Published in European Romantic Review, 26 (November 2015). Illustrations omitted here for
copyright reasons.
The Anti-Historicist Historicism of German Romantic Architecture
Nicholas Halmi*
University of Oxford
*nicholas.halmi@ell.ox.ac.uk
Abstract: Nineteenth-century German architecture was characterized by a conflict between
the availability of multiple historically derivative styles and the demand for the establishment
of a culturally appropriate normative one. This conflict resulted from an aesthetic historicism
that posited the cultural specificity of architectural styles while simultaneously abstracting
them from their original contexts. Because the same aesthetic, ideological, and functionalist
claims could be and were advanced on behalf of different styles, the prolonged debate among
German architectural writers and practitioners about which one should be favored proved
irresolvable so long as it was assumed that a style must be historically referential.
Keywords: German architecture; French architecture; nineteenth-century architecture;
architectural style; architectural theory; Gothic architecture; Greek architecture; historicism;
Heinrich Hübsch; Leo von Klenze; Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach: Jean-Nicolas-Louis
Durand; Karl Friedrich Schinkel; Johann Wolfgang Goethe; Ludwig I, king of Bavaria.
In nineteenth-century German architecture, the persistence of a plurality of historically
derivative styles of exterior design was matched only by the persistence of the desire for a
newly normative style. In 1828 the Hessian architect Heinrich Hübsch, an associate of the
Nazarene group of artists, published a treatise whose very title posed the question that
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preoccupied architects for much of the century: In welchem Style sollen wir bauen? In what
style should we build? His own answer was the Rundbogenstil: rounded-arch or Romanesque
style. Sixteen years later the Saxon architect Carl Albert Rosenthal directed the same
question to members of the Association of German Architects, noting that what was at stake
was the architectural expression of national character (23). Unlike Hübsch, Rosenthal favored
the Spitzbogenstil: pointed-arch or Gothic style. In 1850, no consensus about a national style
having emerged in the meantime, the Bavarian king Maximilian II ordered the Academy of
Fine Arts in Munich to hold a competition for “a new national form of architecture” in which
“the character of the age [Charakter der Zeit] would unmistakably find its clear
expression”—yet the terms of the competition encouraged the entrants to mix existing styles
while not neglecting the “old German, so-called Gothic architecture” (qtd. in Hahn 102–3).1
Unsurprisingly, all seventeen submissions were eclectic, a result that, according to the
surviving reports, satisfied neither the judges nor the king (Hahn 114–16; Klenze,
Memorabilien fol. 44r).2 Evidently the question of stylistic choice could not be answered on
its own terms. But was the difficulty, as a contemporary editorial in the Deutsches Kunstblatt
maintained, that “architectural styles are not created, but develop [entstehen]” (“Neuer” 145;
qtd. by Herrmann, “Introduction” 9)?
Recent scholarship has been concerned largely with elaborating the ideological programs
underlying the preferences for particular styles, whether explicit, as in the Rhenish politician
August Reichensperger’s relentless promotion of the Gothic as a distinctively christlich–
germanische architecture (Lewis 75–85), or implicit, as in Hübsch’s dissociation of the
Rundbogenstil from classical style in order to promote Christian universalism by association
with the basilican architecture of the early, which is to say undivided, Church (Bergdoll,
“Archaeology”). In a book on the relationship between Romantic historicism and Prussian
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cultural politics in the early nineteenth century, the historian John Toews has interpreted the
architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s shift in his professed allegiance from Gothic to Greek
style after 1815 as the result of a transformation in his conception of an ethical national
community: whereas the Gothic, articulated in Schinkel’s unrealized design for the
Befreiungsdom (1814), a cathedral commemorating the German people’s liberation from
Napoleon, symbolized a community of autonomous individuals identifying subjectively with
an historically informed idea of the nation, the Greek, expressed in his more modest but
executed design for a museum of antiquities (Altes Museum, 1823–30), symbolized “the
ethical power of aesthetic experience” to integrate isolated individuals into a community
defined by a shared past and common will (120–37, 141–52). Analyzing the publications of
Bavaria’s leading architect, Jörg Traeger (67–73) and Dirk Klose (126–27) have argued that
Leo von Klenze sought to legitimize his own preference for Greek style by appeal to the
contemporary racial theory of the common origin of the German and Greek peoples in the
Caucasus. In his survey of nineteenth-century German architectural theory, Mitchell
Schwarzer has identified in justifications of different historical styles the promise to the
anxious modern subject of affiliation with “ideas of social cohesion located alternatively in
classical antiquity, feudal Christianity, court culture, and mercantile humanism” (37).
Persuasive as such interpretations are in themselves, they are generally limited by
their focus on individual styles and their reliance on the architects’ own writings. In the
absence of an agreed style, practitioners felt compelled to justify discursively, if primarily to
themselves and their professional colleagues, their choices among the available stylistic
registers. But in practice the selection of a style was rarely left to the architect alone. A
particularly instructive example is Bavaria, whose king Ludwig I, upon ascending the throne
in 1825, undertook an ambitious, expensive building program that transformed the
appearance of Munich. However firmly convinced Klenze may have been that ancient Greek
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architecture provided “a firm principle for all times” (Versuch 7), he proved perfectly capable
of designing buildings in other styles. As his biographer observes, “Klenze—following royal
wishes—himself contributed to the development of that historicizing stylistic pluralism and
eclecticism which he sought lifelong to combat” (Buttlar 10). Indeed, each of his three
additions to the royal Residenz complex in the center of Munich is in a different historically
derivative style: the Florentine Renaissance Königsbau (1826–35), whose windows recall the
Palazzo Pitti and pilasters the Palazzo Rucellai; the Allerheiligen-Hofkirche or Court Church
of All Saints (1826–37), which combines a Romanesque exterior and a neo-Byzantine
interior decorated at Ludwig’s insistence with extravagant gold mosaics after the model of
the Norman Cappella Palatina in Palermo; and the classical Festsaalbau (1832–42), whose
façade was inspired by Palladio’s Basilica in Vicenza. Similarly, Klenze’s rival Friedrich von
Gärtner was commissioned to design for a single street, named after Ludwig himself, a
monumental state library (1832–43) in an Italianate Rundbogenstil reminiscent of the Palazzo
Pitti, a three-arched loggia (Feldherrnhalle, 1841–44) copied from Florence’s fourteenthcentury Loggia dei Lanzi (illustration 1), and a triumphal arch (Siegestor, 1843–52) modeled
on Rome’s fourth-century Arch of Constantine.
