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(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 ...

(b Castel Bolognese, Ravenna, 1756; d Bologna, March 11, 1841).

Italian architect, engineer and theorist. He graduated from the University of Bologna in engineering and architecture. From 1775 to 1796 he was in Rome, where his design for the new sacristy of St Peter’s (1775) was admired by Pius VI, although the commission was awarded to Carlo Marchionni. Antolini took part in the scheme to drain the Pontine Marshes (1776–7), but caught malaria and resigned his appointment. Devoting himself to the study and practice of architecture, he became involved in the artistic controversies of the day, including the debate on the use of the Doric order (see Piranesi, Giovanni Battista) and the changing attitudes towards the restoration of ancient monuments, his own position becoming progressively more conservative. He published his first important archaeological work on the Temple of Hercules at Cori in 1785 and began his studies on the Temple of Minerva at Assisi. During this period he also produced schemes for palaces, chapels and other buildings for noble foreign clients, including a design for the façade of the palace and court chapel of the Duke of Courland at Mitau (now Jelgava, Latvia). During the French intervention in Italy (...

(Iliev)

(b Sofia, Aug 11, 1891; d Poland, Oct 10, 1962).

Bulgarian architect, theorist and teacher. He graduated in architecture from the Technische Hochschule, Berlin, in 1920. On returning to Bulgaria he formed a practice with Ivan Danchov (1898–1972). Belkovski espoused the revival of Neo-classicism that was prevalent in much of Europe in the 1930s and actively resisted the modernist trends of Functionalism and Constructivism. Notable examples of his collaboration with Danchov in Sofia are the Bulgaria Hotel and Concert Hall (1934–7), originally with frescoes (destr. 1944), the Balkan Cinema and Hotel (1935–7; from 1944 Youth Theatre) and the Telephone Exchange (1942–7), with sculptures by Lyouben Dimitrov (b 1904). Belkovski and Danchov also designed Kuyumdzhiiski House (1931; now the French Embassy), Oborishte Street, Sofia. From 1943 Belkovski was a professor at the Higher Institute for Architecture and Building, Sofia, and Director of the Institute of Town Planning and Architecture of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, where he published papers in the field of standardized designs and the industrialization of construction....

(b Hartland, CT, June 15, 1773; d Springfield, MA, July 26, 1845).

American architect and writer. Benjamin was one of the most influential architect–writers of the first half of the 19th century in the USA and was trained as a housewright in rural Connecticut between 1787 and 1794. Two of his earliest commissions, the carving of Ionic capitals (1794) for the Oliver Phelps House in Suffield, CT, and the construction of an elliptical staircase (1795) in Charles Bulfinch’s Connecticut State Capitol at Hartford, reveal an exceptional ability with architectural geometry that was to help to determine the direction of his career. Benjamin worked as a housewright in a succession of towns along the Connecticut River during the 1790s. In 1797, dissatisfied with the publications of William Pain, an English popularizer of the Neo-classical style of Robert Adam, Benjamin wrote The Country Builder’s Assistant, a modest handbook for carpenters that was the first such work by an American writer. In ...

(b Paris, Feb 12, 1728; d Feb 6, 1799).

French architect and writer. A gifted designer and admired teacher, Boullée became best known for the magnificent set of drawings he assembled for his treatise Architecture, essai sur l’art (Paris, Bib. N.). His father, Louis-Claude Boullée, was an architect, and his mother, Marie-Louise Boucher, may have been related to the painter François Boucher. Etienne-Louis studied painting with Jean-Baptiste-Marie Pierre until his father prevailed on him to pursue architectural studies with Jacques-François Blondel, a leading theorist of French classicism. Although he never went to Italy, Boullée was introduced by Jean-Laurent Legeay to the international Neo-classicism germinating in Rome during the 1740s. Legeay urged his students to complete their projects with a presentation drawing rendered in perspective that would be more intelligible to the client than the customary elevation. This encouraged pictorial effects of light and shadow and provided a link between the practice of architecture and the painting of architectural views. At the age of 19 Boullée began teaching at the Ecole des Ponts et Chausées; he was admitted to second-class membership in the Académie Royale d’Architecture in ...

(b Milan, 1791; d Milan, March 28, 1872).

