Many historians, in despair, have merely labelled the period after 1850 ‘Eclectic’ as if earlier periods of architecture—and notably all the preceding hundred years since 1750—had not also been eclectic, although admittedly to a lesser degree. Within the eclecticism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries there can readily be distinguished the two major stylistic divisions with which Part I has dealt separately (in Chapters 1-5 and in Chapter 6, respectively). So also in the fifties, sixties, and seventies two principal camps are discernible among the architects. Their programmes were less clear than in the previous half century, and in one case much less widely accepted internationally. Yet the High Victorian Gothic of England, taken together with the later Neo-Gothic elsewhere, on the one hand, and what may be loosely called the international Second Empire mode on the other, subsume between them a fair part of the more conspicuous architectural production of the third quarter of the century.

Both the Victorian Gothic of this period and the Second Empire mode were ‘high’ phases of style. Perhaps for that reason neither of them controlled, in the way that Romantic Classicism had done in the earlier decades of the century, all or even any very extensive segments of building activity; yet between them they gave colour to a very considerable proportion of it. The obvious stigmata of one or of the other, or even of both—external polychromy and high mansard roofs, respectively—are to be found on such modest things as mills and working-class housing blocks as well as on major public monuments. The High Victorian Gothic first developed in Anglican ecclesiastical architecture and always carried with it a rather churchy flavour—sometimes quite ludicrously, as in the case of Gothic distilleries, Gothic public-houses, and Gothic sewage plants. Continental Neo-Gothic was more largely confined to churches, especially in France. The international Second Empire mode found its inspiration in the grandiose extension of a palace in Paris; something of the Parisian and even the palatial clung to it when it was used—as often in the non-French world—for such things as factories and modest suburban villas.

Both the Victorian Gothic and the Second Empire had definite national homes, yet both were also full of elements of Italian origin. In that respect the High Victorian phase of the fifties and sixties was somewhat analogous to the Germanic Rundbogenstil, as well as being the direct heir of the earlier and more puristic Gothic Revival of the forties in England. Often the Second Empire mode was even more Italianate, since it was in the main but a pompous modulation of the earlier Renaissance Revival. The one had its roots in the Picturesque, but it differed from earlier Picturesque manifestations in being a ‘style’—or very nearly such—not merely the reflection of a point of view. The other had roots not only in Romantic Classicism but also farther back in the High Renaissance and the Baroque; some qualities of those earlier styles were both continued and revived. But neither High Victorian Gothic nor Second Empire were ‘revivals’ in the sense of those of the first half of the century; they lived with a vigorous nineteenth-century life of their own, not one borrowed from the past. In both cases one may more properly say that they had revived.

The Second Empire mode was the heir, or at least the successor, of the last universal style of the western world, the Romantic Classical. Moreover its wide international sway was hardly terminated by the end of Napoleon III’s reign in France any more than its beginning had waited for his enthronement. Concerning that sway it should be noted, however, that considered as a definite ‘style’ the Second Empire mode is very far from characterizing as much of French production in this age as of that in several other countries. Indeed, somewhat paradoxically, its actual initiation may almost be said to have occurred outside France and before the political Second Empire actually began in 1852. In this chapter and the next, certain alternative developments in succession to the earlier Renaissance Revival have been associated with the Second Empire mode, sometimes a bit arbitrarily perhaps, for lack of a more appropriate place to deal with them.

Although France was less affected by the Picturesque in the first half of the nineteenth century than England, the Renaissance Revival had permitted some straying from the more rigid paths of Romantic Classicism in the thirties and forties (see Chapters 3 and 6). The earliest French work of the twenties that may seem of Italian Renaissance inspiration is very severe and flat, approximating occasionally the effects of the German Rundbogenstil yet consistently disdaining that mode’s tendencies towards either medievalism or originality in detail. Gradually, under Louis Philippe, there were changes: on the one hand, there arose an interest in later periods of the Italian Renaissance; on the other, there came an increasing and less peripheral use of sixteenth-century and even later native models. Common to both these developments was an evident desire for richer and more plastic effects.^[178] What above all distinguishes the mature Second Empire mode, even more in other countries than in France, is the elaboration of three-dimensional composition by the employment of visible mansard roofs and of pavilions at the ends and centres of buildings, these last capped either with especially tall straight-sided mansards or, even more characteristically, with convex or concave ones. Such features are rare before 1850 in France and almost unknown elsewhere.^[179]

The return of the mansard in France is harder to document than its appearance as a new element of architectural composition in other countries, for in France it had never passed out of use as a practical device for providing usable attics. With the increasing emulation of sixteenth-century French models in the second quarter of the century tall roofs of a more medieval sort began to be used with some frequency. Biet’s ‘Maison de François I’ of 1825 did not have them; but ten years later they are very prominent on the François I house Dusillion built in the Rue Vaneau. Moreover, Lesueur in the late thirties could hardly avoid their use when extending the sixteenth-century Hôtel de Ville (Plate 22A). As noted earlier, it seems to have been H.-A.-G. de Gisors, at the École Normale Supérieure built in 1841-7, who first re-introduced on a prominent building mansards of seventeenth- or early eighteenth-century character, and in association with detailing that suggests, vaguely at least, the style Louis XIV. By the late forties the use of such mansards was fairly common in France, although they rarely received much emphasis.

Had Dusillion in 1849-51 built the mansarded mansion for T. H. Hope^[180] in Paris rather than in London therefore, or the Danish-born but Paris-schooled Detlef Lienau (1818-87)^[181] his mansarded Hart M. Shiff house of the same date in France rather than in America, neither would have been especially notable. But in the England and the United States of the mid century emulation of French models was in itself novel. Dusillion’s and Lienau’s mansards, moderate enough by French standards, suggested to the English and the Americans a way by which edifices of generically Renaissance character could be given something of the bold silhouette that high pointed roofs provided for Victorian Gothic structures. Like Barry’s loggia-topped towers and his corner chimneys, mansards appealed directly to the mid century’s characteristic desire to break sharply away from the flat-surfaced, and nearly flat-topped, cubic blocks of Romantic Classicism. Pavilion composition offered a similar resource for the plastic modelling of façades.

In 1851, following immediately after the Hope house, came the designing of the Great Western Hotel at Paddington in London by the Hardwicks. This was still, one should note, before the Second Empire actually began in France. Gawky though this hotel is, and very uncertain in its use of French precedent, contemporaries generally recognized its inspiration as derived from the period of Louis XIV. The complex massing and the broken skyline, with roofs of different heights and pavilion-like towers at the ends, are much more obviously a premonition of the Second Empire mode in the form the world outside France would shortly adopt it than were the London and New York houses of two years earlier. Unlike Dusillion and Lienau, moreover, the architects of the Great Western Hotel, recognized masters of the dying Greek Revival as well as of the rising Gothic and Renaissance Revivals, were not French-trained.

