Imagining the Renaissance: The Nineteenth-Century Cult of François I as Patron of Art*

1997 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 207-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet Cox-Rearick
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Marguerite De Navarre ◽  
Gothic Revival ◽  
Classical Style

A sentimental domestic scene, François I and Marguerite of Navarre, was painted in 1804 by the Salon painter Fleury Richard (fig. 1). As he explained, it illustrates an anecdote from the legend of François I. The king's sister, Marguerite de Navarre, is shown discovering on the windowpane a graffito about the inconstancy of women. François — the great royal womanizer — has just scratched it there and looks very pleased with himself.This painting signals not only the early nineteenth century's fascination with the Renaissance king, but reveals its attitudes about the Renaissance itself. For example, the setting and the costumes betray a confusion about the periodization of Gothic and Renaissance: the room in which the scene takes place is of Gothic revival design, while another room - in neo-classical style - opens beyond; the king's costume is historically correct, but Marguerite could be Maid Marian.

Scottish Gothic Drama

2017 ◽  
pp. 59-74
Author(s):  
Barbara A. E. Bell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Visual Effects ◽  
Gothic Revival ◽  
Performance Culture ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Music Hall ◽  
The Way

Scottish theatre, from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, has been characterised by a distinctive performance culture that values anti-illusionist techniques, breaking the fourth wall, music and song, strongly physical acting styles and striking visual effects. These were accepted traits of the Georgian theatre as a whole; however, they endured in Scotland through the music hall and pantomime traditions, when late nineteenth-century Western theatre was focused on realism/naturalism. Their importance to the search for a distinctive Scottish Gothic Drama lies in the way that the conditions of the Scottish theatre during the Gothic Revival valued these skills and effects. That theatre was heavily constricted in what it could play by censorship from London and writers were cautious in their approach to ‘national’ topics. At the same time a good deal of work portraying Scotland as an inherently Gothic setting was imported onto Scottish stages.

The Church Missionary Society and Architecture in the Mission Field: Evangelical Anglican Perspectives on Church Building Abroad, c. 1850-1900

2015 ◽  
Vol 58 ◽  
pp. 197-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Turner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Infrastructure Development ◽  
Gothic Revival ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Church Building ◽  
Church Missionary Society ◽  
Architectural Development ◽  
The Church

The Gothic Revival occupies a central place in the architectural development of the Church of England in the nineteenth century, both at home and abroad. Within the expanding British colonial world, in particular, the neo-Gothic church became a centrally important expression of both faith and identity throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. From a symbolic and communicative perspective, the style represented not only a visual link to Britain, but also the fundamental expression of the Church of England as an institution and of the culture of Englishness. As such, it carried with it a wide range of cultural implications that suited the needs of settler communities wishing to re-established their identity abroad. Expansion during this period, however, was not only limited to the growth of settler communities but was also reflected in growing Anglican missions to the non-Christian peoples of annexed territories. The two primary organs of the Church of England in the field, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) and the Church Missionary Society (CMS), actively employed the revived medieval style throughout the Empire as missions were solidified through infrastructure development. As a popular style with direct connotations to the Christian faith, revived medieval design became increasingly popular with Anglican missionaries abroad in the period between the early 1840s and the end of the century. Not only did its origins in ecclesiastical buildings make it attractive, but it was also stylistically distinctive, and set apart as a sacred style from both secular and ‘heathen’ structures.

‘Our Ancient Architecture’: Contesting Cathedrals in Late Georgian England

2011 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 213-232 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Aspin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Anglican Church ◽  
Gothic Revival ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Georgian England

Recent research has transformed our understanding of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a phase in the wider process of the Gothic Revival. While historical writing on the Gothic Revival had previously tended to see the significance of the period between 1790 and 1820 largely in terms of its academic contribution to the later development of Victorian Gothic Revival architecture, emphasizing especially the role of antiquarian scholarship in providing a basis of archaeological accuracy upon which subsequent architects could draw, more diverse angles have been opened up within the last couple of decades. Research by Simon Bradley, Chris Brooks and others has illuminated debates on the origins of the Gothic style itself and the patriotic language underpinning them, and has added greatly to our understanding of the associations between Gothic and ‘Englishness’. Rosemary Hill has investigated the ambiguous and problematic religious connotations of Gothic. Simon Bradley has authoritatively anatomized the increasingly enthusiastic take-up of Gothic by the Anglican Church in the first few decades of the nineteenth century, and has uncovered a rich prehistory of ecclesiological principles before the foundation of the Camden Society and all its powerfully misleading retrospective propaganda.

scholarly journals Nineveh sails for the New World: Assyria envisioned by nineteenth-century America

Iraq ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 66 ◽  
pp. 243-256
Author(s):  
Steven W. Holloway
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
British Museum ◽  
Historical Representation ◽  
Sir Isaac Newton ◽  
Gothic Revival ◽  
Museum Exhibits ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Revival Movement

