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Aigner, Chrystian Piotr  

Andrzej Rottermund

(b Puławy, June 1756; d Florence, Feb 8, 1841).

Polish architect and writer, also active in Italy. He probably studied in Rome in the late 1770s and returned to Italy in 1785–6 under the aegis of Stanisław Kostka Potocki, a collector and amateur architect with whom he collaborated throughout his life. In 1786 Aigner and Potocki refronted the church of St Anna, Warsaw, using a giant composite order on high pedestals. The political turmoil of the 1790s disrupted Aigner’s career, but during his second phase of creativity (1797–1816) he won fame through his work on the great estate of the Czartoryski family at Puławy, on the Vistula west of Lublin, the most important centre of cultural life in Poland during the Enlightenment. Aigner had already erected the Marynka Palace there in 1790, a variation on the Petit Trianon at Versailles, France, and from 1798 he began to add ornamental buildings to go with the new Picturesque layout of the Puławy gardens: a Chinese pavilion, a Gothick house and a peripheral Temple of the Sibyl with a shallow dome. In ...

Article

Baltrušaitis, Jurgis, II  

Kirk Ambrose

(b Moscow, May 7, 1903; d Paris, Jan 25, 1988).

Lithuanian art historian, scholar of folklore and Egyptology, and diplomat of Russian birth. Son of the celebrated Lithuanian Symbolist poet of the same name, Jurgis Baltrušaitis II studied under Henri(-Joseph) Focillon at the Sorbonne and earned the PhD in 1931. The concerns of his mentor are evident in La stylistique ornementale dans la sculpture romane (1931), which reprises and extends arguments for the ‘law of the frame’ in Romanesque sculpture. Accordingly, the shapes of architectural members, such as capitals and tympana, determined the articulation of sculptural forms. This theory could account for the genesis of a wide array of monumental carvings, from foliate capitals to narrative reliefs, but ultimately it had a rather limited impact on the field of Romanesque sculptural studies. In a scathing critique, Schapiro argued that Baltrušaitis’s book—and by implication Focillon’s methods—robbed Romanesque sculptors of agency and neglected the religious and expressive meanings of this art form....

Article

Centre d’études supérieures de civilisation médiévale  

Stephanie Luther

[CESCM]

French organization founded in Poitiers in 1953. The Centre d’études supérieures de civilisation médiévale (CECSM) is affiliated with the Université de Poitiers, the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), and the Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication. The founders, among them historian Edmond-René Labande and art historian René Crozet, began CESCM as a month-long interdisciplinary study of medieval civilization, inviting foreign students to participate. CESCM has since developed into a permanent organization but maintains the international and interdisciplinary focus of its founders.

CESCM continues to hold its formative summer session, known as ‘Les Semaines d’études médiévales’, and invites advanced graduate students of all nationalities. The summer session spans two weeks and includes sessions on a variety of topics, each conducted by a member or affiliate of CESCM. CESCM supports collaborative research groups and regularly holds colloquia attended by the international scholarly community.

Since 1958 CECSM has published ...

Article

Cram, Ralph Adams  

Douglass Shand-Tucci

(b Hampton Falls, NH, Dec 16, 1863; d Boston, Sept 22, 1942).

American architect and writer. Cram was the leading Gothic Revival architect in North America in the first half of the 20th century, at the head of an informal school known as the Boston Gothicists, who transformed American church design.

In 1881 Cram was apprenticed to the firm of Rotch & Tilden in Boston. His letters on artistic subjects to the Boston Transcript led to his appointment as the journal’s art critic by the mid-1880s. In 1886 he began his first European tour. In 1888 he founded the firm of Cram & Wentworth with Charles Wentworth (1861–97). With the arrival of Bertram Goodhue, the firm became Cram, Wentworth & Goodhue in 1892, and in 1899 Cram, Goodhue & Ferguson, with Frank Ferguson (1861–1926) having joined the office as business and engineering partner following the death of Wentworth.

Cram was strongly influenced both by the philosophies of John Ruskin...

Article

Davis, Owen William  

(b 1838; d ?London, 1913).

English architect and designer. He studied under the architect James Kellaway Colling (c. 1815–1905), an expert on Gothic architecture, and spent several years as assistant to Matthew Digby Wyatt, who at the time was working on the then India Office (1867–8), Whitehall, London. Davis was a designer of architectural ornament, furniture, wallpaper, textiles, ironwork and ceramics, and in 1870 some of his designs were published in Building News. For James Shoolbred & Co., London (fl 1870–1900s), he designed furniture in the medieval, Jacobean, Stuart, Louis XVI and Japanese styles and in the style of Robert Adam and James Adam, illustrated in the company’s catalogue Designs of Furniture … and Interior Decoration (1876). A selection of furniture designed by Davis and manufactured by Shoolbred was shown at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876. In 1885 he published Art and Work, which contains 85 lithographic plates of ornament for marble, stone and terracotta and designs for furniture, ceramics, metalwork and textiles, accompanied by notes on the design sources; among the plates are several after drawings, previously unpublished, by the ...

