’s, produced many other compositions of this order, often by remodelling eighteenth-century buildings.^[52] Two of the finest are the Pheasantry, which is specifically a towered Italian Villa, and the group that includes the Friedenskirche, carried out by others from Persius’s designs in 1845-8 (Plate 15). In this latter group the principal feature is a close copy of an Early Christian basilica, even to the inclusion of a real medieval apse mosaic brought from Murano; yet compositionally the group is a masterpiece of the classically ordered Picturesque, rivalling Schinkel’s Gardener’s House in subtlety and elegance. Even more personal to Persius is the delicacy of detailing and the unusual external arcade of his earlier Heilandskirche of 1841-3, with its graceful detached campanile, by the lakeside at nearby Sakrow.

Also notable are his steam-engine houses, particularly that for Schloss Babelsberg. The inclusion of medieval and even Islamic detail indicates the increasing eclecticism of taste around 1840; yet the disparate elements are so scaled and ordered as to compose into an asymmetrical pattern of Italian Villa character in which the minaret-like chimney provides the dominant vertical accent. Less Picturesque is the Orangerieschloss, based on a sketch by Frederick William IV and executed after Persius’s death by A. Hesse.

Schinkel’s big Potsdam church, the Nikolaikirche, designed in 1829 and built up to the base of the dome in the years 1830-7, stood right in the town, not in the park like his work for the princes, and is a wholly formal monument. It was planned as a hemisphere above a cube in the most geometrical mode of Romantic Classicism. As in the case of Soufflot’s dome of the Panthéon, this was undoubtedly influenced by Wren’s St Paul’s in London which Schinkel had seen on an English voyage in 1826. Unfortunately Persius had later to add corner towers, almost like the minaret chimney of his Babelsberg engine house, in order to load the pendentives when he completed the church in 1842-50. These irrelevant features quite denature Schinkel’s formal intention. The interior, however, is superior to those in most of the centrally planned churches of this period in various countries that were based on the Roman Pantheon.

Schinkel did not have such opportunities of building whole squares and streets as did his Baden and his Bavarian contemporaries. For all his efforts, the Berlin Lustgarten was probably never very satisfactory urbanistically because of the inadequate focus that was provided by his modest cathedral beside the massive Baroque Schloss and the awkward shift in the axis where the Schlossbrücke enters from Unter den Linden. At the other end of Unter den Linden the Pariser Platz inside K. G. Langhans’s Brandenburg Gate shows little evidence of Schinkel’s intended regularization of the surrounding buildings. All that he was actually able to carry out there was the Palais Redern of 1832-3 (in fact a remodelling), and this was demolished in 1906 to make way for the Adlon Hotel.

The façades of the Palais Redern gave a quattrocento Florentine impression because of their relatively bold over-all rustication; only the large openings were arcuated, however, the ordinary windows being lintel-topped. Significant of Schinkel’s new interest in asymmetrical order was the disposition of the four arched openings; these were balanced in relation to the corner of Unter den Linden but unbalanced in relation to either façade alone; the other windows were quite regularly spaced.

If Schinkel seems to have adopted here a version of the Renaissance Revival—as, for that matter, he had already done much earlier in his somewhat similar remodelling of the Berlin City Hall in 1817—at the Neue Tor, also of 1832, he provided two gatehouses which were in a sort of Rundbogenstil Tudor comparable to Gärtner’s Wittelsbach Palace of fifteen years later. His trip to England^[53] had fascinated him with English architecture, old and new; there he had noted everything with intelligent interest—from medieval castles to the towering new cotton mills near Manchester with their internal skeletons of iron. He had no occasion, however, to make large-scale use of iron construction, though there is little doubt that had he lived on through the forties he would have done so with both technical and aesthetic mastery.