Italian painter and art historian. He was trained as a painter in the Neo-classical school of Giuseppe Bossi, and by Vincenzo Camuccini and Pietro Benvenuti. He was the author of Notizie sulla vita…e degli Sforza, the first great history of Milanese art of the 14th to the 16th century, which largely established the canon of early Milanese artists. Calvi’s book was founded on his perceptive connoisseurship of painting and sculpture, and a good understanding of secondary literature. He made a thorough, intelligent use of primary sources including lapidary inscriptions, documents from the archives of Milan and Pavia, and also the then unpublished manuscript (compiled c. 1775) of Antonio Francesco Albuzzi. This work consisted of a collection of notes on the lives of Milanese artists, its author being the first secretary of the Accademia Braidense, where Giuseppe Bossi taught. Both Bossi and Calvi possessed copies of Albuzzi’s manuscript.

(b Galicia [probably the region of Noya], 1704–11; d Madrid, Aug 25, 1775).

Spanish sculptor, teacher, critic and scholar. He was seminal in introducing the Neo-classical style to Spain and has been justly called the prototype of the academic artist (Bédat). The 14 years he spent in Italy (1733–47) studying ancient art and the work of such artists as Alessandro Algardi and Gianlorenzo Bernini were central to his career. De Castro’s earliest training was under Diego de Sande and then Miguel de Romay in Santiago de Compostela (Galicia). From 1724 to 1726 he worked in Lisbon, afterwards moving to Seville, where he entered the workshop of Pedro Duque Cornejo. He went to Rome in 1733, but no sculpture by de Castro is known to have survived from his stay in the city. He first joined Giuseppe Rusconi’s workshop and later that of Filippo della Valle. He also made contact with influential artists such as Anton Raphael Mengs. In 1739 he won first prize for sculpture at the Accademia di S Luca in Rome and as a result was given an annual allowance by ...

(b Göteborg, Sweden, Feb 23, 1723; d London, March 8, 1796).

English architect and writer, of Scottish descent.

The son of a Scottish merchant trading in Sweden, Chambers was educated in Ripon, Yorkshire, and returned to Sweden at the age of 16 to train as a merchant in that country’s East India Company. Between 1740 and 1749 he made three voyages to the East, passing away the tedium of the journeys by studying ‘modern languages, mathematics and the fine arts, but chiefly civil architecture’. This background placed Chambers in a unique situation as far as his future career in England was concerned. By inclination he was a continental, and in 1749 he went to Paris, as any Swedish architect would have done, and sought instruction in architecture. He entered Jacques-François Blondel’s influential Ecole des Arts, a progressive educational body that trained the finest Parisian architects of the first generation of Neo-classicists. Late in 1750 Chambers moved on to Rome, where he set himself up as a privately funded student. There he seems to have maintained contacts with the Académie de France, and for a while he lived in the same studio as Giovanni Battista Piranesi, who befriended those artists whose work was in the vanguard of Neo-classicism. Nevertheless, Chambers was too astute to ignore the visiting coteries of English travellers and ...

(b Vicenza, ?Sept 18, 1730; d Vicenza, Oct 26, 1803).

Italian architect and writer. He was a pupil of Domenico Cerato, developing an extremely conservative trend of Neo-classicism based on Palladio but assimilating contemporary ideas of prismatic form and functional planning; he was heavily influenced by the contemporary publication of Ottavio Bertotti Scamozzi’s Le fabbriche e i disegni di Andrea Palladio raccolti e illustrati (1776–83). Bertotti Scamozzi regarded him as having ‘appropriated’ rather then ‘imitated’ Palladio; Antoine Quatremère de Quincy called him a ‘rejuvenated Palladio’. He was a prolific architect, building numerous palazzi, villas and churches in the Veneto, and was elected a member of the Institut de France.

Calderari’s unexecuted design (1756) for the façade of the church of Padri Scalzi, Vicenza, exemplifies his manner. The composition followed closely that by Palladio for S Giorgio Maggiore (begun 1566), Venice, but the flat planes and the decoration of the frieze were resolutely Neo-classical. The chapels of the Casa Monza (...

[Nino]

(b Rome, Oct 15, 1826; d Pisa, Jan 31, 1903).

Italian painter and critic. He was taught by one of the leading Neo-classical painters in Rome, Vincenzo Camuccini, from 1843 to 1847. He also studied under Francesco Podesti and Francesco Coghetti at the Accademia di S Luca, Rome. These painters instilled in Costa the basic academic techniques, in particular that of painting a scene or figure in mezza macchia, or half-tones, which he was to apply to great effect in his landscape paintings. In 1848 Costa joined Giuseppe Garibaldi’s Legione Romane; after the fall of the Roman Republic in 1849 he took refuge from the papal police in the Campagna, outside Rome. Between 1849 and 1859 Costa lived and worked in this region and met several foreign artists, including the Swiss painter Emile François David (1824–91) and the English painter Charles Coleman (1807–74), who encouraged his interest in landscape painting; the latter introduced him to Frederic Leighton and George Heming Mason, and they became lifelong friends. Costa recalled these years and described his working practices in his memoirs, ...