In order to understand the unique reception of ancient Assyria in nineteenth-century America, it is necessary to describe the British public's own reception of the earliest British Museum exhibits, together with the marketing of publications of Layard and others. And, in order to grasp something of both Britain's and America's keen fascination with the earliest images of Assyria, I must introduce you briefly to the changing perceptions and tastes in admissible historical representation that, I believe, drove this fascination.The British public's breathless enthusiasm for the monuments from Bible lands had radical origins in English soil. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century antiquarians surveyed, sketched and wove theories about the prehistoric relics that dot the English landscape, occasionally linking them with a mythical Christian past. William Stukeley, for example, student and first biographer of Sir Isaac Newton, made something of a career out of surveying Avebury and Stonehenge, in an early eighteenth-century quest for evidence that could link the Britons of Celtic fame with the peoples and the received timeline of the Bible. By the early nineteenth century, the Gothic Revival movement had begun in earnest. Its proponents saw this project as a moral mainstay in the revitalization of English society and culture. English prehistoric and medieval monuments would be measured, drawn, catalogued, published, and ultimately by so doing, laid at the feet of the British public. The Napoleonic wars accelerated this movement, for Continental sightseeing was impossible, so the classic Grand Tour evaporated down to an insular walking tour. This of course fuelled the sense of British national destiny:Works on topography… tend to make us better acquainte d with every thing which exists in our native land, and are therefore conducive to the progress of real knowledge, to the diffusion of rational patriotism, and to virtuous sentiments and propensities …

scholarly journals Identity through style : the transatlantic dissemination of Anglican and Episcopalian neo-Gothic church architecture

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Kate M. Kocyba
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Church Architecture ◽  
Church Development ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
Gothic Revival ◽  
High Church ◽  
Protestant Denominations

In the nineteenth century the Episcopalians used Gothic Revival architecture for dogmatic purposes to define their status among Protestant denominations and secure their place in the United States of America. The discussion of neo-Gothic churches in America usually begins after the arrival of the English theological Oxford Movement in the 1830s. I claim the political changes that occurred with the American Revolution along with early nineteenth century American tensions between low and high church Episcopalians fostered a distinct American Episcopalian neo-Gothic church development. Through exchanges of ideas between English and American clergy and architects, American Episcopal High Church architecture developed and spread throughout the United States. By examining specific churches, including those by Frank Wills and Richard Upjohn, in context of Anglican and Episcopalian doctrine, its liturgical practices, and publications by architects and English and American ecclesiological societies, I show how and why neo-Gothic churches became solidified as a signifier of and reinforced the Episcopal faith.

Ecclesiastical Gothic Revivalism

2020 ◽  
pp. 431-446
Author(s):  
William Whyte
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gothic Revival ◽  
Ecclesiastical Architecture ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Church Buildings

This chapter argues that the ecclesiastical Gothic revivalism of the nineteenth century was the consequence of a wider change in contemporaries’ understandings of the nature of church buildings themselves. The product of new ideas about faith and time as well as novel notions about the nature of architecture, this revival was every bit as revolutionary and as distinctively Victorian as contemporaries believed it to be. Thus, although it is now impossible to argue that the Gothic Revival of the nineteenth century completely replaced one style with another, it is possible to see that a Gothic revival of the nineteenth century helped change conceptions of ecclesiastical architecture most profoundly, not least by transforming churches into vehicles of communication in their own right.

Secular Gothic Revival Architecture in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Liverpool

2007 ◽  
pp. 206-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Sharples
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Commercial Buildings ◽  
Gothic Revival

‘Secular Gothic Revival Architecture in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Liverpool’, written by Joseph Sharples, argues against the belief that early and mid-Victorian Liverpudlian architecture was single-mindedly Classical, and instead foregrounds the significant number of Gothic commercial buildings erected in Liverpool from the mid-1860s, suggesting that Liverpool architects were not as constitutionally anti-Gothic as first thought.

The Byzantine Revival in Europe

2021 ◽  
pp. 270-282
Author(s):  
J. B. Bullen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
William Morris ◽  
Gothic Revival ◽  
Byzantine Architecture ◽  
Byzantine Revival

The nineteenth-century interest in Byzantium was essentially a romantic revival following the Gothic revival, triggered by the imagination of Ludwig I of Bavaria and his passion for the Byzantine architecture of Italy. His acquisitional taste was taken up by his brother-in-law, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, in socio-political terms, and by Ludwig II on aesthetic terms. French interest in Byzantium was archaeological, connected to what was called Byzantine or Romanesque building in southwest France. Britain’s contribution was highly individualistic, depending on a small number of strong-minded characters who were willing to challenge the prevailing Gothic orthodoxies. Strengthened first by John Ruskin and then by William Morris, it shifted attention away from the “primitive” simplicity of Byzantine work to its simple majesty.

Battle of the Styles? Classical and Gothic Architecture in Seventeenth-Century North-East England

2012 ◽  
Vol 55 ◽  
pp. 79-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Pears
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Gothic Architecture ◽  
Gothic Revival ◽  
Classical Architecture ◽  
North East ◽  
Architectural Styles ◽  
Classical Style ◽  
British Architecture

Research over the last twenty years into seventeenth-century elite British architecture has questioned the view that Classical designs were the preserve of a narrow group of royal and aristocratic patrons at the Stuart court, and also that Inigo Jones was a ‘lonely genius’ misunderstood in his own lifetime but prophesizing the true Classicism that was to bloom in the eighteenth century.The role of patrons in defining architectural styles has also been analysed, and it has been noted that Classicism was not the only style they favoured. For earlier historians, a perception that Classical architecture was an advance upon the Gothic style of medieval English buildings led to discussions of ‘Gothic survival’ or ‘Gothic revival’ and of a ‘Battle of the Styles’ in sixteenth-, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century buildings, with such patrons as Lady Anne Clifford (1590–1676), who commissioned and renovated buildings in Gothic style, being viewed as a ‘curiosity’ for not employing Classical style.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document