At Schloss Babelsberg,^[54] built for the rather tasteless brother of his own particular patron, later the Emperor William I, he essayed an English sort of castle, admittedly more in the contemporary Picturesque mode of the new Castellated Mansions of Nash and Wyatt than like any real medieval one. This was designed in 1834 and begun in 1835. Persius took it over on Schinkel’s death, redesigning one of the principal towers, and it was finally finished after Persius’s death by Heinrich Strack (1805-80) in 1849. Though certainly not inferior to Smirke’s Eastnor or Cundy’s Hawarden, if without the lovely site and the richly organic composition of Busby’s Gwrych, Babelsberg is better appreciated in Schinkel’s or Persius’s drawings than in actuality. Schloss Kamenz, a rather Tudoresque remodelling of an earlier structure which Schinkel undertook in 1838, is more typical but no more successful.

Although playing but a very minor part in Schinkel’s own production, his exercises in the Chalet mode should at least be mentioned. Not only do these illustrate the very wide range of his own eclectic inspiration, considerably wider than that of Durand and the French of the previous generation, they also represent one of the peripheral aspects of his achievement which his pupils, and German architects of the mid century generally, delighted to exploit. The happiest work of his followers, however, continued rather the Italian Villa line of Glienecke and the Court Gardener’s House, a line in which Persius at least all but equalled his master.

The Grecian work of Schinkel’s imitators and emulators tended to be overdecorated and lacking in geometrical order while their Rundbogenstil is in general awkwardly proportioned and incoherently ornamented (see Chapter 9). Outside Prussia, such Hamburg architects as Wimmel & Forsmann and de Chateauneuf illustrate better than other North Germans the real possibilities of the Rundbogenstil. De Chateauneuf had something of an international reputation, moreover, after winning the second prize in the competition held in 1839-40 for the Royal Exchange in London. His design for that was based on the Loggia dei Lanzi, and may well have provided the suggestion for Gärtner’s Feldherrenhalle in Munich begun the next year.

It is impossible and unnecessary to follow Romantic Classicism to all the other German centres. At Darmstadt the Classical Ludwigskirche of 1822-7 by Georg Moller (1784-1852),^[55] a pupil of Weinbrenner, is a handsome circular edifice with an internal colonnade below the dome. Thus it is rather like the ‘central space’ in Schinkel’s Museum, but more broadly proportioned. A boldly arched entrance of almost Ledolcian character is set against the external circumference of blank wall rather than the more usual temple portico. The Artillery Barracks at Darmstadt of 1825-7 by Moller’s pupil Franz Heger (1792-1836) provided a notably early example of the Rundbogenstil. Comparable was August Busse’s Castellated Zellengefängnis in Berlin of 1842-9, the first German example of a penitentiary radially planned and with individual cells (see Chapter 5). Stüler’s destroyed Trinitatiskirche in Cologne, a Persius-like Early Christian basilica completed in 1860, was much finer than his Berlin churches (see Chapter 9).

Also Rundbogenstil, but of a more medievalizing order, was Semper’s Synagogue of 1838-41 in Dresden. Its centralized massing is uncharacteristically plastic. His Palais Oppenheim there of 1845-8 at 9-11 An der Bürgerwiese, based on Raphael’s Pandolfini Palace, was a handsome and very ‘correct’ example of the international Renaissance Revival to be compared, like de Meuron’s house in Hamburg, with Barry’s London clubhouses. The Cholera Fountain of 1843 in Dresden was Gothic, however, providing further evidence of Semper’s rather directionless eclecticism at this time.

His principal works of this period were the first Opera House^[56] in Dresden of 1837-41, where Wagner’s early triumphs took place, burnt and rebuilt by Semper later, and the nearby Art Gallery of 1847-54 which completed so unhappily the circuit of the marvellous Rococo Zwinger by Daniel Pöppelmann. The one was a rather festive, the other a rather solemn example of the Renaissance Revival; both are more notable for their planning and their general organization than for any visual distinction (Figure 8). The Opera House in Hanover, built by G. L. F. Laves (1789-1864) in 1845-52, is less original in plan but more sober, even a bit Schinkelesque, in design (Plate 14B). Its interior has been completely done over since it was bombed in the Second World War.