If the international Second Empire mode had thus, in a sense, beginnings outside France, it is nevertheless true that its spiritual headquarters was in Paris. The prestige of the new Emperor’s capital, a prestige rapidly regained after more than a generation of desuetude, quite as much as the visual appeal of multiple mansards and pavilioned façades, explains the world-wide success of the mode during, and even well after, the eighteen years that the Second Empire lasted.

It was in 1852 that Napoleon, then Prince-President, made himself Emperor. He had already signalized, a few months earlier, his ambition to revive the splendours not alone of his uncle’s rule but those of earlier French monarchs by his decision to complete the Louvre^[182]—or more accurately to connect the Louvre with the Tuileries. This was a project over which generations of architects had struggled on paper and at which several abortive starts had already been made. Visconti received the commission, not Duban, who had been engaged since 1848 on what was proving a highly controversial restoration of the old Louvre. Visconti was chosen not for his reputation as a private architect but largely because a succession of public projects for new library buildings in Paris that he had been asked to prepare under Louis Philippe and even under the Second Republic had all fallen through, and it was felt he deserved an important commission from the State. Perhaps also his Tomb of Napoleon I at the Invalides made him especially sympathetic to Napoleon III.

A viable scheme for the New Louvre was produced by the sixty-year-old Visconti with very great rapidity. Counting on the great size of the Cour du Carrousel to obscure the awkward lack of parallelism between the Louvre and the Tuileries, he planned two hollow blocks extending westward at either end of the existing western front of the old Louvre. Beyond these blocks narrower wings, in part built already, would connect with the two ends of the Tuileries Palace in which French rulers usually lived. In the middle of the court fronts of the side blocks there were to be large pavilions, echoing Le Mercier’s in the centre of the west wing of the old Louvre, and other smaller pavilions to mark the salient corners towards the Place du Carrousel. Although the new constructions were intended to house various things—two ministries, a library, stables for the Tuileries, etc.—they were designed comprehensively with no specific indication of what would go on behind the long walls and inside the various pavilions. The New Louvre was not a palace or Royal residence; but like the old Louvre, which by this time housed several disparate activities—most notably the chief art gallery of France—it was meant to be representationally palatial.

In 1853 Visconti died and H.-M. Lefuel (1810-80), a pupil of Huyot, took over. Lefuel very much enriched the design and thereby provided the prime Parisian exemplar of the Second Empire mode, at least as the world outside France came to know it in the late fifties and sixties. Heavily though Lefuel leaned on the precedents provided by the various sections of the old Louvre, it is important to stress that his design did not represent, in the way of the first half of the century, a specific ‘revival’. For one thing, the old Louvre, begun by Pierre Lescot late in François I’s reign and carried forward by a succession of architects in the next four hundred years, offered a wide range of suggestions but no one consistent model. The most characteristic and striking features of the New Louvre, the corner pavilions, were those that were most eclectic in inspiration and in their total effect most nearly original (Plate 68). No part of the old Louvre is as boldly plastic as these pavilions with their rich applied orders set far forward of the wall-plane; only Le Mercier’s Pavillon de l’Horloge on the old Louvre offered precedent for the great height of all the new pavilion roofs and in particular for the convex mansards, like square domes, over the central pavilions flanking the Cour du Carrousel.

Sumptuous as was Goujon’s sculptural investiture of the earliest work in the court of the old Louvre, this was delicate in scale and very flat; much of the sculptural decoration of the new pavilions follows Goujon fairly closely, but even more—some of it nearly in the round—is so bombastically plastic as almost to justify the term ‘Neo-Baroque’. Although there is actual early-seventeenth-century precedent for most of their individual details, the very lush stone dormers set against the high straight mansards of the corner pavilions are particularly novel in effect. For the next thirty years, and even longer, such features of the New Louvre would be imitated all over the western world yet, paradoxically, they had much less influence in France and almost none in Paris.

As far as the outside world—particularly perhaps England and the United States, but hardly less Latin America—was concerned the New Louvre was the prime architectural glory of Second Empire Paris and the symbol, par excellence, of cosmopolitan modernity. Burghers in Amsterdam and Montreal, vacationers in Yorkshire and silver-miners in the Rocky Mountains all expected to find echoes of it in the sumptuous new hotels they frequented; Latin Americans continued to emulate it even into the twentieth century. Yet in the real Paris of the Second Empire, the Paris which is largely still extant today, the New Louvre is but one prominent structure among many and, as has been said, not even a very typical one.

The first Napoleon had had no time to carry out any considerable urbanistic reorganization of his French capital. But for the goodwill of his successors, notably Louis Philippe, the architectural projects that he was able to initiate would never have been brought to completion. His nephew, however, vowed to peace and not to war, had nearly two decades in which to build. Well before his reign began, moreover, he had definitely made up his mind to replan Paris more drastically than any great city had ever been replanned before.^[183] Only a few fine squares, the Champs Élysées, and the Rue de Rivoli remain in Paris from earlier campaigns of urban extension and replanning; but the Paris of the Second Empire, the Paris of the boulevards and the great avenues, is the urbanistic masterwork of the third quarter of the nineteenth century, a period notably deficient in urbanistic achievement almost everywhere else except in Vienna.

For all the sumptuousness of the individual monuments with which the focal points of Napoleon III’s Paris were ornamented, their settings are generally more distinguished than the ‘jewels’ mounted in them; an exception, of course, is the Place de l’Étoile where, however, the jewel was inherited from an earlier period (Plate 7). This is because of the high standard of design that was maintained in the general run of new blocks of flats that lined the places, the boulevards, and the avenues (Plate 75A). Since in Second Empire Paris the urban totality is more significant than the individual buildings, and since over the years of the Empire—or for that matter down even to the eighties—there was very little stylistic development, the Parisian production of this period may well be presented more topographically than chronologically, as if one were outlining a tour^[184] of its splendours.

There is one extant railway station of some distinction belonging to the period at which to arrive. Yet this station, Hittorff’s Gare du Nord designed in 1861 and built in 1862-5, is perhaps less advanced than Duquesney’s Gare de l’Est, which was just being completed as the Second Empire opened (Plate 22B). The flat Ionic pilasters of the façade and the great archivolt-surrounded openings between them are evidence of the firm resistance that Hittorff’s generation put up against the lusher tastes of the mid century as expressed in Lefuel’s work on the New Louvre. Even more characteristically Romantic Classical, and probably finer though less famous than the Gare du Nord, was Cendrier’s Gare de Lyon, since demolished, which had been built almost a decade earlier at the same time as his Palais de l’Industrie in the early fifties.

Proceeding from Hittorff’s station one strikes immediately the characteristic broad straight streets, often lined with trees, that were the new Second Empire arteries of Paris. The continuous ranges of grey stone buildings, their even skyline crowned with inconspicuous mansards, generally include shops below and always contain flats above. They are so designed as to attract very little attention to the individual structures,^[185] almost as little as do the separate houses in London terraces. There is much less irregularity of outline than along Nash’s Regent Street, for example, and a general consistency in the size and phrasing of the windows. There is also very little noticeable variety in the handling of the conventional apparatus of academic detail so crisply carved in fine limestone. Even where, by great exception, some bolder architect such as Viollet-le-Duc used more original detail, the unity of character is barely disturbed, so consistent are the basic patterns of the façades (Plate 101A).