[INSERT ILLUSTRATION 1]
1. Friedrich von Gärtner. Feldherrnhalle, Munich (1841–44). Photograph: Helga SchmidtGlassner. Bildarchiv Foto Marburg.
That an artistically cultivated ruler, intent on turning his capital city into a major
intellectual center, would not only countenance but demand this stylistic diversity suggests
the absence of established, particular ideological associations with the styles themselves.
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Thus the formation of such associations was factitious. Even the identification of the Gothic
with Germanness, which would have appalled most eighteenth-century German architectural
theorists (Frankl 418–22), was largely a creation of Romantic writers like Ludwig Tieck,
Friedrich Schlegel, and Joseph Görres, provoked by the French domination of German lands
during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars (Beutler 75–76; Germann 89; Lewis 30–31).
The fusion of the aesthetics of the sublime with artistic nationalism in the celebration of
Gothic cathedrals made those buildings powerful symbols of the Germans’ aspiration to
emancipate themselves from the French and to constitute themselves as a single linguistically
and culturally defined nation. Schinkel’s devotion to the Gothic in the early 1810s, when he
supported himself by painting nationalistic scenes—such as the Medieval City by a River
(1815; illustration 2), in which a rainbow arches over a castle, a vast cathedral, and a city,
implying the unity of society under the authority of the king who appears in the foreground,
returning victoriously from battle (an obvious allusion to the Prussian-led campaign against
Napoleon in 1814)—was the architectural counterpart to the interest of his friends Clemens
Brentano and Achim and Bettina von Arnim in German folk songs (Bergdoll, Schinkel 31–
33).
[INSERT ILLUSTRATION 2 HERE]
2. Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781–1841). Mittelalterliche Stadt an einem Fluss (1815). Oil on
canvas, 95 x 140.6 cm. Berlin, Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Photograph:
Jörg P. Anders. Copyright BPK/Nationalgalerie, SMB/Jörg P. Anders.
Considerations of the Gothic in contemporary studies concerned specifically with
architecture, however, tended to be historicizing (Frankl 466–67; Germann 93; Kruft 290–92,
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296–97), and the style did not in fact become dominant, let alone normative, when building
projects could again be undertaken after 1815. By far the most significant German Gothic
structure built during the century was the portion of Cologne Cathedral that had remained
unbuilt since the fifteenth century.3 That the cathedral, whose “ruinous incompletion” Görres
had interpreted as a symbol of the unrealized unitary German state (2), was completed in
1823–80 was overdetermined by the conflicting ideological interests of Rhenish Catholics
like Reichensperger, who wanted to preserve a sense of cultural distinctness in the face of the
post-1815 Prussian annexation of the Rhineland, and of the Protestant Prussian crown, which
wanted to secure the loyalty of its new subjects (Lewis 11, 34–42).
If there had been any overwhelmingly compelling reason, whether structural,
aesthetic, or ideological, for preferring one style to another, architects need not have resorted
to submitting variously styled versions of preliminary designs for projects, thus conceding to
their patrons the final decision on the style to be realized. When, for example, the young
Klenze, at Ludwig’s urging, decided to participate in the competition for a sculpture gallery
(Glyptothek, 1816–30), he submitted not one but three schemes—Greek, Roman, and
Renaissance—of which the Greek was built after modifications demanded by the crown
prince (Buttlar 113–18). Nowhere, however, is the essential arbitrariness of the choice of
historically referential ornamentation at the time revealed more starkly than in Schinkel’s
submission, to the Prussian crown prince in 1824, of a single sheet containing four alternative
designs, two classical and two Gothic, for the Friedrich Werder Church in Berlin (illustration
3), the double-turreted Gothic alternative finding royal favor (Bergdoll, Schinkel 90–94).
[INSERT ILLUSTRATION 3 HERE]
3. Karl Friedrich Schinkel. Friedrichwerdersche Kirche, Berlin. Four design options in Gothic
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and antique style (early 1824). Pencil on paper, 41.2 x 61.1 cm. Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett,
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Photograph: Jörg P. Anders © 2014. Photo Scala,
Florence/BPK Bildagentur für Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte, Berlin.
In these circumstances, identifying the motivations for individual stylistic choices cannot
explain how architectural style became the focus of debate in the first place and why that
debate could not be resolved except, in the Modern Movement of the early twentieth century,
and then only temporarily, by the dismissal of style as irrelevant (see Benevolo 473; Crook
236–71).
For all their differences, nineteenth-century German architects and architectural
theorists shared three basic assumptions: first, that architectural form performed an important
public function, expressing a communal identity or inculcating social values; second, that
stylistic plurality as such was unacceptable and a single, normative style was preferable (if
not for all purposes, then at least for each purpose); and third, that this new norm would be
chosen or assembled from among styles of ancient or medieval origin. Had architects not
been confronted with the simultaneous availability of multiple historical styles, or had they
simply accepted that plurality and not sought to justify the exclusive adoption of one style,
they might have spared themselves a century of inconclusive argument. As a comparison
with the political use of architecture in the so-called Baroque period will clarify, the
predicament of Hübsch’s generation and the next originated—unlike the styles they
favored—in the latter half of the eighteenth century, and must therefore be examined in the
context of contemporary intellectual developments.
