THE
Art of Architecture

A
POEM

In Imitation of Horace's Art of Poetry

(Anonymous)

(1742)

Introduction by
William A. Gibson

PUBLICATION NUMBER 144
WILLIAM ANDREWS CLARK MEMORIAL LIBRARY
University of California, Los Angeles
1970

GENERAL EDITORS

William E. Conway, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
George Robert Guffey, University of California, Los Angeles
Maximillian E. Novak, University of California, Los Angeles

ASSOCIATE EDITOR

David S. Rodes, University of California, Los Angeles

ADVISORY EDITORS

Richard C. Boys, University of Michigan
James L. Clifford, Columbia University
Ralph Cohen, University of Virginia
Vinton A. Dearing, University of California, Los Angeles
Arthur Friedman, University of Chicago
Louis A. Landa, Princeton University
Earl Miner, University of California, Los Angeles
Samuel H. Monk, University of Minnesota
Everett T. Moore, University of California, Los Angeles
Lawrence Clark Powell, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
James Sutherland, University College, London
H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., University of California, Los Angeles
Robert Vosper, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

CORRESPONDING SECRETARY

Edna C. Davis, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT

Roberta Medford, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

INTRODUCTION

John Gwynn, generally accepted as the author of The Art of Architecture (1742), is best known to students of English literature as one of the founders of the Royal Academy and as a friend of Samuel Johnson, who undertook in 1759 to win the Blackfriars Bridge commission for Gwynn with a series of three letters in the Daily Gazeteer1. To architectural historians Gwynn is best known as the architect whose proposals for regularizing the street plans of London and Westminster (in London and Westminster Improved, 1766) were prophetic both of the plan which eventually emerged from the land speculation and building boom of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and of the prominence subsequently given to city-planning.2 But like Dr. Johnson, Gwynn looked as much to the past as he anticipated the future. This is almost inevitable since he too spans the years which saw the last expressions of humanist principles of art and the first struggles to find new bases for aesthetic judgments. Although the date of Gwynn's birth is unknown, he must have been almost an exact contemporary of Dr. Johnson, for he also began his literary career in the 1730's, gained public recognition in the 1750's, associated with members of the Literary Club in the 1760's, and died slightly over a year after Johnson, probably on 27 February 1786.

Their careers exhibit two more instructive parallels. Both began as amateurs, possessed of no specific training, and ended as self-supporting "professionals," able to exercise their skills on demand and fully conscious of the qualifications needed for membership within their professions.3 Second, both began with the hope of "fixing" the rules of their arts, but ended by disavowing the intention or by implicitly contradicting it. Johnson records his disillusionment with one such attempt in the "Preface" to his Dictionary (1755). Gwynn's continuing interest in the attempt is evident in his early proposals for establishing an art academy (An Essay on Design, 1749) and in his serving as a representative of the architectural profession in the founding of the Royal Academy. However his efforts late in his career to accommodate his early principles to the needs of a nation in the midst of an economic and a building boom reveal a considerable shift from his dogmatic support of the rules of art in The Art of Architecture.

The poem is significant in a number of ways. It is the work of a young, inexperienced architect, with literary ambitions, who has learned most of what he knows about the principles of his art from published sources—treatises, pattern books, and measured drawings—rather than in an architect's studio or in a master mason's stone-cutting yard. Take, for example, one of his lists of architects worthy of study: "With M——s, F——ft, G——s, L——i, W——e,/ Let Admiralty, or Custom-house compare" (p. 18). Four of these architects published treatises or translations of treatises which Gwynn certainly knew: Robert Morris, Lectures on Architecture, 1734-364; James Gibbs, Rules for Drawing the Several Parts of Architecture, 1733; James Leoni, translations of Palladio, 1715-16, and of Alberti, 1726; Isaac Ware, translation of Palladio, 1737. The other architect referred to is Henry Flitcroft. The poem is, secondly, an unusually clear expression of the architectural principles—and dilemmas—of a man who is sensitive to changes in taste and in artistic practice, but unaware of the causes of the changes, and probably incapable of grasping their significance. This is precisely what makes The Art of Architecture a valuable document in the history of eighteenth-century criticism. The poem provides a brief but rather full summary of the major precepts of humanist architectural theory accepted in the first half of the century, and introduces an important English innovation. At the same time it reveals the passionate desperation of a man confident in his rules of art but powerless to impose them upon a society enamored of novelty. Gwynn never gave up his youthful ambition of improving English building, but he did give up the positiveness evident in this poem.

Gwynn's general critical bias is readily identifiable because it is consistent with that of many conventionally trained architects of the 1720's and 1730's, and with that of most propagandists for English Palladianism. Like the Earl of Burlington, William Kent, Colin Campbell, Morris, Ware, and Alexander Pope, Gwynn venerated Inigo Jones as England's Palladio, as the architect who showed how Palladio's rules could be naturalized for the English climate (pp. 14, 25). Similarly orthodox is his opinion of the fanciful baroque architecture of Sir John Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor, both of whom are held up as perpetrators of tasteless, licentious innovation (pp. 14, 26). The more chaste baroque architects—Sir Christopher Wren, Gibbs, and Thomas Archer—Gwynn generally admires, although he recognizes occasional flaws in the works of Gibbs and Archer (pp. 14, 29). In remarking on his other "villain" architects, Gwynn reveals his political preferences and some acquaintance with current scandals. At least two of them were aligned with the court party. Thomas Ripley, a one-time carpenter who was one of Pope's targets of satire, erected Houghton for Robert Walpole in accordance with designs by Campbell (pp. 15, 17).5 Edward Oakley dedicated his Magazine of Architecture, Perspective and Sculpture (1730) to Walpole, but received no posts such as those which Ripley, Hawksmoor, Vanbrugh, or John James enjoyed under the Walpole administration (p. 28). Two more architects whom he mentions, besides Gibbs, Vanbrugh, and Ripley, were employed on the notorious projects of the Duke of Chandos—John James and Andrew Shepherd (pp. 10, 23).6 Gwynn's taste and principles were those of an educated elite to which he did not belong—conventional in their moral and aesthetic implications, and conservative in their political ones.