Since the plan of Paris has remained basically radial, the visitor has the choice of proceeding circumferentially along one of the lines of outer or inner boulevards or of turning inwards to the centre. It is more profitable, on the whole, to advance centripetally, for the outer boulevards are generally very monotonous. The Île de la Cité was the original core of Paris; the east-and-west axis of the Louvre, extended westward along the Champs Élysées all the way to the Étoile, already provided a central tract parallel to the Seine; the new cross axis was to be a north and south artery running from the Gare de l’Est to the Observatoire. On the Île the vast complex of the Palais de Justice, whose restoration and extension had been undertaken by Duc as early as 1840, received a notable Second Empire ornament in its western block, facing the Place d’Harcourt, which was built by Duc assisted by E.-T. Dommey (1801-72) in 1857-68. Rationalistic in its structural expression and Classical in most of its detailing, this façade and the hall behind it reflect the tastes of the period in the heavy scale of the parts and the rather cranky—and certainly studied—awkwardness of the modelling of the various conventional elements of the orders and minor features of detail. Duc’s earlier work at the Palais de Justice, on the other hand, was detailed with very great grace and elegance, it may be noted.

The principal Second Empire construction on the east-and-west axis of Paris, the New Louvre, has been described already. Along the north side of the Louvre the Rue de Rivoli was extended eastward in 1851-5 the entire length of the palace with no change in the original Percier and Fontaine design except for the addition of high quadrantal mansards throughout the entire length of the street and its subsidiaries. Even a large new hotel^[186] was forced into this framework. Yet because of its island site, the high rounded roofs give this block as it is usually seen from the Place du Théâtre Français to the north something of the new plasticity; it thus provided eventually an appropriate terminus to the Avenue de l’Opéra, after that was finally completed under the Third Republic.

Facing the east side of the Louvre, Hittorff balanced the restored Gothic front of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois with the new front of the Mairie du Louvre built in 1857-1861. Characteristic of this period in France is the avoidance of Gothic detail on this secular façade in favour of something vaguely François I; yet the pattern of the front of the church is carefully repeated, even to the rose-window in the high-pitched gable, and the new tower by Ballu, on axis between the Church and the Mairie, is Gothic.

Up to the Rond Point, the Champs Élysées is flanked by parked areas on either side and decorated by fountains and other features designed by Hittorff (see Chapter 3). At the Rond Point there are a few very sumptuous hôtels particuliers, but beyond that the avenue was built up—or more accurately, for the most part, would eventually be built up—like a very broad boulevard flanked by large blocks of flats with shops and cafés below. In the open area on the left between the main axis, the river, and the new quarter which had taken its name ‘François I’ from Biet’s house, lay the Jardin d’Hiver of 1847 and the Palais de l’Industrie of 1853-4. Here also is the Rotonde des Panoramas of 1857 by G.-J.-A. Davioud (1823-81). Around the Arc de l’Étoile, at the far end of the Champs Élysées, are ranged pairs of dignified houses; these were designed by Hittorff with the collaboration of Rohault de Fleury in 1855 and executed in 1857-8 in a mode so academic as to be almost a revival of the style Louis XVI (Plate 7). The general layout of the place was determined by Haussmann, expanding a much earlier scheme of Hittorff’s.

What is most notable in all this mid-nineteenth-century construction along the main axis of the city is the continuity of taste between the Second Empire period and the period that preceded it. The only real echo of the New Louvre was in the big private houses set back from the Rond Point.

The Avenue de l’Opéra, extending north-westward from the Place du Théâtre Français, has become, since its completion in 1878, the major cross axis, rather than the earlier Boulevard Sébastopol to the east. The Place de l’Opéra, with a short spur of the avenue at its south end, was laid out in 1858; and the façades of the buildings (Plate 70C) around it began to go up in 1860 from the designs of Rohault de Fleury^[187] and Henri Blondel (1832-97). The Opéra^[188] (more properly Académie Nationale de Musique)—after the New Louvre the most conspicuous product of the Second Empire—was begun in 1861 from the design with which J.-L.-C. Garnier (1825-98), a pupil of Lebas who also worked briefly for Viollet-le-Duc, won the second competition held in that year. Although the Garnier design is often thought to be particularly characteristic of the taste of the Imperial couple, it was actually very unpopular with the Empress Eugénie; she had expected the project of her friend Viollet-le-Duc to be accepted and was furious when it failed to win. Substantially completed externally by 1870, the Opéra was not finally finished and opened until January 1875, so that neither Napoleon III nor Eugénie ever entered it.

Here, at its heart, the contrast between setting and monument in Second Empire Paris is at its most extreme, even though this setting is far richer and more plastic than that provided by the severely flat houses that surround the Arc de l’Étoile. Just as there, however, the use of a giant order on all the big blocks that form the place reveals the distinctly academic taste of the leading French architects in this period; but Blondel’s rounded pavilions, where two major streets come in on either side at an angle, provide an almost Baroque elaboration in the grouping of the various masses by which the complex space is defined (Plate 70C). Certainly the result is very different from the large open areas surrounded by discrete blocks of plain geometrical shape favoured by Romantic Classicism.

The Opéra is sumptuous in a rather different way from the New Louvre (Plate 70B). Yet in Garnier’s work, as in Lefuel’s, a generically Neo-Baroque effect is achieved with elements mostly High Renaissance in origin, but here Italian rather than French. The richly coloured marbles, the admirably placed sculpture by Carpeaux, and above all the fashion in which the masses pile up—from the ornate colonnade crowning the main façade, through the half-dome which expresses the auditorium externally, to the tall stage-house at the rear—is much richer plastically than the somewhat repetitive scheme of the New Louvre. The whole, moreover, is made fully three-dimensional by the comparable organization of the major elements at the sides and on the rear. Thus Garnier provided a visual equivalent to the complex ordering of his extremely elaborate plan, a plan the undoubted virtues of which can be fully appreciated only on paper (Figure 15). Inside the Opéra the great staircase, the foyer, and the actual auditorium drip with somewhat brassy gold and the profusion of detail has a curiously un-Renaissance spikiness and lumpiness (Plate 71). This quality underlines how un-archaeological was Garnier’s approach, how responsive he was (perhaps unconsciously) to the new tastes of the mid century that had produced the High Victorian^[189] Gothic in England in the previous decade and fostered generally the international success of the Second Empire mode. When Eugénie asked him what the ‘style’ of the Opéra was—Louis XIV, Louis XV, Louis XVI—he replied with both tact and accuracy: ‘C’est du Napoléon III’.