Like the princes and popes of Renaissance Italy, the absolutist rulers of the German states
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understood very well how to express their power architecturally. Following the prototype of
Versailles, in which the palace (as expanded by Louis XIV with the king’s bedroom at its
center) formed the focal point of the town’s avenues, the margrave of Baden-Durbach
founded Karlsruhe in 1715 as an ideal city in which no fewer than thirty-two avenues
radiated outwards from the palace. In the Palatinate, the prince–electors depleted the
electorate’s treasury in order to construct in Mannheim (from 1720 to 1760) a palace second
only to Versailles itself in size, extending 450 meters along its front façade and covering
seven hectares in total. For their part the prince–bishops of Würzburg sought to impress other
rulers with the size and theatrically conceived exterior elevations and interior spaces of their
Residenz (built 1720–81), especially the staircase hall with Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s
allegorical ceiling fresco of 600 square meters glorifying Bishop Karl Philipp von
Greiffenklau (see Blanning 74–75). But because an eclectic classicism remained normative
for the duration of the ancien régime, the external decorative idiom as such was politically
insignificant. Princes conveyed their status through the location, size, spatial disposition, and
interior opulence of their palaces.
Like the monads of Leibniz’s cosmology, mirroring the universe individually without
interacting with one another, German Baroque palaces were meant as isolated statements,
expressing at once the importance of the princes who commissioned them and the political
structure of the absolutist state. In the architectural historian Sigfried Giedion’s account of
the transformation of classicism in the eighteenth century, a systematic Baroque radialism in
which each architectural element was defined by its relation to the entire structure succumbed
to a decentered Romantic plasticity in which every room was self-enclosed and equal in
status to every other: “The overriding social ideal is dissolved into equal individuals, all
demanding unconditional recognition” (103, 157, 162). Yet the implication of a connection
between Romantic classicism and an individualism derived from the ideals of the French
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Revolution is misleading. For not only were the buildings that Giedion adduces—notably
those designed by Schinkel in Prussia and Klenze in Bavaria—commissioned and built after
the post-Napoleonic restoration of the German princes (under the terms of a loose
confederation dominated by Prussia, Austria, and Bavaria), but classicism itself lost any
claims to normativity in German architectural design after the French Revolution.
To Giedion, classicism was merely “a coloring [Färbung],” “the empty frame of
antiquity” into which each age inserts its own content (9). But his Romantic assumption that
architecture expresses a Zeitgeist and his Modernist rejection of style as a basis for
comparative analysis prevented him from recognizing that the shift in the locus of
representationality in German architecture at the end of the eighteenth century did not occur
within the confines of classicism. On the contrary, style itself became that locus. Citing
approvingly the complaint of Gottfried Semper, the most influential German architect of the
second half of the nineteenth century, that “our major cities blossom forth as true extraits de
mille fleurs, as the quintessence of all lands and centuries, so that in our pleasant delusion we
forget in the end to which century we belong” (47), Giedion observed that “around 1830 it
became common to use the most varied styles side by side” (16). Exactly that phenomenon,
which Giedion himself considered merely symptomatic of Romanticism’s inability to
develop an ornamental motif that “would have served as a symbol of the time” (17), will be
considered here as a manifestation of the period’s troubled consciousness of history.
An initial departure from the conventional eighteenth-century understanding of German
public architecture as an expression of local political authority occurred in 1772, when the
twenty-three-year-old Goethe, in an anonymously published panegyric of Erwin von
Steinbach, the purported designer of Strasbourg Cathedral, proclaimed the Gothic a
distinctively and indigenously German style, in contradistinction to the derivative classicism
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with which the French and Italians had to content themselves. Completely ignoring the
cathedral’s religious purpose, Goethe treated its style as an autonomous property, expressive
of a notional German nation: “Now I should not become angry, holy Erwin, if the German art
expert [Kunstgelehrte], from the hearsay of envious neighbors, misjudges his advantage and
belittles your work with that misunderstood word Gothic. For he ought to thank God that he
can declare, ‘That is German architecture, our architecture; for the Italian may boast of none
of his own, still less the Frenchman.’ . . . This characteristic art [charakteristische Kunst] is
the only true one” (Baukunst 13).
On German Architecture (Von deutscher Baukunst) attracted little attention at the
time of its publication—a fact that Goethe later and rather disingenuously attributed to the
baleful influence of his friend Johann Gottfried Herder on his prose (Dichtung 508)—and its
nationalist chauvinism was unfounded, for Gothic architecture was Anglo-Norman in origin
and Strasbourg Cathedral French in its design and details (Frankl and Crossley 50–52, 134–
35). But the essay is historically significant for anticipating, by twenty years or more, both
the central concerns and the argumentative strategies of German Romantic architectural
theory. Appealing to the historical origin of a style, Goethe identified it with a particular
nation; appealing to structural necessity, he legitimized that style as an aesthetic norm. That
neither line of argument was factually accurate in this case did not impede the later adoption
of both in the promotion of other styles.
