Dudley Symon wrote that when
"the Church of England had 'found herself', [and] developed a liturgical sense and interpretation of the popular appeal of her own Liturgy, she instinctively turned to the Classical, the Palladian and the Renaissance model as a more fitting vesture and shrine for her rites. For its meaning and particular beauty to become apparent it needed (as Canon Addleshaw says) such a building as the chapel of Trinity College, Oxford, beloved by Newman, or the churches of Wren".
Indeed, even Pevsner considered Trinity Chapel as "one of the most perfect ensembles of the late C17 in the whole country"..
I'm not sure that all Architecture buffs would agree in cheerfully lumping togetherr the 'impure classicism' of poor Wren with the purities of Andrea Palladio and Inigo Jones. But the sponsors of Palladianism in the Oxford of Queen Anne's time, Aldrich and Clarke, have inspired a suspicion of being linked together by that very high Toryism which merged almost imperceptibly into a careful, fall-back, Jacobitism.
Something to think about as one takes the short cut through Peck Quad ...
And rumours about Lord Burlington's more private politics have never quite died away, have they? Earlier this year, the National Trust revealed evidence that Sir Henry Bedingfield, 3rd Baronet of Oxburgh Hall, was slipping money to James VIII's banker in 1726, when he was in Paris with Burlington (whose sister he married). He also made payments to Andrew Crotty, Burlington's agent, who was known to the Hannoverian Intelligence Service as "the great Jacobite" (The Times, Feb 15 2020).
I wish I knew more about Architecture! Can anybody put me straight?
There is an interesting chapter in Sir Howard Colvin's Unbuilt Oxford.
Canon Addleshaw and Cardinal Newman were, of course, both Trinity men.
ReplyDeleteI have seen the argument that Palladian architecture from the 1720s was an expression of Whiggish culture - a Senatorial class - as opposed to the Tory preference for the Baroque and continental architects. Not an absolute rule ( no pun intended ) - Blenheim ( though not to the first Duke and Duchess of Marlborough’s taste) and Castle Howard are Baroque as is part of Kimbolton - all grand Whig houses.
ReplyDeleteCertainly, the conventional wisdom used to be that the Whigs went Palladian whilst the Tories built baroque. Even if that was ever broadly true, it was complicated by things like Burlington's putative crypto-Jacobitism, as embodied in the plasterwork at his unimpeachably Palladian villa at Chiswick (though much of the cryptic stuff there is just straightforwardly Masonic, I am told). Anyway, everybody went Palladian(ish) in the long run, but I prefer the Roman baroque slant given by (the crypto-Catholic, former seminarian) Gibbs.
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