[Mathias; Matthew]

(fl c. 1740–early 1770s).

English engraver, draughtsman and drawing-master. In 1748 his premises faced Old Slaughter’s Coffee House in St Martin’s Lane, London, a favourite meeting-place for adherents of the new Rococo style. His earliest known satirical print, the Cricket Players of Europe, is dated 1741.

In 1751 he issued A New-book of Chinese, Gothic & Modern Chairs, a slight publication on eight leaves. Twelve examples with bizarre backs were described as ‘Hall Chairs’ in a reissue of 1766, but it is more likely they were intended for gardens and summer-houses. A shell-back chair (Stratford-on-Avon, Nash’s House) corresponding to one of the designs was made for the Chinese temple erected at Stratford for the Shakespeare jubilee organized by David Garrick in 1769. Five plates from a second book of chairs (c. 1751), of which no copy survives, were apparently reprinted in Robert Manwaring’s The Chair-maker’s Guide (1766). Described as ‘Parlour Chairs’, they incorporate extravagant C-scroll motifs in the backs....

(b Paris, Sept 18, 1760; d Thiais, Dec 31, 1834).

French architect, teacher and writer. He was one of the most influential teachers of his time, and his radically rationalist approach, which emphasized priority of function and economy of means, was expressed in analytical writings that remained popular into the 20th century. He studied under Pierre Panseron (fl 1736) and from 1776 in the office of Etienne-Louis Boullée. He also took courses with Julien-David Le Roy at the Académie d’Architecture and participated in competitions under the guidance of Jean-Rodolphe Perronet. He twice came second in the Prix de Rome: in 1779 for a museum and in 1780 for a school. During the 1780s he worked as a draughtsman for Boullée and for the engraver Jean-François Janinet. In 1788 construction began in the Rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière, Paris, of his Maison Lathuille, a building with Néo-Grec decoration but with a layout characterized by its extreme simplicity. About 1790 he executed a series of drawings entitled ...

(b Stockholm, May 5, 1745; d Örebrö, May 21, 1800).

Swedish naval officer, draughtsman and writer. His father was founder and commanding officer of the Sveaborg Fort in Finland, which belonged at that time to Sweden. There Ehrensvärd grew up and as part of his education was instructed by the most eminent Swedish watercolour painter, Elias Martin (ii). His naval career was broken off by a trip of decisive importance to Italy (1780–82), which resulted in his producing a series of watercolours and writing Resa til Italien, 1780, 1781, 1782 (‘Journey to Italy, 1780, 1781, 1782’) and De fria konsters philosophi (‘Philosophy of the liberal arts’). These were both published in 1786 and are among 18th-century Sweden’s most remarkable books on art. They reflected the author’s contacts with Neo-classicism throughout Europe, contemporary theories on climate and physiognomy and, not least, ideas that constitute an early manifestation of Functionalism.

Under the influence of a visit to Paestum, Ehrensvärd executed studies of Classical buildings in a Nordic landscape and designs for dockyard buildings at Karlskrona that employ a Greek Doric order of extraordinarily squat proportions. Other works included a series of drawings influenced by English caricature art, parodying the political and moral atrocities of his time, and he frequently collaborated with the draughtsman and sculptor ...

(von)

(b Dresden, May 18, 1736; d Dessau, March 9, 1800).

German architect, designer and writer. He studied ancient and modern languages at Dresden and Leipzig and, from 1754 to 1757, mathematics, physics, chemistry, history and philology at Wittenberg. In 1757 he met the young Prince Francis of Anhalt-Dessau and, after journeys on his own to Italy, he travelled with the Prince to England and Scotland (1763) and to Italy and France (1765–6). In Rome he explored the ancient buildings, made contact with Johann Joachim Winckelmann and studied the fundamentals of architecture with Charles-Louis Clérisseau. After returning via Antibes, Paris, London and Edinburgh, the Prince decided to have a palace and garden built at Wörlitz in the style of an English Palladian mansion. Schloss Wörlitz (1769–73) was Erdmannsdorff’s first important work and probably his masterpiece. His models were Duddingston House (1763–8), Edinburgh, by William Chambers, and Lancelot (‘Capability’) Brown’s preliminary studies for Claremont House (...

(b Pontoise, Sept 20, 1762; d Paris, Oct 10, 1853).

