OCTOBER 2008 » book review

Stuart the Athenian

The Antiquities of Athens
by James Stuart and Nicholas Revett
Princeton Architectural Press, New York; 2008
496 pp; hardcover; many b&w; illus. & drawings; $125
ISBN 13: 978-1-56898-723-1

Reviewed by Thomas Gordon Smith, AIA

Stuart and Revett's The Antiquities of Athens is available again, thanks to the Institute of Classical Architecture and Classical America publication program. The original eighteenth century volumes I, II, and III of 1762, 1787 and 1794 have been reproduced in a smaller format and bound together by Princeton Architectural Press. The titles were repeatedly reissued throughout the nineteenth century in pocketbook student editions and folios for connoisseurs and architects. Specific plates also became standard reproductions in builders' pattern books and encyclopedias for the general public. A project to document Greek architecture, conceived by two English painters in Rome in 1748, became a major factor in broadening the Renaissance canon for architects and opening Hellenic culture to deeper scholarship. Although Stuart and Revett's work is generally known, and by now, one of hundreds of books on the subject, I hope that easy access to the crystal-clear plates of The Antiquities will again spur the current reanimation of classical architecture.

The Antiquities of Athens was the lodestar for the Anglophone and Germanic Grecian architecture dominant in the decades around 1820. I will return to this latter-day effect, but will first attempt to understand Stuart and Revett's context and their motivations. The book was conceived, and the first volume published, between 1748 and 1762. British Palladian architecture and interior decoration was entering old age by this period. I believe this symbiotic movement of modern archaeology, architecture and publication underpinned Stuart and Revett's diligent and dangerous exploration. It also provided models for presenting new aspects of classicism to Europe. Was their intention for the "Roman School of Architecture" to be "entirely changed for the Grecian" as Asher Benjamin would write in 1833? Probably not, but for several decades after 1815, Grecian models from Stuart's Antiquities prevailed.

Andrea Palladio referred to Greek places in the Quattro Libri, but Greek buildings in Ottoman-controlled Athens and along the coast of Ionia were barely known, even to intrepid Venetians. Perhaps more thoroughly than he realized, Palladio practiced a form of Hellenistic architecture by imitating the antiqui, through their proponent, Vitruvius. Stuart and Revett's older Anglo-Palladian contemporaries even imbibed many Ionian methods by imitating villas and palaces Palladio built around 1550. Buildings like the Villa Pisani at Montagnana and the Palazzo Chiericati in Vicenza incorporate Palladio's accurate comprehension of Vitruvius, gained through his drawings for Daniele Barbaro's 1554 edition of Vitruvius.

However traceable this Greek lineage, English imitators were probably not thinking Greek. When Stuart and Revett went to Athens, the Palladian was a fully integrated style. One direct Palladian influence on Stuart and Revett's publications helped architects to incorporate Athenian models into new buildings. In 1738 Isaac Ware published The Four Books of Palladio's Architecture (Dover Reprint). Ware translated Palladio's text and skillfully transformed Palladio's wood block illustrations into copper engravings. These included isolating column and entablature details in large-scale elevations and reflected plans of corner conditions. Twenty-four years later, Stuart and Revett used Palladio's technique for Athenian examples. For example, they made a drawing that removed a Corinthian capital and portion of its Ionic entablature from the cylindrical Monument of Lysicrates to present it instead as a ninety-degree, cornered object. This allowed people to understand its exquisite detail, and helped architects see its application to a rectangular portico, for example, just as predecessors assimilated Palladio's models.

In 2006-2007 the Bard Graduate Center organized a beautiful and penetrating exhibition, "James 'Athenian' Stuart, 1713-1788," at the Victoria and Albert Museum and at their townhouse in New York. The James Stuart biography in the catalogue portrays a gifted decorative painter who forsook family obligations to work for years in Rome. Over time, he made contacts with British grand tourists there and fellow-painter, Nicholas Revett. Between 1848 and 49, they developed the plan and got funding for travel to Greece.