The historian tends always to press forward, forcing rather than retarding the pace of development in his written account. Klenze’s Propylaeon, however, has already provided evidence of the late continuance of Grecian ideals in the German States; in Stuttgart the Königsbau of 1857-60 by C. F. Leins (1814-92), a pupil in Paris of Henri Labrouste, provides a worthier example, although this was actually begun twenty years earlier by J. M. Knapp (1793-1861). In Vienna, as late as 1873, the Parliament House of Theophil von Hansen (1813-91) provides a gargantuan example of what the French had first aspired to build almost a century earlier. Ambiguous in its massing, if still very elegant in its Grecian detail, this contrasts markedly with Hansen’s other Viennese work of the third quarter of the century which is generally of High Renaissance design (see Chapter 8).

This Copenhagen-born and trained architect knew Greece at first hand, for he and his brother H. C. Hansen (1803-83) worked in Athens for some years for the Wittelsbachs and the Danish dynasty that succeeded them. Along University Street in Athens a conspicuous range of porticoed structures is theirs. The University, built in 1837-42, is by the elder brother; the Academy, built in 1859-87, was designed by Theophil and executed by his pupil Ernst Ziller; the National Library was also designed by Theophil in 1860 and completed in 1892. Conventional essays in the international Greek Revival mode, here made somewhat ironical by their proximity to the great fifth-century ruins, these lack the elegance and refinement of Theophil’s Palais Dimitriou of 1842-3 (lately destroyed by the enlargement of the Grande Bretagne Hotel towards Syndagma Square) as also the more than Schinkelesque restraint of the earliest Romantic Classical building in Greece. This is Gärtner’s gaunt but distinguished Old Palace,^[57] designed in 1835-6 for Otho of Wittelsbach immediately after his assumption of the Greek throne and built in 1837-41 (Plate 17A).

The Old Palace and its neighbour the Grande Bretagne still dominate the centre of modern Athens. The palace, in its regularity, its austerity, and its geometrical clarity of design, is a finer archetype of the most rigid Romantic Classical ideals than anything Gärtner built in Munich; indeed, perhaps those ideals were nowhere else ever followed so drastically at monumental scale except in Denmark. One may even wonder irreverently if the fifth century had many civil buildings that were so pure and so calm!

Gärtner and the Hansens set the pace for a local Greek Revival vernacular of a rather North European order. In its detail this vernacular sometimes exceeds in delicacy that of the later centuries of antiquity, as illustrated here in the Stoa of Attalos in the Agora—at least as that has lately been reconstructed—or the Arch of Hadrian. Not all of the new construction was Grecian, however: Klenze’s Roman Catholic Cathedral (Aghios Dionysios) in University Street is a basilica with Renaissance detail, built in 1854-63; the modest English Church of 1840-3 is rather feebly Gothic and reputedly based on a design provided by C. R. Cockerell that was much modified in execution.

Of the leading Greek architects of the period, Lyssander Kaftanzoglou (1812-85), Stamathios Kleanthis (1802-62), and Panajiotis Kalkos (1800?-1870?), only Kleanthis was German-trained. This talented pupil of Schinkel followed his master’s Italianate rather than his Grecian line, and the house he built in 1840 for the Duchesse de Plaisance on Kiffisia Avenue (now the Byzantine Museum) is a distinguished example of a Durandesque Italian villa, with simple arcading front and rear and low corner towers. Kaftanzoglou, trained at the École de Beaux-Arts in Paris and in Milan, was somewhat less able; but the large quadrangular Grecian structure that he designed in the fifties and built in 1862-80 to house the Polytechneion in Patissia Street more than rivals the academic buildings by the Hansens in University Street in the careful ordering of its parts and the correct elegance of its details. Of Kalkos’s work little remains in good condition today.