Like the lushness of the New Louvre, Garnier’s lushness has an undeniably parvenu quality characteristic of the time and place; but the pace he set, however much emulated all over the world in later opera houses, and the peculiar capacity he showed for satisfying the taste for bombastic luxury of the third quarter of the century were never equalled by other architects, least of all by French ones. In the twin theatres flanking the Place du Châtelet,^[190] which were built in 1860-2, Davioud, the architect of the Rotonde des Panoramas, made little attempt to vie with Garnier’s Opéra; but they are considerably more successful in their own right than is the Vaudeville in the Boulevard des Capucines of 1872 by A.-J. Magne (1816-85), which does. Garnier’s own Panorama Français of 1882 at 251 Rue Saint-Honoré has only a modest façade to the street.

Only one other work of Garnier himself rivals the Opéra, his Casino at Monte Carlo of 1878. The fine site that this occupies somewhat makes up for its tawdry finish in painted stucco, and the two-towered façade towards the bay has a properly festive air. The Casino and Baths he built at Vittel in 1882, his Observatory at Nice, and the Cercle de la Librairie of 1880 in the Boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris are considerably quieter in design. The Palais Longchamps^[191] of 1862-9 in Marseilles by H.-J. Espérandieu (1829-74), who had worked for Questel and for Vaudoyer, two palatial museum blocks joined by a curved colonnade above an elaborate cascade, is more Neo-Baroque than most work of the period (Plate 70A); but much of the credit should go to the sculptor Bartholdi whose earlier fountain project Espérandieu took over.

Despite what has been said of the houses at the Rond Point, most Second Empire mansions in Paris, at least those built by leading architects, tend to be rather restrained in their general design and often quite archaeologically correct in their detailing. They are likely, moreover, to follow French seventeenth- or eighteenth-century models rather than those of sixteenth- or seventeenth-century Italy. Already, in the Hôtel de Pontalba, Visconti had copied Versailles closely in the interiors, while his exterior followed the line of the early eighteenth-century hôtels particuliers. (This was drastically remodelled in the eighties.) Labrouste, in the Hôtel Fould, 29-31 Rue de Berri, which was built in 1856-8, was rather plausibly Louis XIII; while Alfred Armand (1805-88), a pupil of Leclerc and a frequent collaborator with Pellechet, in designing the Hôtel Pereire and its twin in the Place Pereire about 1855 approached the style Louis XVI as closely as Hittorff did round the Étoile. Nevertheless, study of Parisian exemplars inspired many foreign architects to design houses that could hardly be anything else but Second Empire.

This is largely explained by the special character of the publications^[192] of C.-D. Daly (1811-93), a pupil of Duban, and of P.-V. Calliat (1801-81), a pupil of Vaudoyer, through which current French work of this period chiefly became known to the outside world. Almost as was the case at the opening of the century, when the volumes illustrating Prix de Rome projects made the higher aspirations of French architects better known to students abroad than their ordinary practice, the publications of this later day seem to have focused attention on certain aspects only of the French architectural scene, aspects prominent enough, but not altogether characteristic as regards public monuments and dominant official taste. Without knowledge of the French architectural past, without the inhibitions instilled early in French architects by their training at the École des Beaux-Arts, foreign architects readily derived from published sources a Second Empire mode considerably lusher than was generally approved for public use in French academic circles and made it very much their own. Even in public architecture foreigners must have seen current work with different eyes from the French.

For example, the Tribunal de Commerce on the Île de la Cité, an agency provided in 1858-64 with a building of its own instead of mere quarters in the Bourse, was supposed by French contemporaries to express in its detailing the Emperor’s personal enthusiasm for the quattrocento buildings that he had lately seen in Brescia. But posterity, like foreigners when the Tribunal was new, notes in this work of A.-N. Bailly (1810-92) the characteristic Second Empire mansards and the almost Neo-Baroque dome—which at Haussmann’s insistence was added to close the vista down the new north-south artery—not the uncharacteristically flat and delicately detailed façades. Far finer is the front of that section of the École des Beaux-Arts facing the Seine which was built by Bailly’s master Duban in 1860-2, finer and doubtless also truer to the most exigent taste of the day. Rather directly expressive of its interior uses—it houses exhibition galleries, etc.—the detailing of this façade is quite original without being at all cranky like Duc’s on the Palais de Justice, and the whole very subtle in composition (Plate 72B). Much of the cold severity characteristic of the previous half-century remains; but Duban was clearly trying to be creative, not archaeological, so that one cannot properly apply stylistic names from the past, not even to the extent that it is possible to do so in the case of the New Louvre and the Opéra. However, such high distinction of design as Duban achieved here was rather rare in Second Empire Paris; it parallels in this period the equally exceptional distinction of Henri Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève of the forties.

The accepted range of stylistic inspiration was so wide that it is often only a certain syncretism that gives buildings of this period, nominally in any one of half a dozen ‘styles’, a recognizably contemporary flavour. So also new methods of construction, rather than superseding masonry in toto and thereby demanding original expression as in Victor Baltard’s Central Markets, were more characteristically fused with it, as in the reading-rooms of Labrouste’s libraries. Of these only the later, that in the Bibliothèque Nationale, was built under the Second Empire (Plate 69). Except for this Salle de Travail of 1861-9 and the Magasin or stacks, both so exciting to posterity, most of Labrouste’s other work at this institution, begun in 1855, is as derivative as his private houses; for the most part it is actually hard to say where the old seventeenth- and eighteenth-century buildings stop and his nineteenth-century additions and those of his successor J.-L. Pascal (1837-1920) begin.

Despite the increasing use of metal in all sorts of buildings, there was undoubtedly less sympathy for it than earlier, and hence less success in finding appropriate expression of its qualities (see Chapter 7). By exception, however, the Central Markets in Lyons of 1858 by Antoine Desjardins (1814-82), a pupil of Duban, have a somewhat Labrouste-like elegance in the arched and pierced metal principals spanning the three naves that is not found in Baltard’s so much larger Central Markets in Paris.

In church architecture something like full eclecticism reigned in Paris under Napoleon III, although Gothic was most popular in the provinces. The new Parisian churches generally occupy focal points where major avenues join or boulevards change direction; but, like the Opéra, they have little visual relation to the sober settings provided by the blocks of flats among which they are placed. Instead, each one seems intended to illustrate an alternative mode quite different from the standard urban vernacular of the day.

Saint-François-Xavier in the Boulevard Montparnasse was begun by the elderly Lusson in 1861 and finished by T.-F.-J. Uchard (1809-91) in 1875. With its basilican plan and cold Early Renaissance detail, this might well have been built under Louis Philippe. Saint-Jean-de-Belleville by Lassus, on the other hand, begun in 1854 and completed in 1859 after his death, while larger and rather better built than his churches of the forties, hardly represents any advance over Gau’s Sainte-Clotilde, completed by Ballu only two years earlier. Neo-Gothic could hardly be duller. However, Saint-Denys-de-l’Estrée (Plate 98), the parish church of the suburb of St-Denis, designed by Lassus’s associate and successor Viollet-le-Duc^[193] in 1860 and built in 1864-7, is more comparable in quality to the contemporary High Victorian Gothic churches of England (see Chapter 11).