French architect and writer. With his friend and collaborator, Charles Percier(-Bassant), he was one of the principal French architects of the 19th century and the best exponent of late Neo-classicism, or the Empire style. Born during the reign of Louis XVI, he died when Napoleon III was on the throne. Continuously, from 1800 to 1851, he held positions of the highest responsibility, supervising the construction of public buildings. As the architect to the government, he worked for Napoleon (see Bonaparte family §(1)), in Paris and at the châteaux of Saint-Cloud, Fontainebleau and Compiègne; he built the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel (Louvre) and started the construction of the arcades in Rue de Rivoli. During the reigns of Louis XVIII and Charles X, he built the Chapelle Expiatoire, Rue d’Anjou, Paris, and supervised for a number of years the site of the Arc de Triomphe at the Etoile. For ...

[Jakob-Ignaz]

(b Cologne, Aug 20, 1792; d Paris, March 25, 1867).

French architect, architectural historian, urban planner and writer. He was the only son of a family of prosperous craftsmen from the Rhineland who acquired French nationality after Cologne was annexed by France in 1794. Hittorff was apprenticed as a mason and studied mathematics and drawing with an architectural career in prospect. As a French citizen he was then able to study in Paris, where he moved in 1810; he entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1811 and joined the atelier of Charles Percier. In the same year he assisted on the first important metal structure erected in France, the iron dome of the Halle au Blé (1808–13), under the direction of François-Joseph Bélanger. Following the return of the Rhineland provinces to Prussia in 1814, Hittorff was unable to continue with his French education and could not enter for the Prix de Rome. However, he and another young architect, ...

(b Belgern, nr Leipzig, 1741; d c. 1806).

German cabinetmaker. By 1770 he was established as a master cabinetmaker in Leipzig. An important early patron was the art dealer Karl Christian Heinrich Rost (1742–98), who commissioned furniture closely based on French and English models. In 1788 Hoffman obtained a loan to extend his business in Leipzig and a subsidiary workshop at Eilenburg; his total workforce was 16 tradesmen. In 1789, after a dispute with the local guild of cabinetmakers, he published his first pattern book, Abbildungen der vornehmsten Tischlerarbeiten, welche verfertiget und zu haben sind bey Friedrich Gottlob Hoffmann, wohnhaft auf dem alten Neumarkt in Leipzig, an anthology of designs for household furniture, mostly inspired by the Louis XVI Neo-classical style. In 1795 he produced a second catalogue, Neues Verzeichnis und Muster-Charte des Meubles-Magazin, in which English design types are dominant. A number of pieces corresponding to plates in these two pattern books have been identified (e.g. sofa, ...

[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...

(Aleksandrovich)

(b Nikol’skoye-Cherenchitsy estate, nr Torzhok, 1751; d Moscow, 2/Jan 3, 1804).

Russian architect, theorist, illustrator, poet, Musician and inventor. An enlightened dilettante and encyclopedist from a princely family, he studied architecture on his own and travelled in western Europe (1775, 1776–7), above all in France and Italy. On his return to Russia L’vov worked at the Foreign Ministry and acquired a reputation as an architect from the early 1780s. His earliest works—the Neva Gate (1780–87) of the Peter and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg, the single-domed cathedral of St Joseph (1780–98) in Mogilyov and the similar five-domed church (1785–96) at the monastery of SS Boris and Gleb in Torzhok—are characterized by their austere simplicity, spareness of form and pronounced monumentality. They became the model for many Russian Neo-classical churches of the late 18th century and the early 19th. L’vov’s works for St Petersburg include the Post Office (1782–9), unexecuted designs for the Cabinet on the Nevsky Prospect (...

(b Dormans, Champagne, March 21, 1736; d Paris, Nov 19, 1806).

French architect and writer. He was one of the most successful and celebrated architects working in Paris at the end of the ancien régime. Grounded in the classical tradition, he gradually developed a highly imaginative architecture of simplified geometric forms and bold detailing, at the same time producing a large number of powerful visionary projects, for which he is perhaps best known.

Ledoux studied first at the Collège de Dormans-Beauvais in Paris (1749–53) and then at the newly established Ecole des Arts of Jacques-François Blondel. From his classes in rhetoric he gained a lifelong love of the classics and a periphrastic literary style that pervaded his writings; from Blondel he derived his sense of the high professional role of the architect, his rudimentary understanding of architectural history, his taste for 17th-century classicism, his concepts of planning and aesthetic expression, and his vision of himself as an architecte–philosophe, heir to the reforming idealism of the mid-century. A contemporary friend and biographer, the architect Jacques Cellérier, noted that Ledoux worked as an engraver in order to pay his expenses. An echo of this early training is found in Ledoux’s self-conscious emulation of the layout of the plates of the ...