Enfilade

From Wordwell Books:

Lynda Mulvin, ed., The Fusion of Neo-Classical Principles (Dublin: Wordwell, 2012), 200 pages,  ISBN: 978-1905569557, €35.

Our understanding of Neo-Classicism is currently in an interesting phase of development, a progression to which this volume will make a significant contribution. As Kathleen James-Chakraborty’s keynote paper argues, scholarly attention is shifting from a focus on the production of works of art and buildings to a focus on consumption. The only chapter in the book that deals with painting, Brendan Cassidy’s on the reputation of Gavin Hamilton, neatly exemplifies the polarities of production and consumption. Hamilton painted his pictures in Rome where they were admired by travelling British patrons but, upon their arrival in England, they were consumed by the public with far less enthusiasm. Cassidy advances a very particular reason for this: that Grand Tourists tended to be very young men who took pleasure in identifying Hamilton’s historical subjects whilst on the sacred territory of Rome by reference to their schoolboy steeping in classical texts but, on their return to more distant northern Europe, were happy to conform with the predominant taste for landscape painting and portraiture.

Conor Lucey’s chapter, on the architectural pattern books that can be identified as having been in the hands of Dublin artisans, is a good contribution to the theme of diffusion of design ideas from one place to another, as is John Wilton-Ely’s on the design revolution of Robert Adam. As Wilton-Ely argues, the targeting and marketing of a ‘style’ is a sign of economic modernity. Another aspect of economic modernity in the eighteenth century is the quasi-professional organisation of the means of production, and Barbara Arciswewska’s essay on the reform of the English Office of Works instigated by the new Hanoverian dynasty is a very important contribution to scholarship in this respect.

In this volume the chapters of Michael McCarthy and Toby Barnard deal explicitly with the problem of when Neo-Classicism begins and ends. McCarthy argues that the fierceness of the nineteenth-century ‘battle of the styles’ has caused us to lose sight of the more gentlemanly basis on which the debate took place in the eighteenth century, but Barnard explores the religious disputes in Ireland that saw the Gothic commandeered by the Protestant community and the Catholics turning to classicism – and perhaps not unwillingly, given that their sense of civic duty was modelled on their classical educations like the young English aristocrats who, as we have seen, form the basis of Cassidy’s chapter.

The issue of the thoroughgoing Greek Revival, which would have hardly any place if this volume were circumscribed in chronological terms by the dates 1750-1800, is vigorously dealt with in this volume by three essays. Susan Pearce looks back to that first truly great phase of archaeological discovery in Greece that followed the Napoleonic Wars and in particular at the extraordinary understandings of Greek architecture and architectural sculpture of C.R. Cockerell.  Lynda Mulvin’s own chapter on Cockerell’s work in Ireland pursues these ideas into built form are, while Patricia McCarthy deals with the much more extensive Irish projects of Richard and William Morrison. Also in this connection, Joe McDonnell through the works of the Irish sculptor Christopher Hewetson and Paul Caffrey with a collection of miniatures examine the emergence of Neo-Classicism in other media in Ireland.

A final strand to this rich volume can be found in the transference of design ideas between different artistic media. This is explored in the essays of Tracy Watts and Eddie McParland.

These essays will make a wide-ranging and stimulating contribution to current scholarly debates about the nature of Neo-Classicism, that critical cultural development that signals the arrival both of recognisable modernity and of internationalism in the western tradition. Moreover the essays have been written by some of the leading experts on the subject.

An invitation from Dave Mazella of The Long Eighteenth:

Simon Gikandi’s book Slavery and the Culture of Taste has just received a James Russell Lowell prize at MLA, and I thought that C18L, Long 18th, and other 18th-century scholars/readers might be interested in doing a collaborative reading of this book in the spring. Right now I’m trying to gauge the level of interest in the book, and seeing when might be a good time to do it.