Rejecting the French Jesuit theorist Marc-Antoine Laugier’s speculative historical
derivation of the column, entablature, and pediment of classical architecture from the upright,
horizontal, and inclined wooden posts of the “primitive hut” (Laugier 12–13)—a theory that
effectively affirmed the normativity of classical design on structural grounds—Goethe
proposed an alternative account of the autochthonous development of architecture in northern
Europe from the need for walls for protection against the elements. From this perspective,
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Gothic ornamentation, which had first struck Goethe as frivolous, became comprehensible as
the harmonization of structurally necessary forms: “How happily could I . . . look at [the
cathedral’s] harmonious masses, alive with countless small components, down to the tiniest
filament, and all contributing, as in the works of eternal nature, to the shape of the whole
[alles zweckend zum Ganzen]” (Baukunst 12). Having thus established the necessity of
Gothic forms, he could assert their conformity to universal canons of beauty: “The more the
soul rises to a feeling for those proportions which are alone beautiful and eternal . . . the more
this beauty penetrates the mind’s being [in das Wesen eines Geistes eindringt], so that it
seems to have arisen with the mind, so that nothing satisfies the mind but beauty, so that the
mind creates nothing but beauty, the happier is the artist” (13–14).
Despite its emphatic rejection of classical models, Von deutscher Baukunst has
striking affinities with Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s foundational work of historicizing
classicism, Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture (Gedancken
über die Nachahmung der Griechischen Wercke in der Mahlerey und Bildhauer-Kunst,
1755), which simultaneously affirmed the paradigmatic status of classical Greek sculpture as
the representation of ideal human beauty and explained its creation as the result of a unique
concatenation of climatic and socio-political factors. Classical Greek sculptures, the
antiquarian proposed, are superior to those of later ages and other nations not only because
the artists idealized, rather than merely imitated, the human form, but because the physical
bodies that served as the models for their idealizations were themselves fitter and more
attractive, owing to the Greek practice of exercising in the nude, than the bodies of modern
peoples (Winckelmann, Gedancken 30–33). Founding a claim of aesthetic exemplarity in part
on a narrative of origination, Winckelmann established a pattern that Goethe and subsequent
German writers on architecture, such as Klenze, followed. For his part the antiquarian
conceived no tension between his historicism and his idealism because, assuming
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transhistorically valid standards of beauty, he historicized the production but not the
reception of art: a work could be expressive simultaneously of its unique culture of origin and
of universal aesthetic values. To the extent that this dogmatic classicism constituted a form of
resistance or, as the historian Friedrich Meinecke insisted, “contradiction to the tendencies of
the nascent historicism” in Winckelmann’s time (249), it was in fact highly characteristic of
the ambivalent assimilation of historicism by aesthetic theory.
If the identification of national styles was a consequence of the historicization of the concept
of artistic style, such classification did not have in architecture the effect that Niklas
Luhmann (166–69) and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (182–83), referring more generally to artistic
production from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, attributed to it, namely of reducing the
burden of stylistic choice after the dissolution of a traditional prescriptive aesthetics (derived
from classical authorities and exemplars) in which all artworks could be judged by uniform
criteria. On the contrary, by assessing not only classical but non-classical architecture
according to structural criteria, the first histories of the subject, published in the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, helped undermine the universalist premise of
normative classicism—that is, the assumption that the fundamental principles of classical
design were grounded in the order of nature—and encouraged the eventual aesthetic
revaluation of non-classical forms, in de facto isolation from functional considerations, with
the result that the range of styles available for contemporary use expanded. Christopher Wren
may still have believed that the classical Orders inhered in the nature of architecture and
hence were “incapable of Modes and Fashions” (351); but as that belief became increasingly
unsustainable, critical attention shifted from the Orders themselves to broader questions of
style. The historicization of architectural form led to the aestheticization of architectural
history.
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In France, where the Académie d’Architecture provided a forum for debate about
architectural theory, both the authority of the classical Orders and the barbarity of the
Gothic—basic tenets of Renaissance classicism—were questioned, even as classical style
remained normative in practice. Representing the Moderns in the architectural counterpart to
the literary Querelle des anciens et des modernes, Claude Perrault argued that the proportions
embodied in the Orders were manifestations of “arbitrary beauty,” determined by custom and
taste and thus historically contingent (vii–viii; see also Herrmann, Theory 53–55 and 58–63,
Rykwert 58–60). A few years later Jean-François Félibien, the royal historiographer and
secretary to the Académie, inaugurated a revaluation of Gothic architecture with his historical
survey of architects from ancient Greece to medieval France (Recueil historique de la vie et
des ouvrages des plus célèbres architectes, 1678), including the designers of four French
Gothic cathedrals (148–95; see also Frankl 343–46, Watkin 20–21). Following the influential
academician François Blondel and anticipating Winckelmann, Germain Boffrand attributed
architectural developments to climatic and cultural conditions, and while praising the “noble
simplicity” of classical design (exactly the phrase that Winckelmann would use a decade
later) he also vindicated the Gothic as a form imitative of trees, hence deriving “from the
bosom of nature” (8, 6). By the middle of the eighteenth century, the static advantages of
Gothic vaulting having been acknowledged by a succession of historians and theorists, the
aesthetic effects of Gothic design began to receive favorable attention, notably from the
architect Jacques Germain Soufflot in a lecture of 1741 (Soufflot; Frankl 396–400) and from
none other than Laugier, the unnamed target of the young Goethe’s ire. The patriotic fervor
of Von deutscher Baukunst might have been dampened if Goethe had acknowledged
Laugier’s declaration that no structure was “as boldly imagined, as happily conceived, as
appropriately executed” as the tower of Strasbourg Cathedral (233).
In a well-known essay, Erwin Panofsky distinguished between two self-conscious
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Gothic Revivals in northern Europe. The first, manifested predominantly in eighteenthcentury garden follies, resulted “not so much from a preference for a particular form of
architecture, as from a desire to evoke a particular mood” (221). The second, which occurred
in the Romantic period, was archaeological in character and sought to recreate Gothic
architecture proper (222). But even if the differentiation of architecture from garden design is
admitted, the historical distance that Panofsky thought a prerequisite only to the second
revival, enabling the Gothic to be recognized as a distinct style “determined by autonomous
and determinable principles” (221), was already necessary to the first. Whether in artificial
ruins or new churches, whether vaguely evocative or minutely imitative, the Gothic (like the
Greek Doric illustrated from the “rediscovered” temples in Paestum, Agrigento, and Athens)
could be revived only after it was understood to be no longer living—that is, to be an artefact
of the past. Such historical distance was not yet present, for example, in seventeenth-century
Oxford, where the Gothic tower of the Bodleian Library was built with superposed classical
columns (1613–38) and the Tudor-style Canterbury Quadrangle in St. John’s College with
classically styled arches (1632–36).
