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(b Hamburg, Oct 2, 1757; d Pisa, Aug 18, 1806).

German architect, draughtsman, landscape designer and painter. He studied from 1778 to 1783 at the University of Göttingen and the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen, where he was awarded four prizes. His early designs included drawings for the hothouse of the botanic gardens in Copenhagen and a lecture room at Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin. While visiting Paris in 1784–5 he devoted himself to the study of Revolutionary architecture, and in England and Italy (1786) he studied landscape design and ancient sites. In Rome in 1787 he met Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who later summoned him to Weimar to rebuild the prince’s Schloss. In addition to a number of designs for the palace at Weimar he produced drawings for various summer-houses. In 1790 he moved to Hamburg, his plans for the Schloss at Weimar still largely unexecuted. By the end of his life he had designed numerous public buildings and private houses in Hamburg, including the house for Bürgermeister ...

(b Paris, April 12, 1744; d Paris, May 1, 1818).

French architect and landscape designer. He had a distinguished career as a royal architect at the courts of Louis XV and Louis XVI. Although his fame rests on his accomplishments as a landscape architect, his mercurial talents are perhaps best characterized in his drawings for interior decoration and court festivals. After studying physics under the Abbé Nollet at the Collège de Navarre, Bélanger attended the Académie Royale d’Architecture in Paris between 1764 and 1766 where he worked under Julien-David Le Roy and Pierre Contant d’Ivry. He was not a successful student and left without achieving the illustrious Prix de Rome. Nevertheless, under Le Roy’s influence he was involved with the circle of Neo-classical artists, including Charles-Louis Clérisseau, who had recently returned from Italy. In 1767 Bélanger became a Dessinateur du Roi at the Hôtel des Menus Plaisirs under Charles Michel-Ange Challe. Since the Menus Plaisirs were responsible for the temporary decorations and stage scenery for court festivities, Bélanger was involved with preparations for the marriage celebrations in ...

(b Gotha, Dec 27, 1725; d Vienna, March 23, 1806).

German sculptor, painter and architect. He was the son of a court gardener who worked first in Gotha and then in Württemberg. He was originally intended to become an architect; in 1747 Duke Charles-Eugene of Württemberg sent him to train in Paris where, under the influence of painters such as Charles-Joseph Natoire and François Boucher, he turned to painting. The eight-year period of study in Rome that followed prompted Beyer to devote himself to sculpture, as he was impressed by antique works of sculpture and was also influenced by his close contacts with Johann Joachim Winckelmann and his circle. He also served an apprenticeship with Filippo della Valle, one of the main representatives of the Neo-classical tendency in sculpture. In 1759 Beyer returned to Germany, to take part in the decoration of Charles-Eugene’s Neues Schloss in Stuttgart.

In Stuttgart Beyer made an important contribution to the founding and improvement of facilities for the training of artists, notably at the Akademie, and to manufacture in the field of arts and crafts, particularly at the ...

[Marcell Armand]

(b Vincennes, 1730; d Vienna, Nov 2, 1786).

French architect and landscape designer, active in Austria. He trained in Paris under Giovanni Niccolò Servandoni, whom he followed to Vienna in 1760. There he worked for the Crown Prince (later Emperor Joseph II (reg 1765–90)), and in 1776 he became Court Architect with responsibility for work in the suburbs of Vienna. Besides numerous architectural monuments, including a triumphal arch (1765) in Innsbruck, Canevale was also commissioned by the Emperor to design several private buildings, as well as summer houses for him in the Prater district of Vienna (1781–4) and on the Laaerberg (1786). Canevale also redesigned the Allgemeines Krankenhaus (the ‘Narrenturm’; 1783), the Josephinum (1783–5), a military medical school founded by the Emperor, and the anatomical theatre in the old university, all in Vienna (see Austria, Federal Republic of §II 4.). Other works included the garden ‘castle’ known as ‘Josephstöckl’ (...

(b New York, July 24, 1803; d Orange, NJ, Jan 14, 1892).

