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Brideshead Revisited
2005.08.05 13:00
[Among other things,] I'm currently reading The Building of Castle Howard by Charles Saumarez Smith (1990). So far I've read chapter 2, "The Architect." The fact that Vanbrugh was more a playwright and only an amateur architect recently came to my attention, and now I'm very much intrigued by the man. Even before the televised Brideshead Revisited, Castle Howard (designed beginning 1699) was among my favorite architectural designs--I used to read Fletcher's The History of Architecture on the Comparative Method during study hall when a freshman in high school (1970-71).
I'm now wondering whether the above image of Castle Howard from Vitruvius Britannicus (published 1715-1725) somehow inspired the architecture of Piranesi as delineated within the Campo Marzio (1762). Remember the Ichnographia of the Campo Marzio (1757-62) is dedicated to Robert Adam. Did Adam show Piranesi Vitruvius Britannicus while he (Adam) was friends with Piranesi in Rome in the 1750s? In any case, the perspectival vantage point and indeed the architecture depicted within the perspectives of the Campo Marzio very much evoke the Castle Howard aerial perspective, for example the Frontispiece of the Campo Marzio:
Anyway, here are my favorite passages from The Building of Castle Howard so far:
What is ingenious about Vanbrugh's ground plan at Castle Howard was the way that it contrived to create the maximum visual effects of architectural scale and magnificence out of the minimum number of rooms. Both externally and internally it looked and felt like a much larger house than it actually was, if calculated in floor space.
--page 55.
Every visitor to the house must have experienced disillusionment at the conflict between the excessive grandiosity of the exterior and the disappointing smallness of the rooms inside. The exterior establishes expectations which are not fulfilled indoors. Although both the elevations and the ground plan are, by themselves, magnificently conceived, there is a curious lack of relationship between the two, a feeling of physical incongruity and architectural disjunction. There is only one set of quite small rooms behind much of the great length of the south facade. There is no organic relationship between the layout of the interior and the architectural forms outside. Too much is gratuitous. As Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, a Scottish landowner who had traveled extensively on the continent and was himself an amateur architect, commented on the occasion of a visit on his way to London in 1727, 'there is not one good apartment in the whole house, at least not one which is in any way suitable to the grandeur and expense of the outside.'
--page 57.
These passages got me wondering whether Waugh's Brideshead Revisited is meant to evoke the same feelings about the Marchmain family--deceptively grand on the outside, but actually small on the inside.
Did you know?
Vanbrugh in a letter to the Duchess of Marlborough [in 1716 wrote]: The word Corridore Madam is foreign, and signifys in plain English, no more than a Passage, it is now however generally us'd as an English Word.
--page 54.
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