The widespread historical revivals in architecture from the mid-eighteenth to latenineteenth century, as opposed to Renaissance classicism and to local survivals sanctioned by
custom, were predicated on both the existential alterity and the formal reproducibility of the
past. Indeed, the latter—the reduction of the historical to an appearance—was the very
confirmation of the former. Historicism in the architectural sense, as design in styles
associated with the past, acknowledged by seeking to compensate for the cultural cost of
historicism in the broader sense, meaning the interpretation of the human world as “the
product of specific historical processes” rather than in terms of “an eternal form, permanent
essence, or constant identity that transcends historical change” (Beiser 2). That cost entailed,
among other things, the dissolution of the aesthetic norms that, in the preceding three
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centuries, had allowed architects considerable individual freedom within a common frame of
reference.
Comparative histories of architectural form, supplemented from the 1750s by illustrated
surveys of ancient Greek buildings (see Wiebenson), made the styles associated with
different epochs and nations simultaneously accessible to architects, just as the five canonical
Orders of classical architecture (Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite) had been
for centuries. This was especially true of Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach’s remarkable
Outline of a History of Architecture (Entwurff einer Historischen Architectur, 1721), which,
in contrast to Winckelmann’s developmental account of ancient art, consisted of a series of
engraved and captioned illustrations of historical structures from a diverse range of national
architectures: Roman, Greek, Egyptian, Hebrew, Turkish, Arab, Assyrian, Persian, Thai,
Chinese, and Japanese. Attributing stylistic diversity to cultural difference, Fischer tried
weakly to uphold symmetry as a universal design norm while otherwise conceding that “the
tastes of nations . . . are as dissimilar in architecture as in food and dress” ([6]). Nonetheless,
he concluded his preface by declaring his hope that the work would contribute to “the
progress of art [Aufnehmen der Kunst]” ([6]). But what exactly would this contribution be?
Since the commentary on the plates made no effort to relate styles to particular
building types, and the illustrations themselves (e.g., of Solomon’s Temple) were mostly
speculative reconstructions, supplemented by a section of Fischer’s own designs, the purpose
of the Entwurff was clearly to provide stylistic models for contemporary European architects.
Surveying an unprecedentedly broad range of designs without judging them functionally or
aesthetically, Fischer paradoxically negated the significance of the national differences that
he was at pains to illustrate. Insofar as it affirmed the value of stylistic diversity as such, the
Entwurff abstracted historical styles from their temporal and national origins and assimilated
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them to a nontemporal conception of individual style.4 While the Flemish art theorist Karel
van Mander, in his Book of Painting (Schilder-Boeck, 1604), had advised artists to cultivate
an individual style by selectively emulating other painters’ styles (see de Mambro Santos
215–69), Fischer implicitly encouraged architects to do the same with regard to historical and
national styles. Such acceptance of stylistic diversity, which Fischer first extended to nonWestern architecture, opened the way for “the simultaneous use of different styles” later in
the century (Ginzburg 143), as in the juxtaposition of a Chinese pagoda and a Palladian hall
in the early 1790s in Munich’s English Garden.
Thus the historicization of architectural style did not so much supersede the older idea
of individual style, to which van Mander and before him Giorgio Vasari had subscribed, as
redefine it, the architect’s individuality being limited effectively to a choice from among
long-established stylistic sets. Though no longer confined to a single canon, architects were
more closely chained to each of their multiple canons. Diderot’s injunction to painters of
imaginary ruins, “Traverse the globe, but in such a way that I always know where you are, be
it in Greece, Alexandria, Egypt, Rome” (719; see Halmi 13), could have been addressed
equally to German Romantic architects. Since what was lost in the affirmation of the
historicity and individuality of culture was above all a sense of profound historical continuity
in which the aesthetic and moral exemplarity of the past for the present could be assumed, the
challenge was less to reassert the authority of a “classical tradition” that would no longer bear
critical scrutiny than to recuperate the historical per se. For that reason the choice of a
particular historical model mattered less than the visual faithfulness to that model, whatever it
might be. The historically referential buildings of Ludwig I’s Munich, like his collections of
ancient statues and Old Master paintings, sought not to establish specific connections with
Periclean Athens, Constantinian Rome, or Medicean Florence, but to assert Bavaria’s claim
to be the modern representative of the cultural pre-eminence associated with those past
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societies.
Nonetheless, the conflict between the historicist emphasis on cultural individuality,
which translated architecturally into an expectation of the appropriateness of a given style to
its time and place, and the abstraction of historical styles from their original contexts ensured
that the question of stylistic choice would preoccupy architectural theorists in the Romantic
period. Already in the 1770s the Swiss philosopher Johann Georg Sulzer, who on the one
hand identified the state of a nation’s architecture with its “state of mind” (Gemüthszustand
einer Nation) and on the other believed that the Orders could not be improved on (1:129,
130), recognized that the different national idioms within the classical family created for
contemporary architects a dilemma that could not be resolved by reference to purely aesthetic
criteria. Distinguishing Greek, Roman, Italian, and French classicisms—he rejected the
Gothic as “barbaric”—Sulzer, in conformity to his morally instrumentalist conception of art,
proposed selecting according to building type: the “noble simplicity and grandeur” of the
ancient styles (Bauarten) made them most suited to “temples, triumphal arches, and large
monuments,” while the Italian combination of “grandeur and splendor with simplicity” was
best for palaces and the French, with “less grandeur and simplicity but more delicacy and
pleasantness,” for mansions (1:127). To be sure, this principle was no less arbitrary than any
other, because historically buildings of each of those types, to say nothing of others, had been
built in each of those national styles. But the rationalization of stylistic decisions on
supposedly functional grounds offered later theorists and practitioners a means of evading or
effacing the radically contingent relation of decorative scheme to building type and purpose.5
The Romantic-era counterpart to Fischer’s Entwurff was the French pedagogue J. N.