The new capital of remote Greece possesses more, and on the whole more impressive, Romantic Classical buildings than do Vienna and Budapest, capitals of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In them ambitious urbanistic projects were initiated only later after the accession of Francis Joseph in 1848. The Theseus Temple in the Volksgarten in Vienna of 1821-3 by Peter von Nobile (1774-1854),^[58] a Swiss who had made his reputation in Trieste, is hardly more than a large Grecian garden ornament conscientiously copying the fifth-century Hephaisteion in Athens line for line. His nearby Burgtor, begun the following year, is much worthier in its heavy, almost Sanmichelian, way. More characteristic, however, is the work of Joseph Kornhäusel (1782-1860) and of Paul Sprenger (1798-1854).

Kornhäusel’s Schottenhof, opening off the Schottengasse, is a housing development built in 1826-32 in collaboration with Joseph Adelpodinger (1778-1849). This is of extraordinary extent and arranged very regularly around several large internal courts. The smooth stucco walls, restricted ornamentation, and regular fenestration, brought out to the wall surface by double windows, can be matched in many streets of the city that were built up in these decades. Behind such a façade in the Seitenstettengasse lies Kornhäusel’s elegant but rather modest Synagogue of 1825-6. This has an elliptical dome and an internal colonnade that carries a narrow gallery. Much richer is his rectangular main hall of 1823-4 in the Albertina; as has been noted, this palace had already been enlarged in 1801-4 in Romantic Classical style by Montoyer. Kornhäusel’s hall is finished in mirror and in pale yellow and pale mauve scagliola with chalk-white Grecian details and sandstone statues of the Muses by J. Klieber.

With Kornhäusel all is classical; Sprenger, on the other hand, employed a rather tight version of the Rundbogenstil, more Renaissance than medievalizing, for his considerably later Mint of 1835-7 in the Heumarkt in Vienna. More original, and with charming arched window-frames of terracotta in delicate floral bands, is his Landeshauptmannschaft of 1846-8 at 11 Herrengasse. This contrasts happily with the Diet of Lower Austria, projected in 1832-3 and built in 1837-44 by Luigi Pichl (1782-1856), next door at No. 13, a rather heavy and conventional example of Romantic Classicism; so also does No. 17, a very simple block originally built by Moreau for the Austro-Hungarian Bank in 1821-3. The later bank building across the Herrengasse at No. 14, built by Heinrich von Ferstel (1828-83) in 1856-60, well illustrates the modulation of the Rundbogenstil here, as in Germany, towards richer and more Gothicizing forms after the mid century. The glass-roofed passage extending through this to the Freyung is still very attractive, despite its shabby condition, and worthy of comparison with other extant examples of passages elsewhere in the Old and New Worlds (see Chapters 3, 5, and 8).

The great nineteenth-century Viennese building campaign of Francis Joseph began in 1849 with the initiation of the Arsenal. There the outer ranges (now mostly destroyed by bombing) were completed in 1855 from designs by Edward Van der Nüll (1812-65), a pupil of Nobile and Sprenger, and his partner August Siccard von Siccardsburg (1813-68). The Army Museum of 1850-6 is by Ludwig Foerster (1797-1863) and Theophil von Hansen (who had married Forster’s daughter after moving from Athens to Vienna), and the chapel of 1853-5 is by Karl Rosner (1804-59). These are all in slightly varying Rundbogenstil modes, and they show, like Ferstel’s bank, the changed taste of the mid century, most notably in their rather violent brick polychromy (see Chapter 8).

In Budapest the National Museum of 1837-44 by Michael Pollák (1773-1855) is a vast rectangle fronted in the conventional way by an octostyle Corinthian portico and with a somewhat Schinkel-like severity of treatment on the side wings. This is another major example of the museums which were such characteristic monuments of Romantic Classicism everywhere. Among many other large and typical public monuments designed by Pollák, the Kommitat Building may be mentioned as of comparable size and dignity to his museum.