During their two and a half year residence in Athens, according to the account in "James 'Athenian' Stuart," "Revett survived an attack by pirates, and Stuart an assassination attempt…" to say nothing of Stuart's account in Volume II of having boulders thrown by Ottoman guards during an architectural investigation below the Acropolis. In what must have been long periods of respite, however, Stuart and Revett made meticulous measurements and sketched ruined and half-buried structures throughout the city. In contrast to hostile volleys of rocks from the acropolis cliffs, the safe haven of a make-shift cloister at the Capuchin Hospitum, where the cylinder of the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates was immured, must have been great solace.

The exquisite Lysicrates structure is a monumental marble trophy stand for a bronze tripod won as the Grammy for a choral competition in 334 BC. Despite its uniqueness, it is characteristic of the five Athenian buildings Stuart and Revett meticulously illustrated in the first volume of The Antiquities of Athens. The other four are a Doric propylon into the Roman market; a boldly detailed Ionic temple along a stream; a Roman time and temperature research center; and fragments of a monumental Corinthian structure.

Four years ago, none of these buildings got a moment's attention in the sidelong cultural glances the media programmed for the Olympics in Athens. Not even the weather channel focused on the Tower of the Winds. Popular recognition was on the Parthenon, Erechtheum and generally, the Acropolis. These major monuments were not published by Stuart and Revett until the second volume of The Antiquities of Athens came out 25 years after Volume I. Their seminal exposé in 1762 of authentically Greek architecture, then, was a group of small and idiosyncratic structures of Hellenistic and Roman date. Some critics complained that the fabled acropolis monuments of about 430 B.C. were not published earlier, but these intricate structures were both more accessible and probably more attractive to Stuart's eighteenth century taste.

Although Stuart praised, "my friend Mr. Revett" who "wholly confined his attention…to the architectural prints," they parted company one year before Stuart published Volume II about the Acropolis and its "Buildings erected while the Athenians were a free people." Volume II came out in 1787 one year before Stuart died. Stuart published the now-demolished Choragic Monument of Thryssalus as Chapter IV. An eccentric variation on the Doric architectural type, this delicate structure is the segue from Volume I. Otherwise, Volume II presents the great monuments of the Acropolis: the Propylaea, the Parthenon and the Erechtheum. The most well-preserved classical Doric structure, then and now in Athens, the Temple of Hephaestus, was titled the Temple of Theseus in the 1794 Volume III.

Given that the Acropolis remained an Ottoman garrison, accretions of walled houses surrounded the Parthenon's peripteros and a mosque occupied its cella. It is amazing that Stuart and Revett ferreted out its plan, principle elevation, sections of its pronaos and elements of architectural detail. These include two corner details of columns and entablatures, again in Palladio's format. Each displays metope and frieze reliefs. Stuart presented 21 chiaroscuro plates of six additional metopes, a corner of the west pediment, and portions of the continuous Ionic frieze within the peristylos. Plate XXX was inserted after publication as a context key for individual frieze details. Fifteen years after Volume II was published, Lord Elgin removed much of the Parthenon statuary to London.

Although Stuart shows two "ornaments painted in the soffit" of the Temple of Hephaestus in Volume III, Stuart and Revett were not interested in polychromy. The fascination with polychromy was a product of the Romantic Movement in the 1830s, during which Stuart and Revett's discoveries were absorbed into the international Grecian movement. All in all, Stuart and Revett sustained an Enlightenment view of Greek architecture, with gleaming white marble as a sign of architectural purity.

Despite finding parts of the Erechtheum "encumbered with large blocks of marble and variety of rubbish" and the prostylos Ionic portico "walled up, and being a magazine of military stores…" in Volume II, Stuart and Revett produced a remarkably clear plan, beautifully engraved elevations, and meticulous details of the capitals and caryatids.

