Read the text and translate it to Ukrainian

2. Answer the following questions:

1. What does the term “baroque” mean?

2. When does the Baroque period stretch from?

3. What architectural style did the Baroque style grow out of?

4. What architectural monument and why gives an idea in which the Baroque emerged out of the Renaissance?

5. What problems did Bernini face when he was designing the square of St.Peter’s in Vatican?

6. What does the term “rococo” mean?

7. How did the exponents of Rococo style work?

8. What country is famous for the monuments of Rococo style?

9. What masterpieces of Rococo architecture do you know?

10. How did Rococo style develop in Germany and Austria?

3. Give Ukrainian equivalents of the following words and phrases:

odd, strange, bizarre

expansive movements

complete, harmonious fusion

apparently effortless gaiety

to supervise the work

reduced scale

separate stages

carefree framework

slender lines

solemn and render glorious praise

4. Give English equivalents of the following words and phrases:

визначати стиль

стосуватись всіх видів мистецтва

висловлювати суть

існуючі форми

попередник

переробити екстер’єр

доступний

окремі стадії

Make up the sentences of your own with the given words and phrases.

Match a line in A with a line in B.

Summarize the text in English.

Unit 17

Text

NEOCLASSICISM

There is much controversy over the extent to which, and the date at which, the first period of English Neoclassicism (in the seventeenth century) began to exert an influence on the Continent. Germany was in the throes of war at the time, and absolutism held sway in France. Contact with England was either nonexistent or very rare. Italy was in the process of losing its position as torchbearer of European civilization and culture, resting on the laurels of its great past.

In 1600 a young Englishman called Inigo Jones (1573-1652) visited northern Italy, bringing back with him on his return numerous sketches made on his trip and a copy of Architettura by Andrea Palladio — the great late-Renaissance architect, who had perhaps studied Vitruvius in more depth than any of his peers. To Palladio (1508-80) history must give credit for the so-called "colossal order" — columns or pilasters rising several stories high, with an enlargement either of the base up to the level of the whole of the first floor, or of the bearing block.

At the same time as Inigo Jones, yet quite independently, a young German architect, Elias Holl from Augsburg (1573-1646), also went to Italy to study Palladian architecture. In 1602, having been appointed principal town architect of Augsburg, Holl built his masterpiece, the Zeughaus (arsenal); ten years later he produced the boldly designed town hall, the façade of which has characteristically clean, severe lines — a not unoriginal adaptation of designs he had seen in Italy. These two buildings are among the most beautiful examples of Renaissance architecture in Germany.

Palladio's influence on Inigo Jones was altogether different. Through his work, Jones managed to anticipate certain elements of design that appeared elsewhere in Europe only after the Baroque and the last, delicate, airy phase of Baroque: Rococo.

Comparison of Jones's masterpiece, the Queen's House at Greenwich (begun in 1616), with English buildings constructed a hundred and fifty years later will reveal only variations of style, not of basic conception. Inigo Jones put an end to the confusion of styles that had typified the Tudor period; yet English Neoclassicism does not, properly speaking, begin with him, although he was the supreme model of the style.

England in the first half of the seventeenth century was not sufficiently trouble free to devote its energies to building — to "translating Palladio into English." Charles I, grandson of Mary Queen of Scots, had appalled his subjects (both Scottish and English) by his decision to govern alone, without Parliament. It was an impossible ambition: any such policy was totally unrealistic. After a few decisive victories against the Royalist troops, Oliver Cromwell proclaimed a republic. In 1649 Charles was beheaded. Cromwell's republic failed largely because of the Puritans' inability to sort out internal political problems. The Stuarts returned, only to show that they had not learnt a great deal in the interim. London was struck by the Great Plague in 1665, then in 1666 by the Great Fire. Only when the Dutch William of Orange and his Stuart wife Mary ascended the throne together did times start to improve in Britain. During the great period of the eighteenth century she began consolidating her overseas territories (India, Canada and Australia) and establishing bases and trading stations at strategic points on the seaways. A new age opened in England — that of enlightened rationalism. Human relations improved, and it was no longer considered that violence was the natural way of reacting to those of different beliefs.

After the destruction of London by the Great Fire, Christopher Wren (1632-1723) achieved the prodigious feat of building some fifty new churches, the most notable being St Paul's Cathedral. The dome of this magnificent structure is generally agreed to be faultless; however, like the Hotel des Invalides in Paris (1706) the actual body of the building seems as it were to hestitate midway between Baroque and "Palladian Neoclassicism."

Neither of these buildings is in the end as successful as the brilliantly inventive Karlskirche in Vienna, built in 1739 by Fischer von Erlach (both father and son), or Georg Bahr's Frauenkirche in Dresden (1743).