If first Greece and then Austria employed Danish Hansens in the forties and fifties, the earlier Romantic Classical tradition of C. F. Hansen, who in any case lived on until 1845, was still better maintained at home by his pupil M. G. B. Bindesbøll (1800-56). Where C. F. Hansen’s inspiration was Roman and Parisian, Bindesbøll’s seems rather to have been German, as was common in his generation. Certainly his masterpiece, again a museum and indeed a museum of sculpture, out-Schinkels Schinkel. The Thorvaldsens Museum^[59] in Copenhagen was built in 1839-48 to house the sculpture and the collections of the thoroughly Romanized Bertil Thorwaldsen, which he had determined in 1837 to present to his native country. The mode, of course, is Greek but completely astylar like the rear of Schinkel’s Berlin Museum; the general impression, particularly of the court with Thorvaldsen’s tomb in its centre, is surprisingly Egyptian (Plate 16B). The mathematical severity of the architectural design is warmed by the murals on the walls, once largely washed away but now all renewed; they romanticize thoroughly its rigid geometrical forms. Even the purely architectural elements, moreover, were once polychromed, if the present restoration of the colour is correct.

The murals on the exterior of the museum were designed in 1847-8 and executed in 1850 by Jørgen Sonne in a sort of coloured plaster intarsia with heavy black outlines. Developing a happy idea of Bindesbøll’s, these tell rather realistically the story of the transport of the sculpture from Rome to Copenhagen. The foliate work on the court walls was carried out by H. C. From in 1844—laurel-trees, oaks, and palms. In the interiors, where Thorwaldsen disposed his own sculptures somewhat less formally than he had the Aegina sculptures in the Munich Glyptothek, the intricate and brightly coloured decoration of the barrel vaults is in that Pompeian mode which had been a part of the Romantic Classical tradition ever since the time of Clérisseau and Adam. This provides a happy contrast to so much Neo-Classic white marble statuary set against plain walls painted in strong flat colours. The finest of these ceilings have no modern rivals, even in Adam’s eighteenth-century work, for the precise geometrical organization of the panels and the delicate refinement of the very low plaster reliefs. Bolder and wholly abstract are the floors of tile mosaic arranged in a bewildering variety of patterns, some imitated from Roman models but more of them so original in design that they suggest ‘hardedge’ paintings of the 1960s.

In his few other executed works and projects Bindesbøll showed himself considerably less Classical and Schinkelesque than in this museum; perhaps the museum reflects Thorvaldsen’s taste as much or more than his own. Tending, like other Danes of his generation, towards the Rundbogenstil in his urban buildings, for his country houses he arrived at a very direct and logical rural mode in which rustic materials and asymmetrical compositions were controlled by a Romantic Classical sense of order and decorum. If, on the one hand, his interest in bold structural polychromy in the fifties parallels that of the English Butterfield, his domestic mode forecasts that of the English Webb (see Chapters 10 and 12). Bindesbøll’s production was small indeed, but at least the very simple Rundbogenstil Agricultural School of 1856-8 at 13 Bulowsvej in Copenhagen, executed after his death, deserves specific mention here.

J. D. Herholdt (1818-1902), living almost half a century longer than Bindesbøll, was naturally more productive. He was also a master of the Rundbogenstil hardly rivalled in his generation even by the ablest Germans. Late as is his National Bank at 17 Holmens Kanal in Copenhagen—1866-70—this is one of the finest examples anywhere of the more Tuscan sort of Rundbogenstil. His University Library of 1857-61 in the Frue Plads is less suave in design but much more original in its brick detailing. As late as the eighties he maintained the Romantic Classical discipline in his Italian Gothic Raadhus at Odense of 1880-3 as well as carrying out many tactful restorations of Romanesque churches. Of his fine Copenhagen Station of 1863-4 the wooden shed now serves on another site as a sports hall.

