What meanings did contemporaries attach to styles fashionable in the eighteenth century

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What meanings did contemporaries attach to styles fashionable in the eighteenth century

 

The eighteenth century was a period of change as much for the architectural world as for the world of the architect.     The Glorious Revolution marked the beginning of great stability, vast economic growth and population growth; factors that would lead to a massive growth in the amount of building going on in Britain.    At the same time, London, the hub of England, was transformed from a medieval city into a bustling stone metropolis following the destruction of the old city during the Great Fire.  The resulting boom in building led to a popularisation of interest in architecture and the publication of books detailing new fads and moulding patterns for use by builders in order that they would be able to make their creations more fashionable without any great effort.  The concept of taste as something that was “right” or “wrong” (Shaftesbury saw taste as “founded on truth, or veri similitudae at the least”) meant that reactions against styles of architecture were usually tacit or tepid, as disagreeing with the panels of virtuosos in such establishments as the Dilettanti or Antiquarians dictated the fashionable and the unfashionable

A powerful new national bank (introduced by William III who had seen such a system operate with great success in his native Netherlands), combined with the gradual industrialisation of Britain, the growth of Empire and the development of the modern capitalist system led to a growth of British affluence.  By the end of the eighteenth century, Britain had swept from being at the edge of European affairs to being the arbiter of them, mostly due to her economic maturity.  The physical result of this for the average Briton would have been the massive growth in public works.  Financed by Queen Anne’s Coal Tax, the British government was capable of raising huge funds for the building of tremendous buildings. 

The economic power of the government at the beginning of the eighteenth century was manifest from the new St. Paul’s Cathedral.  One of the largest churches in Christendom, the famous domed cathedral of the new metropolis was just one of the hundreds of churches built by Wren in the late seventeenth century in London alone.  This prolific master was seen in the early eighteenth century as a great ‘modern’ to rival the ‘ancients’ and his work was everywhere to be seen. The result was a proliferation of the baroque style.  The baroque style was developed as a variation on the classical style during the seventeenth century.  Abandoning the classical rules of architecture as developed by Brunelleschi and Alberti (a movement encouraged by the humanist movement who amongst other things advocated study for its own sake, a point of philosophy that lead amongst other things to a proliferation of interest in the classical works, including classical art and architecture) whilst retaining the classical motifs, the baroque style was replete with pilasters, columns, friezes and other obviously ‘classical’ motifs and yet these were deliberately ‘mismatched’.  For example, St. Paul’s columns are paired together so that although the pairs maintain equidistance, there is not equidistance between each column.  Equally the wanton placement of Doric, Corinthian and Ionic columns would have been upsetting to the classical architect. The abandonment of the strict rules governing the use of columns allowed stylisation in a way impossible in the strictly classical mode.

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The rebuilding of London in the modern mode made the old gothic buildings stand out to such an extent that many were retraced or remoulded according to the new fashion.  The Palladian school, based on Palladio’s famous treatise, was the emergent fashion from the Wren era and as the government renewed the fabric of London, a city that held more than twenty times as many citizens as the next largest of England’s cities, the baroque and Palladian fad was transmitted across the country.

These affluent people would also contribute in great measure to the boom in building.  The growth ...

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