Some sixty years later, just a few miles to the south, the members of London’s Athenaeum Club, an institution catering (as its rulebook stated) to ‘persons of distinguished eminence in science, literature, the arts or public life’, commissioned a new building for themselves on Pall Mall. Classical figures, modelled after those in the Elgin Marbles and executed by the sculptor John Henning, were arranged on an extended frieze some 260 feet long, which wrapped around three exterior sides of the clubhouse. The figures were engaged in the Athenian equivalents of the activities which interested the English gentlemen inside: singing, reading, writing and orating. Above the front door stood a towering gilded statue of Athena. The goddess of craft and wisdom looked defiantly down Pall Mall, intent on offering all who passed a foretaste of the personalities and interests of the membership within. By all appearances, only a few metres removed from the shallow commercialism of Piccadilly, an institution had been founded which harboured within its walls a group of men fully the equals of those who had lent glory to Athens in her golden age.
Robert Adam, library, Kenwood House, 1769
Decimus Burton, Athenaeum Club, 1824; E. H. Bailey, Athena, 1829
2.
Faced with painted ceilings and statues, in front of allegories of nymphs and gods, our eyes are liable to glaze over and drift away. The idealising style that in many countries dominated architecture between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries has a habit of striking us as both tedious and hypocritical.
We find it hard to overlook, let alone forgive, the frequent discrepancies between idealised architecture and the reality of those who commissioned and lived with it. We know that Venice, whatever Veronese implied, repeatedly absconded from the virtues trumpeted by the maidens on the Sala del Collegio’s ceiling. We know that she trafficked in slaves, ignored her poor, dissipated her resources and exacted immoderate revenge on her enemies. We know that La Serenissima painted one thing, and did another. We know, too, that the Almerico family fell into disgrace before Palladio’s villa had even been completed and that their successors, the Capras, enjoyed no greater favour from the gods of commerce and wisdom, who seemed to mock the family’s aspirations from the villa’s rooftops. For his part, Lord Mansfield, far from uniting the talents of Cicero, Homer and Solomon, was an archetypal mid-eighteenth-century lawyer, ruthless, frugal with his humanity and adept at hiding his baser instincts behind Classical quotations. As for the Athenaeum, the majority of its members had joined the club for social advancement and wasted their days slumped in leather armchairs, watching the rain fall, slurping nursery food and neglecting their families, bearing as much resemblance to the contemporaries of Pericles as Piccadilly Circus did to the Acropolis.
By contrast with our idealising predecessors, we tend to pride ourselves on our interest in reality. We reward works of art precisely insofar as they leave roseate ideals behind and faithfully attune themselves to the facts of our condition. We honour these works for revealing to us who we are, rather than who we would like to be.
Nevertheless, the sheer eccentricity and remoteness of the concept of artistic idealisation invites closer examination. We might ask why, for some three centuries in the early-modern period, artists were applauded chiefly insofar as they could produce landscapes, people and buildings that were free of ordinary blemishes. We might wonder why artists competed among themselves to paint gardens and glades that would be more bucolic than any actual park, why they sculpted marble lips and ankles more seductive than those through which real blood might flow, and made portraits of aristocrats and royalty which showed them to be wiser and more magnanimous than they ever were.
It was rarely naivety that lay behind these efforts, or indeed the desire to deceive. The creators of idealised works were worldly creatures and credited their audiences with being so too. It was clear that the councillors gathering under Veronese’s ceiling would frequently have been swayed by impulses darker than those depicted above them. Likewise, it was known that Mansfield’s inclination to do honour to his office had to compete with the siren calls of wealth and fame, and that the hope of achieving something worthwhile over the course of an afternoon at the Athenaeum Club would seldom have withstood the lure of gossip and ginger biscuits in the tea room.
To proponents of the idealising tradition, the notion that artists were being naive in suggesting anything other than this would itself have appeared naive. The purpose of their art and their buildings was not to remind us of what life was typically like, but rather to keep before our eyes how it might optimally be, so as to move us fractionally closer to fulfilment and virtue. Sculptures and buildings were to assist us in bringing the best of ourselves to the fore. They were to embalm our highest aspirations.
3.
It is in German philosophy of the late eighteenth century that we find the most lucid articulations of the theory of artistic idealisation. In his On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794), Friedrich Schiller proposed that the perfections presented in idealised art could be sources of inspiration, to which we would be able to turn when we had lost confidence in ourselves and were in contact only with our flaws, a melancholic and self-destructive stance to which he felt his own age especially prone. ‘Humanity has lost its dignity,’ he observed, ‘but Art has rescued it and preserved it in significant stone. Truth lives on in the illusion of Art, and it is from this copy, or after-image, that the original image will once again be restored.’
Rather than confronting us with evocations of our darkest moments, works of art were to stand, in Schiller’s words, as an ‘absolute manifestation of potential’; they were to function like ‘an escort descended from the world of the ideal’.
If buildings can act as a repository of our ideals, it is because they can be purged of all the infelicities that corrode ordinary lives. A great work of architecture will speak to us of a degree of serenity, strength, poise and grace to which we, both as creators and audiences, typically cannot do justice – and it will for this very reason beguile and move us. Architecture excites our respect to the extent that it surpasses us.
The potential inscribed in an idealised building need never fully be realised to justify its worth. In the eyes of Schiller’s contemporary Wilhelm von Humboldt, it was the idealised buildings of the Ancient Greeks that presented modern Westerners with the most nourishing sources of inspiration, though he added in his essay ‘Concerning the Study of Antiquity’ (1793) that Greek architecture deserved our interest even if only a semblance of the perfections it alluded to could ever be re-created in the practically minded, bourgeois world: ‘We imitate the models of the Greeks in full consciousness that they are unattainable; we fill our imagination with the images of their free, richly gained life, knowing that such life is denied us.’
An invitation to a Classical ideaclass="underline"
Above: Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Schlossbrücke, Berlin, 1824; statue by Albert Wolff, 1853
Below: Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Altes Museum, Berlin, 1830
When von Humboldt’s friend, the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, began to endow Berlin with Classical bridges, museums and palaces, he knew that Berliners would only ever be able to admire from a distance, rather than rekindle, the antiquity he revered, but he trusted that something of the period’s integrity and grandeur could through architecture still come to permeate the Prussian capital. As residents crossed the Schlossbrücke to attend a meeting or passed the New Pavilion at the Charlottenhof Palace on a Sunday walk, Schinkel’s architecture – his statue-laden bridges, his sober columns, his delicate frescos – could play a small but pivotal role in ushering in a renaissance of the spirit.