Victor Baltard’s church of Saint-Augustin, also of 1860-7, is not located, like the Gothic edifices by Lassus and Viollet-le-Duc, in a working-class district or suburb, but occupies a very prominent if awkwardly narrow triangular site in the Boulevard Malesherbes near its intersection with the Boulevard Haussmann. Considering the success of his Central Markets, it is not surprising that Baltard used iron here; but he did so with much less consistency and thoroughness than Boileau had done at Saint-Eugène (see Chapter 7). The arched iron principals of the roof accord very ill with the Romanesquoid-Renaissance design of the masonry structure below. The front, with its great rose window, is somewhat more effective. At least it provides a strong urbanistic focus among the standardized ranges of blocks of flats that line the boulevards in this quarter. Two other big Parisian churches are similar in quality although quite different in appearance. Ballu, in addition to finishing Sainte-Clotilde, built both Saint-Ambroise in the Boulevard Voltaire, which is certainly more plausibly Romanesque than Saint-Augustin, and also La Trinité in the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin, which is much less plausibly François I than his later work at the Hôtel de Ville. La Trinité was built in 1861-7, Saint-Ambroise in 1863-9. Both are vast and pretentious, but neither has much positive character. Like so many comparable examples of the eclecticism of this period in other countries, it is by their faults and not by any characteristic virtues that they are readily recognizable as products of the Second Empire.

Two Romanesquoid churches less prominently located, and hence less well known, are considerably more interesting. One is the parish church of Charenton, Seine, built by Claude Naissant (1801-79) in 1857-9; this is clearly composed and detailed with a somewhat eclectic elegance not unworthy of Labrouste or Duban. Much larger is Notre-Dame-de-la-Croix in the Rue Julien-Lacroix in the Menilmontant quarter of Paris. Built by L.-J.-A. Héret (1821-99), a pupil of Lebas, in 1862-80, this is a cruciform edifice with the vaulting ribs all of openwork iron like those of Saint-Augustin. For archaeological plausibility it compares not unfavourably with Questel’s church at Nîmes, begun some twenty years earlier, in the design of the masonry portions of the structure.

The only big Paris church of the sixties of much real distinction—the only French church, for that matter—is Saint-Pierre-de-Montrouge at the intersection of the Avenue du Maine and the Avenue d’Orléans. This was built by J.-A.-E. Vaudremer (1829-1914), a pupil of Blouet and Gilbert, in 1864-70. Romanesque and Early Christian—perhaps more specifically Syrian—in inspiration,^[194] this basilica is notably direct in its structural expression, nobly scaled, expressively composed, and restrained almost to the point of crudity in its detailing (Plate 72A). Vaudremer’s Santé Prison off the Boulevard Arago in Paris, which was commissioned in 1862 and built in 1865-85, is also Romanesquoid or at least in a sort of very simple Rundbogenstil. The still quite Durandesque character of this prison illustrates Vaudremer’s close linkage, through the work of his two masters, who had both specialized in designing prisons and asylums under Louis Philippe, with the classicizing rationalism of 1800. His much later Lycées of the eighties, Buffon and Molière in Paris and those at Grenoble and Montauban, on the other hand, reflect the more Gothic rationalism of Viollet-le-Duc (see Chapter 11).

Vaudremer’s work may have had some influence, around 1870, on the American Richardson, who was still a student in Paris when Saint-Pierre-de-Montrouge was begun (see Chapter 13). However, no significant line of development led forward in France from his sort of church design. In a smaller and later Parisian church, Notre-Dame in the Rue d’Auteuil of 1876-83, Vaudremer himself showed no further development of his personal style, though the interior here is not unimpressive in its scale and proportions.

The vast and prominent church of the Sacré-Cœur on Montmartre in Paris was begun by Paul Abadie^[195] (1812-84), a pupil of Leclerc, well after the Second Empire was over in 1874, and largely finished before the end of the century by the younger Magne (Lucien, 1849-1916). This is Romanesque in inspiration, too, but painfully archaeological—’painfully’, because its architect, in carrying out the restoration of his principal medieval exemplar, Saint-Front at Périgueux, seems to have sought to provide ‘precedent’ for several of the features that he introduced here! Yet the bold exploitation of the remarkable site of this church, dominating Paris from the heights of Montmartre, and the bubble-like silhouette of its cluster of domes when seen from a distance give the Sacré-Cœur positive qualities lacking in most other French ecclesiastical work of the later nineteenth century except Saint-Pierre-de-Montrouge.

Architecture in France had been a highly centralized profession ever since the late seventeenth century. Under Louis XV a few provincial cities showed some capacity for independent activity, but this subsided during the unproductive years that followed the Revolution. Except to a certain extent in Lyons and Marseilles, local activity did not revive very notably in the first half of the nineteenth century. Under the Second Empire most French cities still remained content to follow the lead of Paris. There is hardly a large provincial town which did not—to stress first the positive side of the picture—lay out broad boulevards or straight avenues and line them with more or less successful versions of the maisons de rapport of Paris; on the negative side, the public buildings and churches were usually derived from, and too often very inferior to, prominent Parisian models.

In the centres of the biggest cities one can well believe that one has not left Paris. Occasionally, however, there are urbanistic entities which have more vitality than the rigidly controlled and tastefully restrained new squares and streets of the capital. The fairly modest square in front of the cathedral at Nantes, with its ranges of high-mansarded blocks, is a case in point. Better known is the rising slope of the Cannebière, continued in the Rue de Noailles and the Allées de Meilhan at Marseilles, with the columnar dignity of the Chamber of Commerce on the left near the Vieux Port at the bottom and the paired Gothic towers of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul closing the vista at the top. Public buildings in smaller cities sometimes have a rather illiterate sort of gusto in their boldly plastic massing and exuberantly coarse detailing closer to Second Empire work abroad than to that of Paris; to some eyes these have a theatrical charm not unlike the period flavour of Offenbach’s operas. They often date from well after 1870.

Espérandieu’s Neo-Baroque Palais Longchamps at Marseilles has been mentioned (Plate 70A). Also at Marseilles is the enormous Romanesco-Byzantine cathedral of 1852-93, which was designed by the younger Vaudoyer (Léon, 1803-72), a pupil of his father and also of Lebas. Espérandieu became inspecteur on the job in 1858 and carried on the work after Vaudoyer’s death. This is hardly superior to Ballu’s Paris churches, much less to Vaudremer’s or even Abadie’s, but it is more striking plastically in its rather redundant combination of domed west towers, crossing dome, and transeptal domes; it is also exceptionally colouristic for France. There is an almost High Victorian Gothic brashness in the treatment of the exterior walls with bands of alternately white and green stone. Here the aggressive assurance of the period speaks with an even louder voice than at the New Louvre and the Paris Opéra; this assurance is echoed, moreover, near by in Espérandieu’s own high-placed church of Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde of 1854-64, a scenic accent of the most brazen Second Empire vulgarity.