German and Austrian architects were still not yet interested in Neoclassicism, the advent of which occurred only towards the end of the century. Then, however, the transformation was rapid and far-reaching.

In 1791 there appeared the Brandenburg Gate, designed by Carl Gotthard Langhans (1732-1808), which became the symbol of Berlin; built with Doric columns, it has five gateways, extending out from the center in carefully balanced proportion.

Neoclassicism might be said to have begun on the Continent in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. In France there was revolution. Now, according to a later Russian opinion, a revolution is "the sudden collapse, within a few years, of centuries-old institutions that appear so solid and impossible to budge that even the most courageous reformers dare not attack them in their writings. Revolution means the collapse or disintegration of everything that previously constituted the very substance of a nation's social, religious, political, and economic life." Compared with the situation in France, Germany was relatively stable at the end of the eighteenth century. At any rate, far less bloodshed occurred. The Seven Years War had been concluded. Resistance had grown up against the petty princes who, wishing to emulate the Sun King, squandered the money they raised in taxes and then, when the coffers were empty, sent out recruiting officers to enlist young men — either by persuasion or force — into military service, only to sell them off in whole companies. In his play Kabale und Liebe, Schiller has an old servant tell his mistress about the young men of their own land shipped out to America.

During this period, new ideas came not from politics but from literature. The new school of poetry was soon known as Sturm und Drang ("storm and stress"). This was the title of a play written in 1776 by a young "hothead," Friedrich Maximilian Klinger (1752-1831), who, it should be said, did not end his adventurous life with quite as much of a bang as he had begun it. He became an officer and served under various commanders, finishing his career as a general and head of the Russian cadet corps.

Sturm und Drang marked the beginning of Romanticism, a cultural, spiritual, literary and artistic movement that accompanied classicism and led it, through "Gothick," to historicism.

Classicism is referred to in Goethe's Von deutscher Baukunst ("German Architecture"). In fact Goethe did not use the term to describe the new movement, and what he thought of it was undoubtedly affected by the startling impression Strasbourg Cathedral had made on him.

He was not at first impressed with Neoclassicism. His youthful Sturm und Drang enthusiasms had taken him far back in time; he wrote fiery, passionate verses and sentences in which he flew back down the ages to the very beginning, when a house was a house, with four solidly built walls, not columns and fancy masonry. He disliked the idea that sections of temples should now be used in the construction of middle-class dwellings. He had too great a respect for antiquity to watch it being profaned with equanimity. Aware of the profound changes that were taking place during his lifetime (and to which he was contributing), he must have realized that the rediscovery of classical models was not a starting point for new ideas and new goals, but was itself the consequence of a new understanding of the world and of an urgent inner need to do away with the preciousness of Baroque gone to seed. Sturm und Drang is the perfect description for the new poetic impulse of the time.

What Goethe objected to, and what later critics of Neoclassicism were to point out, was mainly that the exponents of this style had adopted the formal idiom of a noble, long-past age, and that it was unseemly that classical designs intended to represent the sublime should be used for buildings that were far humbler than, say, a temple to Zeus.

The front door of a modest suburban house would be graced with a miniature Doric, Ionic or Corinthian porch, through which would pass not priests or believers rapt in mystical fervour but vulgar members of the petty bourgeoisie. The essential difference was that classical styles were not concerned with the dimensions of the building in which individuals lived from day to day, whereas Neoclassicism was — and, moreover, with a view to personal aggrandizement.

The best German Neoclassical architect (and painter) was Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841), from Neuruppin. A pupil at the Berlin Academy of Architecture, he was taught by Friedrich Gilly, one of the great theorists of Neoclassicism (though none of his buildings — of which there were never many-survives). Schinkel visited France and Italy in his youth; in 1815 he was appointed senior architectural advisor to the king of Prussia. A proud, reserved man, he had a fine sensitivity to form and an excellent feeling for proportion. His favourite order was the Doric, which he used in all kinds of building, from the Königswache in Berlin (1818) to the Charlottenhof in the country outside Potsdam (1826). Of his numerous works it is worth citing the Schauspielhaus (1821), which has a Doric portico, and the Altes Museum (1828), both in Berlin; and the Nikolaikirche in Potsdam (1837). His projects included a new royal castle on the Acropolis in Athens, a Schloss called Orianda, in the Crimea, for the empress of Russia, and churches in various styles — Romanesque, Byzantine and Gothic.

Already the historicism of the second half of the century had emerged. However, in Schinkel's buildings what was later to run riot in florid superabundance was still contained within very precise limits. He was not concerned with ostentation and opulent display, but with his own brand of calm, measured solemnity. He was an aesthete, a Prussian Greek, in an age when all formality had to be borrowed from old traditions, in which he could express himself only through the forms and dimensions of the past, adapting them with masterly skill to new needs.