Article

Essenwein, August Ottmar von  

Jörn Bahns

(b Karlsruhe, Nov 2, 1831; d Nuremberg, Oct 13, 1892).

German architect and art historian. He was an important exponent of historicism. After studying architecture and art history up to 1851 (graduated 1855) at the Polytechnikum (now Technische Universität), Karlsruhe, he visited Berlin in 1852/3 and travelled in Europe, gaining knowledge that would later be valuable in his work on the conservation of monuments. His first post (1857) was as architect to the Austrian Staatseisenbahn-Gesellschaft. At about that time he designed churches, public buildings and houses, especially in Banat (Hungary; now Romania), and produced plans (1860–61) for the urban development of Franzdorf. In the early 1860s he also produced ornamentation in the Romanesque style for churches, including those at Leiden (Hungary), Berchtoldsdorf, near Vienna, S Antonio, Padua, and Trento Cathedral. In 1864 he became a city architect at Graz and in 1865 Professor of Architecture at the Technische Hochschule, Graz. His publications on architectural history and the conservation of monuments, as well as his practical and theoretical work on problems in the arts and crafts, led to his appointment (...

Article

Langley, Batty  

Roger White

(b Twickenham, bapt Sept 14, 1696; d London, March 3, 1751).

English architect and writer. The son of a gardener, he first tried his hand as a landscape gardener in Twickenham and published several books that reveal his practical knowledge of the subject, notably New Principles of Gardening (1728) and Pomona (1729). He deplored the rigid formality of continental horticulture and followed Stephen Switzer in advocating the introduction of the serpentine line into layout and planting. By 1731 he had moved to London, where at different times he ran a drawing school in Soho, manufactured artificial stone ornaments, engaged in polemical journalism and produced a succession of architectural publications.

Langley’s classical pattern books plagiarized an astonishing variety of sources, both Baroque and Palladian, although it is clear from their tone and that of his newspaper articles that he had little sympathy for the prevailing Palladian orthodoxy of Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington, and his followers. This may explain why, despite energetic self-publicity, he never managed to establish himself as a practising architect—his unsuccessful design (...

Article

Lassus, Jean-Baptiste(-Antoine)  

Jean-Michel Leniaud

(b Paris, March 19, 1807; d Vichy, July 15, 1857).

French architect, designer, architectural historian and restorer. He began his studies at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, but interrupted them to enter the studio of Henri Labrouste. He was among the first of his generation to oppose the hegemony of the Académie and the teaching curriculum based on Greco-Roman tradition. Having become known through the exhibition of several of his projects at the Salon, including a reconstruction (1833) of the Palais des Tuileries as intended by Philibert de L’Orme, and proposed restorations of the Sainte-Chapelle (1835) and the refectory of St Martin-des-Champs (1836), all in Paris, Lassus began his career as an architectural historian, architect and restorer. One of his earliest works was the restoration (1835) of St-Séverin, Paris. In direct contrast with the committed classicists epitomized by Antoine Quatremère de Quincy, Lassus developed a programme based on the assumption that the Early Gothic period produced a rational and functional architecture that marked the high point of national architecture; that later Gothic represented a decline and that the Renaissance introduced foreign and pagan influences; that restoration of Gothic buildings should respect their formal and structural authenticity; and that architects of the 19th century should apply the precepts of Early Gothic in order to find the way towards a new architecture....

Article

Manwaring, Robert  

James Yorke

(fl London, 1760–c. 1770).

English furniture designer and cabinetmaker. He was recorded as working in the Haymarket, London, from 1760 until 1766, but no furniture documented or labelled from his workshop has been identified. In 1760 he contributed 50 designs to Houshold Furniture in Genteel Taste, sponsored by a Society of Upholsterers and Cabinetmakers, and in the same year he published the Carpenter’s Compleat Guide to the Whole System of Gothic Railing, which consisted of 14 plates. There followed the Cabinet and Chair-maker’s Real Friend and Companion in 1765, with designs for 100 chairs in Gothic, chinoiserie, Rococo and Rustic styles. A second edition, virtually unaltered, appeared in 1775. In 1766 he brought out the Chair-maker’s Guide, containing ‘upwards of Two Hundered New and Genteel Designs … for Gothic, Chinese, Ribbon and other chairs’; it includes two plates from William Ince and John Mayhew’s Universal System of Household Furniture and at least six from ...