American architect. From the 1830s to the 1850s he was one of the most influential architects in the USA. His work ranges from major government and institutional buildings to ornamental garden structures; his main contribution to American architecture was his introduction of the European Picturesque in his designs for Italianate and Gothic Revival country houses and cottages. With his partner, Ithiel Town, he also refined and popularized the American Greek Revival. He revolutionized American architectural drawing through rendering buildings in romantic landscapes rather than in the analytical, Neo-classical style that preceded him. In 1836 he helped form the American Institution of Architects and advanced professionalism in American architecture through his scrupulous office practices, being, for example, the first American architect to use printed, standardized specifications.

At the age of 16, Davis left school in New York to work as a type compositor in Alexandria, VA. During this time, probably influenced by reading contemporary Gothic novels, he made drawings of prison and castle interiors akin to Piranesi’s engravings of imaginary prisons. In ...

(b Florence, Feb 14, 1778; d Florence, Feb 22, 1843).

Italian architect, landscape designer and teacher. He studied architecture at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence under Gasparo Maria Paoletti, the leader of the Tuscan Neo-classical school, and won prizes for his projects in 1797; in 1801 he became a professor of architecture there and presented a project for a Pantheon of famous men to the Accademia. In 1803 he began to work for the Tuscan state, making important contacts in the Napoleonic period at a time when he is known to have become a freemason. His first important commission, received from the Accademia di Belle Arti, was the remodelling of the famous Cappella di S Luca (1810–13) in SS Annunziata, Florence, as part of a project to transform the convent into the new seat of the French bishop. Following the restoration in 1814 of the House of Lorraine to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, he played a prime role in the reconstruction of the Scrittoio delle Reali Fabbriche, first as Secretary, then Director (...

(b St Ouen, nr Paris, June 7, 1737; d Paris, Dec 29, 1818).

French architect and designer. He was the son of the gardener at the royal château of Choisy-le-Roi and attended Jacques-François Blondel’s school of architecture, the Ecole des Arts, winning third place in the Prix de Rome competition of 1759. He spent five years in Rome (1761–6) on a bursary granted by Louis XV, and he made friends there with Giovanni Battista Piranesi. He returned to France via Holland and England. In 1769, at the suggestion of the King’s surgeon Germain Pichault de la Martinière, he was commissioned to design the new Ecole de Chirurgie (1771–86; now the Faculté de Médecine, Paris). The layout is in the manner of an hôtel particulier, with a court surrounded by an Ionic colonnade and closed off from the present Rue de l’Ecole de Médecine by a columnar screen. It was this feature that made a great impression on Gondoin’s contemporaries, lacking as it does the usual inflections by projecting end pavilions and central ...

[Mayhew and Ince]

English partnership of cabinetmakers formed in 1758 by William Ince (b ?London, c. 1738; d London, 6 Jan 1804) and John Mayhew (b 1736; d London, May 1811). Ince was apprenticed to John West (fl 1743–58) of Covent Garden, London, from 1752 until West’s death. As the usual age to begin an apprenticeship was 14, he was probably born towards the end of the 1730s. In 1758 Ince formed a partnership with Mayhew. They operated from Broad Street, Carnaby Market, an address formerly occupied by Charles Smith (fl 1746–59), whose premises they had purchased. In Mortimer’s Universal Director (1763) they were described as ‘cabinet-makers, carvers and upholders’, and by 1778 they were styling themselves ‘manufacturers of plate glass’ (Ince’s father and brother were glass-grinders).

In 1759 the partners began to issue in serial form The Universal System of Household Furniture...

(b Venice, May 14, 1783; d Venice, May 8, 1852).

Italian architect, engineer and landscape designer. He was a prominent Neo-classical architect but was also a noted eclectic, much admired, for example, by Pietro Selvatico, and he introduced the taste for the romantic garden to Italy. He attended courses in architecture and figure drawing at the Accademia Clementina, Bologna (1789–9). This school, which was in the forefront of theatre design and technique, provided a stimulating and enlightened cultural environment; his teachers included Angelo Venturoli (1749–1821) and Francesco Tadolini (1723–1805). After obtaining his diploma in 1800, he moved to Padua, and in 1803 he entered the studio of Giovanni Valle, a mapmaker, where he became a qualified surveyor. He collaborated with the engineer Paolo Artico between 1804 and 1806 on defence works on the River Piave, and in 1807, with the architect Daniele Danieletti (1756–1822), he restored the old prison in Carrara Castle. The same year he was also appointed as an engineer in the Regio Corpo di Acque e Strade in the Brenta region. His works of this period included decorating the town hall (...