L. Durand’s Collection and Comparison of Buildings of Every Kind, Ancient and Modern
(Recueil et parallèle des édifices de tout genre, anciens et modernes, 1800), an atlas whose
arrangement subordinated national characteristics to building types. Here the abstraction of
18
historical form was conscious and explicit, as Egyptian temples were juxtaposed with Greek
temples, pagodas with mosques, Roman arches with French, ancient theaters with modern—
all illustrated to a uniform scale in plan, elevation, and section only (illustration 4).
[INSERT ILLUSTRATION 4 HERE]
4. Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand (1760–1834). Recueil et parallèle des édifices de tout genre,
anciens et modernes, rev. ed. (Brussels, 1842), plate 1. Author’s photograph.
As he confirmed two years later in the published Précis of his lectures at the École
polytechnique, Durand accepted the relativism implied by the historicist principle of cultural
individuality, but in doing so he also effectively denied the principle of individuality itself.
Architectural forms, he taught, “are not so firmly defined by the nature of things that we
cannot add to them or subtract from them” (108–9), combining modern with ancient, Roman
with Greek, Eastern with Western, as one sees fit. But what constitutes fitness? In answering
this question, which was the central preoccupation of the Précis, Durand redefined the
traditional standard of stylistic appropriateness for purpose—a standard elaborated by Cicero
for use in oratory (Ginzburg 137–38)—in terms of structural type and function. Refusing to
address style as such, for he rejected ornamentation for its own sake, Durand resolved
aesthetic choice into the rational assessment of what he called disposition, or the arrangement
of spaces and structural elements: “Disposition must therefore be the architect’s sole concern
. . . since decoration cannot be called beautiful or give true pleasure except as the necessary
effect of the most fitting and the most economical disposition” (86). The supposedly
universal and transhistorical standard of disposition thus assumed, in Durand’s teaching, the
normative role that classical style had occupied in Renaissance architectural theory.
19
Durand’s morphological idealism, which approached architecture of all places and times as a
single, timeless object of study, permitted him to assemble an expansive combinatorial
repertoire of basic forms from historical examples of specific styles, illustrated in the thirtythree engraved plates to the Précis. That the historical sources often remain recognizable in
his illustrations even after being subjected to his geometrical reduction—combined with other
forms and drawn on a grid to a single scale—is a major inconsistency of his method. But this
would not have seemed problematic to architects who were seeking, in Hanno-Walter Kruft’s
apt phrase, “pseudo-reasons for their historical preferences” (308–9). Taught to German
pupils at the École polytechnique (among them Clemens Wenzeslaus Coudray, who became
the Weimar court architect in 1816) and further disseminated through the frequently reprinted
Précis (of which German translations appeared in 1806 and 1831), Durand’s utilitarian
eclecticism had a profound impact on nineteenth-century German architecture (see Szambien
122–33). Klenze’s Glyptothek, for example, was “generically Durandesque in its square
modularity,” with galleries arranged around a courtyard, while the vaulted galleries
themselves, whose elaborate decoration was destroyed in the Second World War and
unfortunately not restored, “followed line for line one of Durand’s paradigms” (Hitchcock
51, referring to Précis, plate 14). Schinkel’s Altes Museum, too, although the product of an
urbanistic and technological sophistication foreign to the French engineer, is Durandesque in
its combination of a Greek Ionic portico and a Pantheon-like central rotunda (Giedion 73,
144, and plates 46, 91–92; Goalen).
Durand’s influence is more evident, however, in the rhetoric of functionality that
dominated German architectural theory in the first half of the nineteenth century. Variants of
Durand’s criteria recur so frequently in architectural treatises that a credulous reader might
wonder what grounds their authors could have had for disagreement. Even Christian Ludwig
20
Stieglitz, a Leipzig official who insisted in 1792 (in terms explicitly recalling
Winckelmann’s) that modern architecture could achieve greatness only by imitating Greek
and Roman models (Geschichte vii), was preaching the doctrine of functionalism by the
1830s: “Construction alone—the forms of the principal parts and of the body of the building
as a whole—leads to and lays the foundation for architectural beauty” (Beiträge 2:189). Now
rejecting stylistic imitation that paid no regard to “the purpose and the character of the
building” in question, he conceded to contemporary architects the availability of three equally
meritorious stylistic classes, all in the event historically imitative: Greek, Rundbogenstil, and
Spitzbogenstil (Beiträge 2:178–79). In order to reduce this plurality to a de facto singularity,
however, he referred like Sulzer a half-century earlier to building-type as determinant:
palaces and most secular public buildings demanded an Italianate Rundbogenstil; theaters,
city halls, and stock exchanges a Byzantine Rundbogenstil; and churches a Byzantine style
or, better yet, Spitzbogenstil (Beiträge 2:180–88). Despite his assurance that the “timid
imitation of old forms” would not produce “a true German work” (ein ächtes deutsches
Werk), Stieglitz in fact confirmed the historicist status quo.