Stuart and Revett fled Athens for Thessalonica in 1753 due to violent disturbances extending from larger Ottoman turmoil. In 1755, they returned to London to begin the publication effort. James Stuart never returned to Greece. He and his successors engraved plates for the publications from massive quantities of sketches and notes. While in Athens, they had not been able to document the Propylaea. In 1764, Revett kindly returned to Athens from an expedition to the Ionian Coast. He measured the Propylaea, the entrance to the Acropolis. Despite finding the colonnade defensively walled-up, its entablature and its humped-back pediments missing, and having the adjacent Pinakotheke, or Picture-Gallery, obscured by medieval towers, Stuart, relying on his former partner's generous assistance, published elevations and sections in Volume II. These candidly show the asymmetrical site and plan configurations. Again, in imitating Palladio's format for detail, Stuart's shaded and line engravings present column, pier and entablature conditions.

It is difficult to determine whether Stuart and Revett intended to present archaeological information only, or to influence the course of modern architecture. In an age of paradigmatic thinking, of course, it is natural to look at acutely engraved plates and apply elements or complete structures to solve new problems. Once back in England, James Stuart built numerous exotic teahouses in picturesque English gardens as slight variations on the Tower of the Winds and the Lysicrates Monument. He went so far as to transform the later into the pulpit in the Greenwich Royal Hospital Chapel. He also built a Palladian townhouse on St. James Square with Greek details.

On the other hand, did he intend to unleash a wholesale reanimation of Grecian architecture? Robert Adam and Sir William Chambers certainly feared that this might happen and made both supercilious and vicious comments as preemptory strikes. I believe that Stuart and Revett's decision to present the column and entablature of the cylindrical Lysicrates Monument, for example, in Palladio's format of an isolated corner condition, took the artifact out of an archaeological context and allowed architects to use it as an independent Corinthian type. But was this their intention? There is no question, however, that in the 1830s in the United States as an outgrowth of an international Grecian movement, Lysicrates became the standard Corinthian expression.

The Getty Research Institute recently published a translation by David Britt of Julien-David Le Roy's Ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grece with a 200-page introduction by Robin Middleton. This is a valuable document to contrast with The Antiquities of Athens. Le Roy's first edition of 1758 preceded Stuart's Volume I by four years and was based upon relatively brief observations of Athenian monuments. A cursory glance at Stuart and Revett's text reveals how Stuart must have bristled at the man's name. In the Preface to Volume I: "If nevertheless anyone should doubt of the accuracy of the Measures, because they differ so greatly from those which Mons. Le Roy has given, I can only assure him…I have always found reason to praise his exactness." More obliquely, he probably refers to Le Roy in asserting that, "we determined to avoid Haste and System, those most dangerous enemies to accuracy and fidelity."

By contrasting Stuart and Revett's reconstruction of the asymmetrical west elevation of the Propylaea with the Louis XIV-grandeur of Le Roy's perspective, we see two entirely different intentions, realism and pragmatism versus idealistic "improvements." I believe that Palladian pragmatism was the foundation for Stuart and Revett's practical archaeology and behind their eventual gift to nineteenth-century architecture. Stuart was no more an architect by manual training than Le Roy, yet he accepted the grittiness of archaeology and sought to convey his perception of artifacts as finite objects. While it is good to have both Stuart and Revett's The Antiquities of Athens and Le Roy's book easily available, in my opinion, the tangible work of Stuart and Revett will help usher a new Grecian architecture. TB

Thomas Gordon Smith, AIA, is a professor of architecture at the University of Notre Dame and a practicing architect. Recent projects include the chapel for Our Lady of Guadalupe Seminary in Denton, Nebraska; the Student Recreation Complex at California State University, Stanislaus; and the Cottage at Cedar Grove Cemetery. Smith has also published a number of books including Classical Architecture: Rule & Invention (1988) and Vitruvius on Architecture, (2003) and he is Architectural Fellow to the General Services Administration. Richard John's Thomas Gordon Smith and the Rebirth of Classicism was published by Andreas Papadakis, London, 2001.

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