(b Lacima [now Cima], Lake Lugano, Jan 22, 1669; d Vicenza, Feb 21, 1747).

Italian architect, architectural editor and expositor, landscape designer, draughtsman and cartographer. His work represents the transition from late Venetian Baroque to Neo-classicism, which his studies of Palladio did much to promote in its early stages. His style, however, was never entirely free of the Baroque elements acquired during his formative years.

Muttoni was the son of a builder, and in 1696 he went to work in Vicenza, as members of his family had done since the 16th century, enrolling that year in the stonemasons’ guild. From the beginning of the 18th century he was active as an expert consultant (‘perito’) and cartographer, as is exemplified by the plan of the fortifications of Vicenza that he drew in 1701 for the Venetian government (Vicenza, Archv Stor. Mun.). Throughout his life he continued to undertake various small professional commissions for surveys and on-site studies. His first major commission, however, was the majestic Palazzo Repeta (...

[Nejeloff]

Russian family of architects and landscape designers. Vasily (Ivanovich) Neyelov (b 8 Jan 1722; d Tsarskoye Selo [now Pushkin], 19 Jan 1782) was a pupil of Mikhail Zemtsov and Savva Chevakinsky, and he went to England in 1770 to study landscape design. On his return to Russia he worked at Tsarskoye Selo (see Pushkin), where he created one of the first landscaped parks in Russia, the Yekaterinsky (Catherine) Park (1771–8), laid out with the assistance of T. Il’in and the Englishman John Busch. Altering the outline of the previously rectangular Bolshoye (Grand) Lake, Vasily created, along its banks and to the west, a complex network of artificial water features, winding paths and artificial hillocks, among which park buildings were scattered picturesquely. The Siberian Marble Gallery (1772–4) was copied from the Palladian bridge (1737) at Wilton House, Wilts, England, by Henry Herbert, 9th Earl of Pembroke, and Roger Morris. The Pyramid (...

[Giannantonio]

(b Venice, Sept 2, 1751; d Venice, Jan 22, 1819).

Italian architect, garden designer, teacher and writer. After studying mathematics he became the pupil of the architect Tommaso Temanza. From 1778 to 1781 he undertook a study trip to Italy, France, England, Belgium and the Netherlands. The diary of his travels records his itinerary, new acquaintances and impressions. In Italy he remained in Rome for over a year, forming a lasting friendship with Antonio Canova and Giacomo Quarenghi and also visiting Pompeii, Paestum and Caserta. In England he was one of the first Italians to visit such famous landscape gardens as Stowe, The Leasowes and Blenheim, and he admired the work of Inigo Jones while remaining unimpressed by contemporary English architecture. In France, however, he expressed admiration for some buildings and for the gardens of André Le Nôtre. After early commissions in Paris and Rome to design settings for banquets in the residences of the respective Venetian ambassadors, in 1782...

(b Merseburg, Saxony, Feb 20, 1733; d Warsaw, Aug 11, 1807).

German architect and landscape gardener, active in Poland. He worked in Dresden from 1747 and was appointed Clerk of Works (Kondukteur) in the Saxon Office of Works. He probably travelled to Italy in 1755 and lived in Poland from 1756, where in 1772 he was appointed Court Architect to Frederick-Augustus III, Elector and later King of Saxony (reg 1763–1827). In 1772, for Duke Casimir Poniatowski, he laid out the park at Solec. This was the first of a series of landscape gardens influenced by English models, with picturesque buildings, grottoes and artificial ruins, which he created for the Polish aristocracy. They included Mokotów (1775) for Elżbieta Lubomirska and the important park at Arkadia (from 1780) for Princess Helena Radziwiłł (1749–1821), with such features as an aqueduct, a ‘House of the High Priest’ and a temple to Diana (1783). Zug’s most important work was the Lutheran church (...