In 1822, after traveling through Italy and Greece, Hübsch initiated his critique of
neoclassical theory by denying the existence of a timeless architectural ideal, such as the
archaeologist Aloys Hirt had proclaimed ancient classical (particularly Greek) architecture to
embody (Hübsch, Griechische). In a polemic appended to the second edition of On Greek
Architecture, Hübsch criticized Hirt for promoting thoughtless imitation: “Instead of
historically derived, mechanically learned rules of beauty [Schönheitsregeln], I would let
architectural forms develop from the same purpose from which they originally arose”
(“Vertheidigung” iii). Six years later, declaring the choice of decorative form as such to be
arbitrary and untheorizable (Style 2–3), Hübsch distinguished two basic structural systems,
trabeation, used by the Greeks and especially suited to marble, and arcuation, used by the
21
Romans and especially suited to brick. Since the building materials available in Germany
were more akin to those of Rome than of Greece, it followed that the Germans should build
in the Rundbogenstil, whose resemblance to Romanesque architecture “arises from the nature
of things [der Natur der Sache] and was not induced by the influence of authorities or
individual preference” (Style 51).
To be sure, Hübsch’s materialist analysis of the Rundbogenstil was confined to
ecclesiastical examples, and In welchem Style was published on Dürer’s three-hundredth
birthday for a meeting of the Nazarenes, who were committed to a revival of religious
feeling. Though not stated openly, the ideological implications of Hübsch’s argument were
scarcely disguised, for the tract was dedicated to the Nazarenes. But the appeal of
functionalism seems to have been so compelling, as architects sought to deny or repress the
double-bind of their relationship to architectural history—at once detached from and
beholden to the past—that even ideological preferences for particular styles could not be
justified on their own terms. The two criteria of “utility [Zweckmäßigkeit]—namely, fitness
for purpose (convenience) and lasting existence (solidity)” (2)—by which Hübsch vindicated
the Rundbogenstil were not essentially different from those by which Hirt had defended
Greek style: “the essence of beauty must proceed from construction and a functional layout
[einer zweckmässigen Anordnung]” (13). Because the ancients, according to Hirt, had fully
realized “the essence of appropriate construction in every kind of material,” to build properly
was inevitably to build “in the Greek manner [griechisch]” (38).
Like Hübsch and Hirt, the latter of whom he studied under in 1800–3 (Buttlar 29–31),
Klenze, with whom I shall conclude this essay, translated the historicist principle of
individuality (i.e., cultural appropriateness) into functionalist terms to rationalize the use of
an historically derivative style while denying it an historically specific character.6 Kruft (305)
22
and Mallgrave (105) have noted the Durandesque character of Klenze’s definition of
architecture in his manifesto of 1822 for the architectural contribution to the religious and
civic renewal of post-Napoleonic Bavaria: “the art of molding and combining natural
materials for the purposes of human society and its needs so that the way in which the laws of
constancy, preservation, and functionality [Erhaltung, Stetigkeit und Zweckmässigkeit] are
followed ensures the highest possible degree of solidity and durability in construction with
the smallest expenditure of materials and forces” (Anweisung 6–7). Yet Klenze was not
content to defend on purely pragmatic grounds his candidate for the architectural prototype
that fulfilled these criteria.
Convinced that “the lack of historical sense was what ailed our time” (v), he
advanced, in the Versuch of 1821, an elaborate historical argument for the utility of Greek
architecture as the best model for contemporary purposes. Drawing on scholarship by
Winckelmann, William Jones, Johannes von Müller, Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Creuzer,
and others in classical archaeology and philology, comparative linguistics, and comparative
religion, his speculative reconstruction of ancient Tuscan temple design by analogy to
Etruscan and modern-day Rhaetian and Tyrolian architecture provided the purported
historical basis for his affirmation, a year later, of the normative status of Greek architecture.
Klenze’s analogical method, which emphasized basic structural principles at the expense of
empirical forms “more or less modified according to regional and climatic conditions”
(Versuch 7, 42–43), allowed him to claim that just as the peoples of northern and southern
Europe were connected through their common origin in the Caucasus, so Greek architecture
was linked “to the building practices [Bauarten] of all times on a common chain” (7–8). Even
Gothic architecture, the revival of which Klenze rejected as a “stillborn idea” (Anweisung
13), had sufficient formal parallels (Formanalogien) with Greek design, as well as a
similarity in the arrangement of interior space to Roman basilica design, that to call it
23
German or Saxon was “without proven historical foundation” (11–12)—an argument directed
implicitly against the Nazarene artist Peter Cornelius’s efforts to persuade Ludwig that Greek
style was not nationally appropriate (see Buttlar 148, 288; Watkin and Mellinghof 158–59).
Having thus, in his 1822 manifesto, asserted the derivation of the Gothic (which he renamed
“the Nordic basilica style”) from classical antecedents and denied it a distinctly German or
Christian character, Klenze could advocate the appropriateness of Greek style for both
national and religious purposes precisely because of its universality: “We have sought to
show,” he concluded, “that the rigorous [strenge] architectural style of the Greeks, insofar as
it alone is based on the laws of statics, economy, and utility—which are the same for all times
and places—must also satisfy all times and places and serve as a norm [Richtschnur]; and we
believe equally that differences in climate or building materials cannot substantively reduce
this general utility [Allgemeinheit der Zweckmässigkeit]” (Anweisung 21).
