A s an inveterate reader of the book reviews in the Times Literary Supplement, The Listener and now and then the New York Review of Books I know that books of essays collected years after they have been written get almost without exception a bad press. The reasons are not far to seek. Try as hard as he may, the author cannot perfectly blend into a whole what had been written over a period of many years and for a variety of purposes. Yet it is my conviction that he should try and that books of essays should be published. For what had come out only in a learned journal, or in an ephemeral paper, and perhaps only in a foreign language, often fails to make its impact. And even if it had made an impact at the time when it was new, the record of the development of research tends to get blurred, if the research itself is no longer available. I thought I ought to say this; for the papers represented in these two volumes stretch over a period of nearly forty years. To prepare them for re-publication allowed me, or forced me, to endeavour an objective assessment of their contents and also their significance for me and perhaps for others. They started in Germany and end in England; they started with lusty generalizations and end with humble specific facts; they started with scholarship and end in what strikes me often as superficiality. The substance, to put it in another way, tends to get thinner. If readers agree with me in this I can plead mitigating circumstances. They will, I hope, appear convincing, if I try to show what fields I tilled in these forty years. My doctoral thesis dealt with German Baroque architecture and was complete by 1924. Between 1925 and 1935 I wrote only one book, and the papers here reprinted as Part One are a by-product of that book. They try to demonstrate that Mannerism is the style of the sixteenth century in Italy, in what ways it differs from the Baroque and in what way the Baroque ought to be divided into three phases. About 1930 I began to concentrate on nineteenth-century architecture, but all the notes I had made, including the preparation of a lecture course at Göttingen, were burnt in the war. Between 1935 and 1945 I brought out three books. The most scholarly of them was about the history of the artist's training (Academies of Art, past and present), sign of a change in interest to social problems of art history. The change to nineteenth century architecture was to a certain extent a reflection of this as well. The other two books were Pioneers of the Modern Movement and An Outline of European Architecture. The former is an attempt at distilling the history of one trend in the later nineteenth and the early twentieth century, the latter a summary, successful in the country where it was published, because the treatment of architecture primarily as space, a familiar treatment in Germany, was new for England. Preface These two books were an indication of a turn from writing for scholars to writing for laymen. The difference is not necessarily one of level, it can also be one of presentation. Positively speaking it may mean a shedding of abracadabra. Negatively I need not speak; for the dangers are patent. Readers who have the patience to go through the present two volumes must judge for themselves. To turn to papers, instead of books, was necessary as soon as I joined The Architectural Review. The influence of this event and especially the influence of the spiritus rector of the Review, H. de Cronin Hastings went deep, just as deep as in the German years and in the efforts to analyse Mannerism and Baroque the influence of Wilhelm Pinder had gone. The Architectural Review, in subject matter of research, directed me towards the history of the Picturesque and of visual planning and of course towards topical problems of architecture and design. After 1945 finally my working life changed completely, owing to the willingness of Penguin Books, that is of that great patron Sir Allen Lane, to publish The Buildings of England. I had always felt the necessity of such an enterprise, i.e. of providing for England what Dehio had done in 1905-12 for Germany, but of providing it in much greater detail. That, and the editing of the Pelican History of Art and, alas, more and more committees and councils, cut down the possibilities of preparing and writing papers. Whether I was right in committing myself to The Buildings of England at the expense of all else is a moot point. There are pros and cons. The pro is that the layman and the scholar need such a comprehensive compilation, the con is that it is a compilation and that, in the absence of first-hand research and under the pressure of time, it is a faulty compilation. The papers published in these two volumes then fall into three parts: Mannerism and Baroque; the Picturesque and the problems of Neo-Classicism; the Victorian Age and after. There now remains only one more question. If essays qualify for re-publishing, how should they be re-published? Should they be left untouched, or should they be brought up to date? My rule has been this. Views must be kept. If my views had changed, i.e. if I thought no longer valid what I had written, I would have refrained from reprinting. But a foreword to a paper is occasionally provided to refer to more recent views contrary to mine. Factual errors on the other hand have been corrected and facts left out or only recently discovered by others or myself are incorporated. The paramount example of the unchanged view is the paper on Mannerism, the paramount examples of added facts are the two papers done in conjunction with Dr S. Lang (and added to by her as by myself) on the Doric and the Egyptian Revivals. Only one paper has been largely re-written, that on Voysey. That the late Walter Neurath and Thames and Hudson should have wished to publish so bulky a collection of essays leaves me amazed and profoundly grateful. To his name I wish to add in gratitude those of Ian Sutton and Emily Lane who from inside Thames and Hudson helped in every possible way. N.P. References to notes, which will be found at the back of the book, are given by asterisks in the text and numbers preceded by 'n.' in the corresponding margin. References to illustrations are given by italic numbers in the margin. |