Article

Morgan Library Picture Book  

Daniel H. Weiss

Extensively illustrated Old Testament manuscript (390×300 mm; New York, Morgan Lib., MS. M.638) produced in France. Containing more than 340 narrative episodes distributed across the recto and verso sides of 46 parchment leaves, the Old Testament cycle begins with the first chapters of Genesis and concludes with scenes from the life of King David from 2 Samuel. No longer in its original binding, three leaves are now separated from the Morgan volume; two being in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris (Ms. nouv. acq. lat. 2294, fols 2, 3) and a single leaf in the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles (83. MA.55). Distinctive for the quality of its illustrations, the richness of its narrative cycle and the fact that the original codex probably contained no text, the Morgan manuscript was produced around the middle of the 13th century, most likely in Paris for King Louis IX (reg 1226–70) or a close associate. The ascription of the manuscript to a royal context is based primarily on thematic similarities to other works associated with the King, including especially the ...

Article

Müntz, Johann Heinrich  

Teresa S. Watts

(b Mulhouse, Sept 28, 1727; d Kassel, bur May 1798).

Swiss architect, painter, draughtsman and writer. He served as an engineer in the French army (1748–54) and drew Gothic monuments in Spain (1748) and copied ancient vases and painted idyllic landscapes in Rome (1749–54). He then stayed from 1755 to 1759 with Horace Walpole at Strawberry Hill, where he worked as a topographical artist, portrait painter and architectural draughtsman. Having left Walpole after a domestic dispute, Müntz attempted to support himself through commissions, producing drawings of a Gothic cathedral and possibly the Alhambra for Kew Gardens, a dining room and cloister (New Haven, CT, Yale U., Lewis Walpole Lib.) for Richard Bateman, and an oval room for Lord Charlemont, to complement his vase collection. All were in the Gothic style, as were a number of architectural drawings later used in a guide by Robert Manwaring (1760). Müntz left England in 1762 and spent a year recording monuments in Greece and Jerusalem before settling in Holland, where he worked until ...

Article

Prache, Anne  

Charles T. Little

(b Paris, 1931; d May 1, 2009).

French art historian of medieval art. As Professor of the University of Paris IV (Paris-Sorbonne) from 1981 until 1998, she was a leading specialist in French architecture and stained glass. She was president of the French section of Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi from 1980 to 1988. Studying at the Ecole du Louvre, she wrote initially on the sculpture of Reims, followed by a study on Notre-Dame-en-Vaux at Châlons-en-Champagne, Notre-Dame-en-Vaux. Her doctoral dissertation for the Sorbonne, under the direction of Louis Grodecki (1910–82), became an important monograph on St Remi at Reims. This was later followed by several books on Chartres Cathedral that stand out as classic studies. Aside from technical studies of the origin and development of the flying buttress, she was able to determine building sequences for a number of monuments by utilizing dendrochonological analysis of wooden beams. Her interest in Gothic architecture lead to a new series devoted to the Gothic monuments of France by Editions Picard. Her important contribution to Zodiaque publications included books on the ...

Article

Ravello  

Antonio Milone

Italian cathedral city in the province of Salerno, Campania. Ravello has been documented as an urban centre since the 10th century and as a bishopric since 1087. The centre, near the Toro quarter, is high up between the two rivers that separate the city from Scala and Minori. The city’s fortifications were damaged and the city itself was sacked by a Pisan assault in 1135 and in 1137. At the end of the 14th century, its inhabitants also clashed with the neighbouring city of Scala. In the 13th century a mercantile oligarchy with power throughout all of Sicily and close relations to the Crown took control of the city, celebrated in Boccaccio’s Decameron (II.4), and enriched it with numerous monuments and artworks.

The cathedral, dedicated to S Pantaleone, dates to 1087 but was extensively altered in the late 18th century. The cathedral has three naves and the façade has three portals—the central one has a bronze door (...

Article

Reichensperger, August von  

Michael J. Lewis

(b Boppard, March 22, 1808; d Cologne, July 16, 1895).

German architect, writer, and politician. He was Germany’s foremost Gothic Revival theorist and publicist and a crucial figure in the completion of Cologne Cathedral. A jurist, parliamentarian, and founding member of the Catholic-oriented Zentrumspartei, he defended the interests of his native Rhineland in a political career that stretched from the 1848 National Assembly to the Reichstag. Nonetheless, art and architecture remained his first loves and played an integral role in his political programme. He helped to shift the Gothic Revival away from the pan-German nationalism and liberalism of the early 19th century and to create a movement saturated with regionalist and separatist values.

Reichensperger was educated as a lawyer in Berlin, Heidelberg, and Paris; he served the Prussian administration, becoming an appellate judge in 1841. He supported the religious and political revival that swept the Rhineland in the late 1830s and helped to establish a Catholic press and to organize a series of Catholic lay brotherhoods. His political vision was inspired by the writings of Johann Joseph von Görres, who expressed a critical view of the modern state and enthusiasm for the decentralized power structure of medieval society. Reichensperger was active, from its founding, in the Dombauverein, the association dedicated to the completion of ...