By ostensibly historicizing means, then, Klenze promoted a thoroughly antihistoricist, idealist conception of Greek architecture. Given the flexibility of his own handling
of classical style, we might say that his forays into architectural history were directed to
restoring the theoretical underpinning of an older model of classicism, in which the classical
stylistic repertoire was accepted as canonical but individual ancient monuments were not
expected to be copied exactly. In his published description of the Walhalla—a peripteral
Doric temple, as stipulated by Ludwig, erected in 1830–42 on a giant tiered platform above
the Danube near Regensburg for the purpose of housing busts of distinguished Germans—
Klenze himself emphasized that the range of possibilities realized in ancient Greek temple
design allowed the modern architect ample and “inherent freedom of artistic development”
(“Walhalla” 3). But perhaps because, as he freely acknowledged, the external form had been
determined in advance, and not by the architect (indeed, he reprinted in full Ludwig’s
program for the Walhalla), Klenze did not apply to this structure his earlier vindication of
24
Greek architecture, which had resolved the question of stylistic choice into a more
comprehensive historical and structural analysis.7
On the contrary, he called attention to his departure from ancient models on account
of exactly those factors that his theoretical writings minimized, local climatic conditions and
building materials: “Since the location, light, color of material, conceptions of time, needs,
and contingencies [Umstände] are completely different here . . . no Greek proportion
[Verhältnis] and no Greek form could be imitated slavishly” (“Walhalla” 6). Written at the
end of the building’s construction for his collected designs—the serial publication of which
had begun in 1830 with the prefatory assertion that “there was and is and will be only one
architecture, namely that which reached its perfection” in ancient Greece (Sammlung fol.
3)—Klenze’s commentary focused on elaborating the iconography of the interior decoration
and the details of construction, such as the technologically advanced iron roof trusses that
enabled the architect to dispense with the barrel-vaulted ceiling originally favored by his
patron (illustration 5).
[INSERT ILLUSTRATION 5 HERE]
5. Leo von Klenze (1784–1864). Walhalla, near Regensburg (1830–42). Interior, south side,
with frieze by Johann Martin Wagner representing the Aryan peoples’ northern migration,
caryatids representing the Valkyries (and containing iron supporting rods), and iron roof
truss. Author’s photograph.
In defiance of his own theoretical insistence on the inseparability of external form from
functional and tectonic considerations, Klenze concluded that whereas “the positive [i.e.,
25
technical] aspect of architectural endeavors must be explained in detail, the artistic can speak
for and explain itself” (“Walhalla” 8). If elsewhere he sought to justify a normative
classicism by denying the autonomy of style, here he tacitly conceded precisely that
autonomy by declining to justify the classicism of his own building. Thus in both the
construction and the discursive presentation of what has justly been called “the most
memorable building of the classical revival in Germany” (Watkin and Mellinghof 162),
Klenze belied the idea to which his claims for the normativity of Greek architecture appealed:
the idea of history without historicity.
Although he won the battle with Cornelius over which historical style was to be
deemed suitable for a monument celebrating Germanness, their agreement about the social
value of the project itself indicates that, considered in the context of the historical, political,
and technological conditions that encouraged and permitted its realization despite the
enormous cost involved, the question of the Walhalla’s style was somewhat beside the point.
But the contest for Ludwig’s stylistic affections, like the self-contradictions of Klenze and his
contemporaries in regard to the self-declared problem of stylistic plurality, were
characteristic manifestations of the age’s unwillingness fully to accept the implications of its
aesthetic historicism. The debate about style in German Romantic architecture was the more
intense precisely because, in the face of an emergent historical consciousness that imperiled
an intellectually and socially compelling sense of continuity with the past, the stakes of that
debate were so small.
Notes
1. Translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.
2. In contrast, when the French Académie royale d’Architecture, a year after its foundation in
1671, sponsored a contest for a “French Order” to be used in the courtyard of the Louvre, it
26
was assumed that the submissions would be based on the classical columnar Orders. The
winning entry, submitted by none other than the academy’s founder, Jean-Baptiste Colbert,
was in fact a variant of the Roman Corinthian Order, with a fleur-de-lys inserted in the capital
above the acanthus leaves (Rykwert 77, 79).
3. Although Georg Moller, whose rediscovery (with the architectural historian Sulpiz
Boisserée) of a thirteenth-century drawing of the planned western elevation of Cologne
Cathedral gave the completion project its historical mandate, was the first architect to publish
detailed illustrations of German Gothic architecture, he himself considered the style
“magnificent and sublime, but . . . the result of its time,” and hence inappropriate for
contemporary use (1:5; qtd. in Kruft 296 n. 72)—an attitude reflected also in the printing of
his book in Roman type rather than the usual “Gothic” Fraktur.
4. See Neville on the eighteenth-century reception of Fischer’s Entwurff. Of the five editions,
two were published in English translation (1730 and 1737), while the three in German (1721,
1725, and 1742) included French translations.
5. Despite its self-conflicted combination of organicist expressivism with moral
instrumentalism—and a hostile review from Goethe (“Künste”)—Sulzer’s Allgemeine
Theorie was sufficiently well received that it was pirated four times between 1773 and 1779
and reissued in expanded editions in 1786–87 and 1792–94 (Kruft 190 n. 154).
6. I am here neglecting Schinkel, who performed an artistic and administrative role
comparable to Klenze’s but had a far greater influence on subsequent architectural history, in
favor of the Bavarian partly because the latter published his major theoretical statements
relating to architectural form, whereas Schinkel’s attempt at a systematic theory remained
fragmentary and unpublished, and partly because Klenze’s written and built works have
received much less attention in anglophone scholarship than the Prussian architect’s have.
But I plan to consider Schinkel more fully in a book I am now writing, of which an expanded
27
version of this essay is to form one chapter.
7. See Buttlar, ch. 6, for an account of the Walhalla project from its inception in 1807 to its
completion in 1842. Klenze’s submission for the competition announced in 1814 was a
Parthenon-like Doric temple reinforced by hidden iron rods. His second scheme,
commissioned by Ludwig in 1819, was a Pantheon-like circular temple surrounded by a
Doric peristyle. When this failed to meet royal approval, Klenze offered in 1821 a modified
version of his original design, which was accepted (although not without further disputation
with Ludwig about the roof redesign).
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