When still Crown Prince, Ludwig I of Bavaria decided to build a classical-style forum on the west side of Munich, where he lived. The result was one of the most superb examples of what happens when Greek and Hellenistic architectural concepts are applied under northern skies. Leo von Klenze (1784-1864) built the west gate of the square (named the Propylaea after its model on the Acropolis) using Doric columns, and the museum on the south side (i.e. the Glyptothek) in a Hellenistic-Ionic style. The museum on the north side was designed by George Friedrich Ziebland (1800-73) with a raised portico, incorporating eight Corinthian columns. To the east lay the city, extending up to the square as the royal patron and his architect had envisaged. Thus the forum of this "Athens on the banks of the Isar" also included an urban element — although under Hitler this was spoilt by administrative buildings and so-called "temples of honour" (demolished in 1946).

Despite its promising beginnings, Neoclassicism declined in the Biedermeier period, to be replaced by historicism, which over almost half a century produced nothing but "sugar-icing castles." In retrospect one understands why the various short phases of Neoclassicism went by different names in different countries.

In England the style of Inigo Jones is known as English Classic, while Neoclassicism proper (i.e. the second period of Neoclassicism in Britain, c. 1730-1850) was termed Classical Revival. In France the first phase is known as Directoire (1795-1805), referring to the Revolutionary government of the same name. The next phase is called Empire, after the Napoleonic empire (up to 1814). This style continued after the end of the Napoleonic era for some decades, but towards the middle of the century was replaced by historicism.

Neoclassicism underwent the same fate meanwhile in Germany. Historicism had indeed already been latent in Schinkel, who felt that to be able to build in any style one chose was an ideal state of affairs, offering the architect a freedom of choice such as had never before been available. Yet what was the result? A sort of technically irreproachable mud, with which any building could be rendered "grandiose" — churches, castles, town halls, stations and hotels.

The German name "Biedermeier" is applied to Neoclassicism when reduced to middle-class domestic proportions. In 1848, Viktor von Scheffel created two archetypal petty bourgeois characters called Biedermann and Bummelmaierfor the satirical magazine Fliegende Blätter. These two names soon led to the portmanteau word "Biedermeier" for someone "proper," slightly fat and generally well pleased with life, seeing the world always through rose-tinted spectacles, whatever it might really be like.

Neoclassicism had now come to express reserve and modesty; yet in its modesty it was too noble for the brash entrepreneurs of the late nineteenth century and the belle époque, the founders of huge commercial and industrial businesses. It was as if critics had foreseen this development of ever greater concern for ostentation; and if artists ran out of new, original ideas, old ones should be revived, regardless of period — the more the merrier. Thus Egyptian, Byzantine, Romanesque, Gothic and so forth were all combined and fused. The age of historicism saw an uncompromising jumbling of everything that had ever been thought good and precious.

All great cities have examples of late nineteenth-century monuments — built, in a somewhat random way, on a characteristically huge scale. A long Doric colonnade, forming a public promenade, overshadowed by a vast statue of a woman called "Bavaria," crowns the grassy Theresienhöhe in Munich. Every October a farm market is held there, at the same time as the famous beer festival. This is just one example — by no means completely insignificant or tasteless — of architecture from the great period of "idea-lessness." There is worse: neo-Gothic country houses on hilltops; a so-called Crystal Palace in London; a neo-Baroque cathedral in Berlin decorated in a supremely competent way (at least from the point of view of technique) in some ten or so different styles; Pantheon-type domes on parallel-epipedal bases; and opera houses like wedding cakes, where the spectacle starts at the exterior façade, to develop with pompous solemnity into the foyer and corridors, until it reaches the royal box — only to become brusquely less theatrical as the tiers of seats rise to the gods. During this period theaters were known as temples of the Muses. Alas, poor Muses!

At a technical level this was all good and even quite acceptable. But technical expertise led to facile cheating: plaster corbels hung from stuccoed-over iron supports, pretending they could bear any weight in the world.

However, a new material, suitable for certain architectonic elements, had appeared on the scene: cast iron. Cast iron could do everything, and, what is more, on a mass scale — Corinthian capitals, Islamic-style window grilles, Gothic window tracery, and so on and so forth.

Paris, the city of lights, wanted a tower higher than any yet built. An engineer, Alexandre Eiffel, obliged — with an iron tower rising about 980 feet (299m.) above the city. It is perhaps not exactly beautiful, as some would have us believe, but it is at least one of the few truly honest monuments — truly worthy of being called a monument — of the historicist age.

TASKS