The Marseilles Exchange, however, dominating its own tree-lined square, is rather similar to the Chamber of Commerce in the Cannebière as it rises among ranges of houses that are more Provençal than Parisian in the modesty of their painted stucco fronts. Originally begun in 1842 by Penchaud, the Exchange was largely built in 1852-60 by his pupil Coste, but its style remains Louis Philippe rather than Second Empire.

The great elaboration and consequent expensiveness of Second Empire modes of design, as generally executed in France in fine freestone, restricted their full exploitation to the capital and the largest provincial cities. There is a sort of economic striation, from the immense sums the Emperor and, after him, the authorities of the Third Republic—even though relatively impoverished—were willing to put into representational public construction at the top, through the level represented by what Parisian investors spent on blocks of flats or rich provincial cities on their principal monuments, down finally to the niggardly building budgets of small towns and villages. This striation provides a sort of analogue to the breakdown of that earlier stylistic unity which had been so marked and happy a characteristic of French architecture for at least a century and a half. That this breakdown was still relative in France is apparent when one turns to other countries where eclectic taste in this period was bolder and where the variation in expenditure on different sorts of buildings was at least as great.

French architectural prestige revived internationally in the fifties to remain surprisingly high for another two generations.^[196] However, the Second Empire mode was gradually succeeded internationally by another Parisian mode to which it is convenient to apply the name ‘Beaux-Arts’, from the École des Beaux-Arts out of whose instruction it stemmed. More and more foreigners went to Paris to study as the second half of the century wore on, until Paris became almost what Rome had been in the eighteenth century. In architectural education the influence of the École was especially strong in the New World; the training of English and most Continental architects was much less affected. The first two architectural schools to be founded in the United States, both by William Robert Ware (1832-1915)—himself, curiously enough, a practitioner of a fairly aggressive sort of Victorian Gothic (see Chapter 11)—that at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston opened in 1865 and the somewhat later school at Columbia University in New York, were both based on the methods of the École.^[197] French winners of the Prix de Rome were increasingly imported to serve as teachers, and three generations later the last of them had not yet left the United States. The influence of the École in Latin America was even more powerful, and the dominance of its ideas has lasted in some countries down almost to the present.^[198]

Both in the New World and the Old most cities grew like weeds in the third quarter of the century; the analogy is, indeed, a rather accurate one, for the growth was characteristically rank, uncontrolled, and destructive of earlier architectural amenities. Various European capitals, however, imitating Napoleon III’s re-organization of Paris, took advantage of the clearing away of their fortifications to lay out something equivalent to the grands boulevards. Florence during the late sixties, for example, when it was very briefly the capital of Italy, saw the laying out, according to the general plan of Giuseppe Poggi (1811-1901), of a range of avenues and squares that extend around the city to the east, north, and west on the site of the old walls. These districts, built up over the years 1865-77, display little or none of the new Second Empire afflatus. For the most part everywhere in Italy in this period the architecture is of generically Renaissance revival character. Only in the much later Piazza della Repubblica, carved out of the slummy heart of the city in the 80s and 90s, is there a heavy pomposity of scale that is curiously un-Florentine—the centre of nineteenth-century Athens might be Neo-Greek, but it was Munich, not Florence, that became characteristically Neo-Tuscan!

In the old Savoy capital of Turin, where the first half of the century had seen such notable urbanistic projects, a vigorous local tradition continued to control most of the new work.^[199] However, at the farther side of the Piazza Carlo Felice the Porta Nuova Railway Station was built in 1866-8, as was mentioned in Chapter 3, by the engineer Mazzuchetti and the architect Ceppi in a rather original sort of Rundbogenstil. The vast iron and glass lunette at the front still provides a handsome termination to the long axis of the Via Roma, although the rear of the station has been rebuilt since the War. Along the Corso Vittorio Emmanuele II the earlier arcades of Promis were continued almost indefinitely; but the detailing of the façades grew continually richer in evident emulation of Second Empire Paris. This influence also affected the building up of the contiguous quarter of the city. In the fine new square at the end of the Via Garibaldi, however, balancing the earlier Piazza Vittorio Veneto at the end of the Via Po, the Piazza dello Statuto opened in 1864, the façades by Giuseppe Bollati (1819-69) are not at all Parisian, but recall rather the local Academic Baroque of Juvarra. Especially effective, and rare in Turin, are the warm and tawny colours of the painted stucco walls here.

With the uniting of Italy and the eventual taking over of Rome as the capital of the kingdom of Italy on the downfall of Napoleon III in 1870, a tremendous expansion^[200] of the old Papal city began. The two principal new streets extending eastward, the Via Venti Settembre and the Via Nazionale, were laid out in 1871 and built up over the next fifteen years. Vast and tawny-coloured like the Piazza dello Statuto in Turin, but much less distinguished in design, is the Finance Ministry in the former street built by Raffaele Canevari (1825-1900) in 1870-7. Equally grand in scale and much more dignified are the quadrantal façades of the Esedra built by Gaetano Koch (1849-1910) in 1885 at the head of the Via Nazionale facing Michelangelo’s Santa Maria degli Angeli (Plate 76A). With the fine later fountain by A. Guerrieri and Mario Rubelli in the centre this provides a most impressive piece of late-nineteenth-century academic urbanism. It still offers a not altogether unworthy preface to the Baths of Diocletian—of which it actually occupies the site of the largest exedra—and to the new railway station (Plate 183B), both so near, which epitomize between them the ancient and the modern worlds in the architecture of Rome.

Koch’s Palazzo Boncampagni in the Via Vittorio Veneto, now the American Embassy, built in 1886-90, is also very dignified. It represents very well the occasional tendency in that decade towards restraint and sobriety in Renaissance design, a tendency that balances the contemporary stylistic development towards the Neo-Baroque. In the Via Nazionale the two most prominent edifices^[201] by Italian architects, the Palazzo delle Belle Arti of Pio Piacentini (1846-1928) begun in 1882 and Koch’s Banca d’Italia of 1889-1904, are both quite academic in a respectable Renaissance way, and in the latter case impressively monumental as well. The same applies a fortiori to the two principal public edifices begun in Rome in the eighties—not the respectability, goodness knows, but the monumentality. The enormous Palazzo di Giustizia, in a new quarter across the Tiber, is an incredibly brash example of Neo-Baroque loaded down with heavy rustication, doubtless of Piranesian inspiration. This was designed by Giuseppe Calderini (1837-1916) in 1883-7 and built in 1888-1910 without the intended high mansards.