G. F. Hetsch (1830-1903) also continued the Romantic Classical line, most happily perhaps in his Sankt Ansgarskirke of 1841-2, the Roman Catholic church in the Bredgade in Copenhagen. Ferdinand Meldahl (1827-1908), although capable of very disciplined Early Renaissance design in his office building at 23 Havnegade in Copenhagen of 1864, led Danish architecture away from Romantic Classicism and the Rundbogenstil towards a rather Second Empire sort of eclecticism after he became professor at the Copenhagen Academy in 1864 and its director in 1873 (see Chapter 8).

With its great individual monuments by C. F. Hansen and Bindesbøll and its streets of fine houses in the Romantic Classical vernacular, Copenhagen provides today a more attractive picture of the production of this period than almost any other city. Norway, at this time less prosperous than Denmark, has work by Schinkel himself. At least the designs for the buildings of the University at Christiania, erected in 1841-51 by C. H. Grosch (1801-65), a pupil of C. F. Hansen and of Hetsch, were revised by Schinkel just before his death, and the handling of the walls is certainly quite characteristic of his work in the clarity and logic of their articulation.

In Sweden, where the dominant influences in the early nineteenth century were first French and then German as in Denmark, there was no comparably brilliant development of Romantic Classicism. Rosendal, a country house built in 1823-5 by Fredrik Blom (1781-1851), is a pleasant and very discreet edifice that might well be by almost any French architect of Blom’s generation. His Skeppsholm Church in Stockholm of 1824-42, circular within and octagonal without, is a typical but not especially distinguished work of its period. More characteristic are the modest wooden houses with Grecian detail. These are similar to, but in their naive ‘correctness’ less extreme than, the temple houses of Russia and the United States. Their board-and-batten walls might, paradoxically, have inspired one aspect of Downing’s anti-Grecian campaign in America in the forties (see Chapter 15).

In 1850 Stüler was called to Stockholm from Berlin to design the National Museum. Eventually completed in 1865, this is in a richer Venetian Renaissance mode than he usually employed at home. Such more definitely Romantic modes were generally exploited by native architects only much later. For example, the Sodra Theatre of 1858-9 in Stockholm by J. F. Åbom (1817-1900) is still quite a restrained example of the revived High Renaissance; while so excellent a specimen of the more Tuscan sort of Rundbogenstil as the Skandias Building in Stockholm by P. M. R. Isaeus (1841-90) and C. Sundahl dates from 1886-9, but must be compared with German work of at least a generation earlier.

Holland has even less of distinction to offer in this period than Sweden.^[60] Yet the Lutheran Round Church on the Singel in Amsterdam, as it was rebuilt after a fire in 1826 by Jan de Greef (1784-1834) and T. F. Suys (1783-1861), a pupil of Percier, lends a distinctly Venetian air to the local scene with its great dome, despite the admirably Dutch quality of its fine brickwork. The original church was built in 1668-77 by Adriaen Dortsmann, and doubtless the peculiar plan, with main entrance under the pulpit and double galleries at the rear outside the main rotunda, derives from the older building.

The monumentally Classical Haarlemer Poort of 1840 in Amsterdam by J. D. Zocher (1790-1870) may also be mentioned, as it is nearly unique in Holland. This has the stuccoed walls that, in Holland as elsewhere, generally replaced exposed brickwork under the influence of international Romantic Classicism. The Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague, built by Z. Reijers in 1839 and demolished in 1933, dominated by an Ionic portico of stone, might well have risen in any French provincial city of the day. Very similar, except that the portico is Corinthian, is the Palace of Justice in Leeuwarden built in 1846-52 by T. A. Romein (1811-81). Handsome also, but like the Hague Academy less autochthonous in character than the Round Church, is the long stone façade beside the Rokin of the Nederlandsche Bank in the Turfmarkt (1860) by Willem Anthony Froger. On the whole, Holland is the exception that proves the rule. Almost alone in Northern Europe Dutch architects failed, in general, to accept Romantic Classicism as it was adumbrated most notably in the treatise of Durand; while local conditions, in any case, reduced monumental architectural production to a minimum in the decades between Waterloo and the mid century.