Article

Ruskin, John  

Dinah Birch

(b London, Feb 8, 1819; d Brantwood, Cumbria, Jan 20, 1900).

English writer, draughtsman, painter and collector. He was one of the most influential voices in the art world of the 19th century. His early writings, eloquent in their advocation of J.M.W. Turner and Pre-Raphaelitism and their enthusiasm for medieval Gothic, had a major impact on contemporary views of painting and architecture. His later and more controversial works focused attention on the relation between art and politics and were bitter in their condemnation of what he saw as the mechanistic materialism of his age.

Ruskin was the only child of prosperous Scottish parents living in London: his father was a wine merchant, his mother a spirited Evangelical devoted to her husband and son. Ruskin had a sequestered but happy childhood. He became an accomplished draughtsman (taught by Copley Fielding and James Duffield Harding) and acquired, through engravings encountered in Samuel Rogers’s poem Italy (1830), an early enthusiasm for Turner’s art. He was also an eager student of natural science, particularly geology. He travelled with his parents, seeing Venice for the first time in ...

Article

Schinkel, Karl Friedrich  

Rand Carter

(b Neuruppin, Mark Brandenburg, March 13, 1781; d Berlin, Oct 9, 1841).

German architect, painter and stage designer. He was the greatest architect in 19th-century Germany, and his most important surviving buildings in Berlin (see Berlin, §I, 3) and Potsdam (see Potsdam, §1) show his sense of German idealism and technical mastery. He became Geheimer Oberlandesbaudirektor of the Prussian state and influenced many architects in Germany and abroad.

Schinkel’s father, a Lutheran pastor, died after attempting to save victims of a fire in 1787 that destroyed most of Neuruppin, a town 27 km north-west of Berlin. Much of Schinkel’s boyhood was spent in a town under reconstruction, a model of royal benevolence and rational planning. In 1794 his mother and her six children moved to Berlin to a home for the widows of Lutheran pastors. At the 1797 Akademie der Künste exhibition in Berlin the 16-year-old Schinkel was so fascinated by a project for a monument to Frederick II of Prussia...

Article

Selvatico (Estense), Marchese Pietro  

Franco Bernabei

(b Padua, April 27, 1803; d Padua, Feb 26, 1880).

Italian critic, art historian, architect, and teacher. He was one of the most important writers in mid-19th-century Italy on Gothic art and architecture—an interest stimulated by his support for the Catholic Revival and manifested in his Gothic Revival architectural designs.

He belonged to a noble family awarded the title of marchese by the House of Este princes in Modena, with permission to add Estense to the name Selvatico. He enrolled in the Faculty of Jurisprudence in the University of Padua, mainly to satisfy his family, but he never took his degree. Instead he began to study the history of art and culture with the Abbot Ludovico Menin, a local scholar, and took painting lessons with Giovanni Demin (1786–1859), whose work was known for its late Neo-classicism and incipient Romanticism. More important, however, was his meeting with Giuseppe Jappelli, the architect who adorned Padua with such masterpieces as the Caffè Pedrocchi and whose stylistic eclecticism was very significant at that time. Selvatico painted a few pictures, none of which survived; he also produced some architectural work, which, although not particularly remarkable, can be clearly documented. He began to participate in the cultural life of his city and entered the Accademia di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti in Padua while still a young man. He also visited the most famous cities and monuments in Italy and went to Paris, London, and Germany; evidence of these travels can be seen in his later practical and theoretical work. He was influenced not only by artistic movements but also by more general social and cultural developments, which, because of the Industrial Revolution, were further advanced in France and England than in Italy....

Article

Talbert, Bruce J(ames)  

Rosamond Allwood

(b Dundee, 1838; d London, Jan 28, 1881).

Scottish designer. He served an apprenticeship as a wood-carver in Dundee and ran his own carving business for two years before joining the office of Charles Edward, a local architect. Around 1856 he moved to Glasgow, working first in the practice of the architect W. N. Tait and then with Campbell Douglas (1828–1910). In 1862 he moved to Manchester, where he worked for the cabinetmakers Doveston, Bird & Hull, and by the end of the following year he was in Coventry, working for the wood- and metalworkers Skidmore’s Art Manufactures. In the mid-1860s Talbert moved to London, where he designed award-winning furniture for Holland & Sons’ stand at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1867. By 1868 he was designing furniture for Gillows of Lancaster, notably the ‘Pet’ sideboard (1873; London, V&A). He returned to Dundee to set up a design practice, and in 1868 (though dated 1867...