But the most overpowering new structure in Rome, dominating the whole city and blocking the view of both the ancient Forum and the Renaissance Campidoglio, is the Monument to Victor Emmanuel II, rising above the much enlarged Piazza Venezia at the head of the Corso. Largely the work of Count Giuseppe Sacconi (1854-1905),^[202] who in 1884 won the third competition held for its design, this was begun in 1885 and continued after his death by Koch, Piacentini, and M. Manfredi (1859-1927), being finally brought to completion only in 1911 by the engineer R. Raffaelli. Hardly Second Empire nor yet quite ‘Beaux-Arts’, this most pretentious of all nineteenth-century monuments well illustrates the total decadence of inherited standards of Classicism in Europe towards the end of the century. It can be compared only with Poelaert’s Palace of Justice in Brussels, begun twenty years earlier, and entirely to the latter’s advantage even as regards mere gargantuan assurance.

In general, Italian production of the second half of the century is of relatively slight interest; moreover, it often seriously upsets the balance of earlier urban entities by its heavy scale. The great exception, and the one ranking Italian work of the period, is generally recognized to be the Galleria Vittorio Emmanuele II in Milan. In Genoa, behind the theatre, the Galleria Mazzini of 1871 also exceeds in length, in height, and in elaboration all the galleries and passages built in various European cities in the first half of the nineteenth century, yet it is not essentially very different from them in its scale or its detailing. The vast cruciform Galleria in Milan, however, extending from the Piazza del Duomo to the Piazza della Scala, with a great octagonal space at the crossing, is in concept and in its actual dimensions more a work of urbanism than of architecture (Plate 75B). Built with English capital by an English firm, the City of Milan Improvement Company Ltd, and even, presumably, with some English professional advice—M. D. Wyatt was a member of the English board—this tremendous project more than rivals the greatest Victorian railway stations of London in the height, if not the span, of its metal-and-glass roof. But the actual designing architect was Italian, Giuseppe Mengoni (1829-77), and the Galleria de Cristoforis provided him with at least a modest local prototype. Erected in 1865-77 and now completely restored to its pristine richness and elegance, the Galleria scheme involved the enlargement of the Piazza del Duomo and the lining of two of its sides with related façades—executed only partly from Mengoni’s designs—as also the regularization of the Piazza della Scala. Alessi’s sixteenth-century Palazzo Marino, itself of almost Second Empire lushness, was enlarged to serve as the offices of the municipality and provided with a new façade in Alessi’s extreme Mannerist style across one side of the square facing La Scala. This was carried out in 1888-90 by Luca Beltrami (1854-1933), who had studied in Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts, to serve as municipal offices.

Like all the other most prominent buildings of this period, Mengoni’s Galleria makes its impression by its size, its elaboration of detail, and above all its unqualified assurance. From the triumphal-arch portal, rising as high as the nave of the medieval Duomo, to the gilded arabesques of the pilasters, all is obvious, expensive, and rather parvenu; yet the setting—at once so comfortable and so magnificent—that it provides for urban life, centre as it has always remained of so much Milanese activity, has not been equalled since.^[203] The Galleria Umberto I in Naples is a late and rather inferior imitation whose ornate entrance most ungenerously overpowers the San Carlo Theatre across the street. This was built by Emmanuele Rocco in 1887-90.

After Paris the most extensive and sumptuous example of the re-organization of a great city carried out in this period is not in Italy but in Austria. Vienna had been relatively inactive architecturally in the first half of the nineteenth century under Francis I (see Chapter 2). His successor Francis Joseph, however, who came to the throne in 1848, set out in the following decades as Kaiser and König to see that his Imperial and Royal capitals should rival Napoleon III’s Paris. In 1857 the fortifications surrounding the old city of Vienna were removed, and the following year Ludwig Förster (1797-1863) won the competition for the layout of the Ringstrasse that was to take their place. The execution of this project, with many modifications, took some thirty years (Plate 74). Outside the actual walls there had been a wide glacis, and therefore the Ring could be developed not merely as a series of wide tree-lined boulevards like those of Paris but with large open spaces in which major public buildings were grouped. These edifices are even more various in style than the comparable ones in Paris, despite the fact that they were the work of a very closely knit group of architects. None of them is of specifically Second Empire character, though the high mansards and the pavilion composition of the New Louvre were used fairly frequently on private buildings in Vienna and throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The earliest major project of Francis Joseph was the construction of the Arsenal, begun in 1849, where most of the leading architects of the period worked (see Chapter 2). All in various versions of the Rundbogenstil, this group of buildings culminates in the centrally placed Army Museum of 1856-77 by Förster and his Danish son-in-law Theophil von Hansen (1813-91). On this the very ornate detail is Byzantinesque and Saracenic in inspiration, yet it is not without a distinctive flavour that is unmistakably of this particular period: the brilliant polychromy of the red and yellow brick walls almost seems to echo, like Vaudoyer’s Marseilles cathedral, the bolder effects of the contemporary High Victorian Gothic architects of England.

Ferstel’s bank in the Herrengasse of 1856-60, also Rundbogenstil, has been mentioned earlier. The North Railway Station of 1858-65 by Theodor Hoffmann was Rundbogenstil of an even more ornate sort, with only a rather modest iron-and-glass-roofed shed set between its two massive masonry blocks. This was badly damaged by bombing in the last War but not totally destroyed. On the other hand, the South Station, built in 1869-73 by Wilhelm Flattich (1826-1900), a pupil of Leins in Stuttgart, was of rather conventional High Renaissance character.

The typical and, one may suppose, the preferred stylistic vehicle of most Viennese architects in these decades was, indeed, a rather rich High Renaissance mode. This, for example, Hansen used very effectively for the Palace of Archduke Eugene of 1865-7 and for the Palais Epstein at 1 Parlamentsring of 1870-3. He and Förster, and after Förster’s death Hansen alone, as well as many other architects, employed this mode ubiquitously for various big blocks of flats along the Ring and elsewhere (Plate 74). Good examples are such new hotels of the period as the former Britannia, still standing in the Schillerplatz, and the Donau, which once rose opposite the North Station. Both are by Heinrich Claus (1835-?) and Josef Grosz (1828-?) and were built in the early seventies. Their rather Barryesque raised end-pavilions, without mansards, and the heavily sumptuous detailing of the façades are most characteristic. The better known Sacher’s Hotel behind the Opera House, built by W. Fraenkel in 1876, is somewhat smaller and less lush, at least externally. The block at 8 Operngasse, built by Ehrmann in the early sixties, was topped with Parisian mansards, as are also the long blocks in the Reichstrasse behind the Parlament and the University on either side of the Rathaus; these also have open arcades at their base somewhat like those in Turin.

As along the boulevards of Paris, there is a considerable homogeneity in the private architecture that lines the Ring and the many squares and streets that were built up at the same time. Only in the design of public monuments—often by much the same architects, it is worth noting—did a pompous and somewhat retardataire eclecticism rule. Consider the major works of Ferstel: his bank is Rundbogenstil; his Votivkirche of 1856-79 is Gothic; his University something else again.

Ferstel’s Gothic must be compared, not with the distinctly original High Victorian churches of its period in England (see Chapter 10), but with Gau’s earlier Sainte-Clotilde in Paris (see Chapter 6): it is certainly a considerable improvement over that in the general justness of the scale and the plausible laciness of the fourteenth-century detail. But in English terms the Votivkirche is still Early rather than High Victorian. The painted decoration by J. Führich and others, somewhat more discreet than that in the chief Rundbogenstil churches of Vienna, relieves effectively the coldness usual in these big Continental examples of Neo-Gothic.