We would probably do it over about a week or so, with one respondent per chapter posting a 500-800 word response every day or so, depending on the level of traffic. Then hopefully we can get Gikandi to respond to our posters at the end. For those interested in the process, we’ve done this with books by Joe Roach, Michael McKeon and Richard Sher in the past. Here’s the link to our announcement. If you’d like to participate, or better yet, help organize, please contact me at dmazella@uh.edu. It would also be helpful if you could give me an idea of the best week or weeks this spring for me to schedule.

Thanks,

Dave Mazella
The Long Eighteenth

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Recent postings at The Long Eighteenth offer numerous items of potential interest Enfilade readers including: 1) Soren Hammerschmidt‘s new course blog, Eighteenth-Century Media; 2) ‘Jeffersongate’ and the controversy surrounding Henry Wiencek’s treatment of Thomas Jefferson in Master of the Mountain; and 3) thoughts on synthesis. -CH

From Oxford University Press:

Richard Hingley, Hadrian’s Wall: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 416 pages, ISBN: 978-0199641413, $150.

In Hadrian’s Wall: A Life, Richard Hingley addresses the post-Roman history of this world-famous ancient monument. Constructed on the orders of the emperor Hadrian during the 120s AD, the Wall was maintained for almost three centuries before ceasing to operate as a Roman frontier during the fifth century. The scale and complexity of Hadrian’s Wall makes it one of the most important ancient monuments in the British Isles. It is the most well-preserved of the frontier works that once defined the Roman Empire.

While the Wall is famous as a Roman construct, its monumental physical structure did not suddenly cease to exist in the fifth century. This volume explores the after-life of Hadrian’s Wall and considers the ways it has been imagined, represented, and researched from the sixth century to the internet. The sixteen chapters, illustrated with over 100 images, show the changing manner in which the Wall has been conceived and the significant role it has played in imagining the identity of the English, including its appropriation as symbolic boundary between England and
Scotland. Hingley discusses the transforming political, cultural, and religious significance of the Wall during this entire period and addresses the ways in which scholars and artists have been inspired by the monument over the years.

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From Christopher Catling’s review, “Vandals and Hanoverians,” for TLS (14 December 2012): 27.

. . . in Gildas [writing around 540], the Wall is explicitly about “them and us” – civilization versus beastly paganism. The Wall is a genetic and cultural boundary, an idea that Hingley shows to be surprisingly long-lived: it recurs in nineteenth-century historical paintings of the Wall’s construction destined for the walls of the Houses of Parliament, in the illustrations to Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906), and even in a cartoon published in The Times in 1997 referring to the devolution debate. Civilization versus beastly paganism The idea that there is something different (for which read hostile and culturally inferior) about the people who live north of Hadrian’s Wall recurs every time political relations between the English and the Scottish come to the fore. . . .

Scotland really did turn hostile with the Jacobite uprisings of 1715. There was much talk about building a new Hadrian’s Wall, as roads, bridges and garrisons were constructed between 1725 and 1737 to militarize the Borders and the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. One result was the first accurate mapping of the Wall and its associated landscapes, undertaken by military surveyors; another was the use of the Wall as a quarry for road stone and the construction of a military road right on top of the eastern section of the Wall, from Newcastle to Sewingshields.

The antiquary William Stukeley was horrified by this act of desecration. Lobbying the Princess of Wales, he asked her to be his patron and champion in the work of protecting “this most noble, most magnificent work from further ruin, not from enemies, but from more than Gothic workmen, quite thoughtless and regardless of this greatest wonder, not of Brittain only, but of Europe.” Now, for the first time in the history of the Wall, it was the English who were cast in the role of the barbarians; Hanoverian military engineers were no better than the Goths and Vandals who had sacked Rome. . .

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For the Wall’s ongoing influence, we can also add The Game of Thrones, as George R. R. Martin acknowledged in 2000 (as quoted in The Guardian). Hadrian’s Wall as civilization’s boundary will presumably be with us for a long time.