But the significance of The Art of Architecture is not merely as evidence of contemporary attitudes toward Hawksmoor or James, Chapman or Banks. It is rather what Gwynn believes they indicate: the failure to establish in England a building practice firmly based upon a body of principles which architects and men of letters in the first half of the eighteenth century had wanted to believe inviolable. The Palladian revival had helped to subvert the medieval crafts tradition in building (which had been vigorous through the seventeenth century) and had contributed to substituting for the pomp and flamboyance of the baroque a taste for regularity in outline, clear relationship of parts, and a relative simplicity of surface and ornament. Accompanying it was an unprecedented deluge of publications, all of which helped to create a greater popular consciousness of humanist architectural principles than had previously existed. Yet the revival was proving ineffectual, and perhaps the clearest evidence is in Gwynn's attack on Kent: "See the old Goths, in K——'s Designs survive;/ And Modern Fools, to imitate his strive" (p. 26). Kent edited the drawings of the English Palladio for the Earl of Burlington (The Designs of Inigo Jones, With Some Additional Designs, 1727); but at Esher Place, Surrey (ca. 1730), and again in Merlin's Cave, erected at Richmond Park for Queen Caroline (1735), he "anticipate[d] by twenty years the rococo Gothic of the 1750's."7 The latter design was even published with some by Jones two years after The Art of Architecture in John Vardy's Some Designs of Mr. Inigo Jones and Mr. William Kent (1744). Clearly Vitruvius's rule of decor had not restrained even the publicists of Palladianism.

Humanist architectural theory was losing its authority even as it was being widely disseminated; it was also, as was only half clear to Gwynn, becoming increasingly unintelligible. Wealthy patrons of the art looked more and more upon exact knowledge of it as unbefitting the learning of a gentleman. Archaeological studies of antiquities, instead of helping to fix the rules of proportion, were contributing to aesthetic relativity by demonstrating the disparity between ancient practice and Vitruvius's rules. Claude Perrault attempted to resolve these disparities by a system of mathematical averages, but the result of his empirical method is only to substitute one source of relativity for another.8 By the 1740's what Rudolf Wittkower has called the "break-away from the laws of harmonic proportion"9 was well under way, and it represented but a part of the collapse of the several systems of arithmetic and geometric proportion which had dominated humanist theory. Developments in the history of thought made this collapse inevitable. The old aesthetics were based upon correspondences between divine and human artifacts. Thus in designing a building the architect emulated the Divine Architect who "ordered all things in measure and number and weight" (Wisdom 11:20). The geometric forms and the systems of mathematical and harmonic proportions of a building answered to those of the cosmos; likewise the aesthetic attributes of the cosmos—with their attendant moral ones—such as symmetry, uniformity, regularity, and fitness had their correspondences in architecture. Such assumptions provided immutable bases for the rules external to the individual work of art, but the breakdown of analogical reasoning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries necessarily undermined such philosophical-theological foundations. The new epistemology, further, shifted attention from the external world—the previous source of the rules—to the mind perceiving it.

By the 1740's consciousness was growing of threats against the ethical and aesthetic values of Renaissance humanism (best expressed in Pope's Dunciad in Four Books), and of the consequent need for new sources of authority for the rules of art. One highly eccentric quest for authority was published just a year before The Art of Architecture: John Wood's The Origins of Building; or, The Plagiarism of the Heathens Detected (1741). Wood reconstructs the history of architecture to make it conform to Old Testament chronology. Thus he attributes the major tenets of Vitruvius's architectural theory to various patriarchs and ancient Jewish heroes, or, when he finds any justification for doing so, directly to God. Gwynn's attempt to buttress the rules is far more mundane. He seeks support from contemporary philosophy; for example, he introduces the epistemological and ethical systems of Shaftesbury to account for some principles of decorum, but without perceiving the subjectivity he was imposing on them. He rationalizes some of Vitruvius's analogies between natural and architectural forms. But even more clearly indicative of the futility of his effort are his appeals to authority. He implores such aristocratic patrons as Pembroke, Chesterfield, and Burlington to "Be to my Muse a Friend; assist my Cause;/Be Friend to Science, fix'd on Nature's Laws" (p. 30). Perhaps most important, however, is the authority of Horace himself, who provides the model for the poem.

Although neoclassical critics generally accepted the reality of correspondences between architectural and literary criticism, Gwynn did not find the Ars Poetica an entirely manageable model.10 Horace's figures of the mad painter and the mad poet which frame the poem at either end serve Gwynn well, for his imitations of them as the mad