Ferstel’s much later University of 1873-4, which stands next door to his church and balances Hansen’s precisely contemporaneous Grecian Parlament (see Chapter 2), is a richly plastic pavilioned composition of generically Renaissance character. It also has a high convex mansard over the central block like those on the New Louvre, a feature echoed on the Justizpalast in the Schmerlingplatz, built by Alexander Wielemans (1843-1911) after the University in 1874-81. So much for the main works of one leading architect of the period. Not all Ferstel’s contemporaries had quite so varied a stylistic repertory, however.

In Vienna, as in Paris, one of the most conspicuous and also one of the most successful and original of the new public buildings was the Opera House. This was built in 1861-9 by Van der Nüll & Siccardsburg in a mode quite unrelated to their earlier work at the Arsenal but one not easy to define. The Vienna Opera House is a somewhat simpler and less boldly plastic structure than Garnier’s, both in its generally right-angled massing, with pairs of rectangular wings projecting on each side towards the rear, and in the rather flat, somewhat François I detail. Yet the vast curved roof, actually rather like that over the buildings along the Rue de Rivoli, does give it a distinctly Second Empire air (Plate 74). Less grandly sited than the Paris Opéra, it was none the less balanced across the Opernring by one of the largest and handsomest of Hansen’s private works, the Heinrichshof of 1861-3 (Plate 73B). This had a fine glass-roofed passage through its centre and ranges of flats behind the elaborate Late Renaissance façades. It has unfortunately been demolished since the War to make way for a very poor modern block of offices.

Here by the Opera House, as at the Place de l’Opéra in Paris, the Viennese urban achievement of the age was concentrated. The Heinrichshof, with its raised central portion matching the high roof of the Opera House opposite and its corner towers corresponding to the mansarded pavilions of more definitely French-styled blocks of flats, offered a handsomer Austrian equivalent of the Second Empire mode than does the Opera House itself; for the Opera House lacks externally the lushness and bombast characteristic of the period at its most assured, while the auditorium within, re-opened in 1955, is today a much simplified reconstruction by Erich Boltenstern (b. 1896). Yet the masonry exterior of the Opera House is clean and fresh today thanks to Boltenstern’s restoration and, with the great staircase and foyer regilded and refurbished generally, it offers a lighter and more festive vision of the period than do the vast majority of Viennese buildings whose stucco so often badly needs a coat of paint.

Hansen’s Musikvereinsgebäude of 1867-9 in the Dumbagasse is academic in an almost eighteenth-century way, both as regards the general organization of the exterior and the restraint of the detailing. In his still later Parlament of 1873-83, as has been noted earlier, he produced the last grandiose monument of the Greek Revival. More characteristic, however, is his contemporaneous Academy of Fine Arts of 1872-6 in the Schillerplatz. This is externally in the Renaissance mode that he presumably preferred after he left Athens, but it has Grecian detailing inside of a delicacy and elegance that recalls the thirties. Especially handsome is the colonnaded Aula in the centre, even though its rich painted ceiling of 1875-80 by Anselm Feuerbach is inappropriately Baroque in a rather Rubens-like way.

Another Austrian architect besides Ferstel was using Gothic for prominent Viennese edifices in this period (see also Chapter 11). After Ferstel’s Votivkirche the next Neo-Gothic structure was the Academische Gymnasium in the Beethovenplatz; this was built in 1863-6 by Friedrich von Schmidt (1825-91), who had worked earlier under Zwirner on the restoration and completion of Cologne Cathedral. But the school was soon outshone in size and in elaboration by Schmidt’s Rathaus of 1872-83. This stands between Hansen’s Parlament and Ferstel’s University but in a line with the Reichstrasse at their rear. The Vienna Rathaus is certainly not unrelated to G. G. Scott’s Victorian Gothic and that of Waterhouse in England, particularly in the side wings that end, eclectically enough, in high-mansarded pavilions. But the general fussiness of the turreted front recalls rather pre-Puginian Gothic, say Porden’s Eaton Hall of seventy years earlier (see Chapters 6 and 10).

Despite the total visual unlikeness of the Rathaus to its Grecian neighbour, the Parlament, both have a similarly obsolete air. It is as if Francis Joseph’s presumptive intention in the fifties of outbuilding Napoleon III had been succeeded by a belated and rather provincial desire to outrival the larger structures in other countries in the two leading modes of the previous period, the Greek Revival and the Gothic Revival, neither much represented hitherto in Vienna.

Yet an equally prominent public monument of the seventies and eighties, the Burgtheater, which stands just opposite the Rathaus, is of a Late Renaissance, almost Neo-Baroque order, with a distinctly Second Empire flavour to its bowed front and generally very plastic composition (Plate 73A). This, the most distinguished of all the public monuments along the Ringstrasse, was built in 1874-88 by Semper, whose international career in Germany, England, and Switzerland wound up in Vienna after he was called there in 1871 by Francis Joseph to advise on the extension of the Hofburg Palace. Except perhaps in its bowed front, this Viennese theatre does not much resemble the rebuilt Dresden Opera House of 1871-8 which Semper had just designed (see Chapter 9). Perhaps Semper and his Viennese partner Karl von Hasenauer (1833-94), a pupil of Van der Nüll and of Siccardsburg, were somewhat influenced by the plans on which they were working together for the extension of the nearby palace; these were, not inappropriately, in the Austrian Baroque of Fischer von Erlach’s unfinished Michaelertrakt of the Hofburg dating from the second quarter of the eighteenth century. However that may be, the theatre, boldly scaled and tightly composed, is a far more successful building than the very derivative Neue Hofburg projecting out towards the Ring as that was executed in 1881-94 by Hasenauer after Semper’s death. The post-War restoration of the theatre and the rebuilding of its auditorium are by Michel Engelhart (b. 1897).

Semper and Hasenauer’s two vast Museums of Art History and Natural History face each other on a large square across the Burgring from the Neue Hofburg. Of identical design, they were both largely built in 1872-81. In the treatment of the exteriors—they were finished internally only very much later—as also in some of Hansen’s very latest work in Vienna, one senses a conscious rejection of the bold plasticity and the compositional elaboration characteristic of the preceding decades, and most notably of the Burgtheater. The Renaissance detail is by no means sparse, but there is an academic sort of primness and orderliness belonging to the last quarter of the century such as has been noted earlier in Koch’s Roman work.

The Bodenkreditanstalt built by Emil von Förster (1838-1909), Ludwig’s son, in 1884-7 is still more severe in its Florentine quattrocento way, recalling the more Tuscan aspects of the Rundbogenstil. With this may be contrasted the unashamed Neo-Baroque of Karl König’s Philipphof of 1883, introducing one of the modes most characteristic of the end of the century in both Austria and Germany.