Architectural theorists from Alberti to Palladio thought about architecture typologically. For them buildings were identified principally by their function rather than their form. This way of categorizing architecture has long been recognized by scholars and it has been profitably applied to the study of Italian fifteenth- and sixteenth-century architecture, especially that of villas and palaces. And yet the church, together with its typological subdivisions, such as the oratory, the monastic church, and the pilgrimage church, has remained relatively neglected. As a consequence many aspects of the design of individual churches have been ignored or misunderstood. One example is the church of the Madonna delle Carceri in Prato (Figs 1 and 2). It has generally been discussed either as one of the most beautiful of fifteenth-century centralized churches, or as part of an attempt to characterize the style of its Florentine architect, Giuliano da Sangallo. Although these approaches have revealed much about how the Madonna delle Carceri’s design came into being, when the building is seen from a different perspective, that of its function as a pilgrimage church, it becomes easier to explain aspects of its form, and to suggest alternative models for its design.

In his Vite of 1730 Lione Pascoli reports the opinion of Bernini enthusiasts that Borromini, ‘out of an excessive desire to innovate in ornamentation, had on occasion gone beyond the rules’. Reading this today I think we wonder why they said only ‘on occasion’: how could theorists retain throughout the seventeenth century a conception of architectural rules sufficiently flexible for Borromini ever to be said to satisfy it? This article will examine a small and sometimes overlooked area of architectural decoration — door and window surrounds — and try to discover what such rules might be; firstly by examining the relation between architectural treatises and actual buildings, and then asking to what extent the middle ground between theory and practice can be filled in with a sort of ‘common law’ of architecture: a mixture of precedent, interpretation, and deduction from first principles. It will then attempt not so much to defend Borromini from the charge of going beyond this common law, rather to demonstrate that his innovation depends upon a subtle manipulation of it. In this way I hope to sketch out the dozen or so most important architectural first principles or ‘issues’ which generate virtually every Roman Baroque surround.

In an earlier paper a group of four drawings by an unknown draughtsman of steeple designs by Nicholas Hawksmoor were identified as for the church of All Saints, Oxford and dated to about the year 1700. There is no reason to doubt this identification; the drawings are clearly related and one of them shows the west end of All Saints as built. However, certain features of the designs give an uncomfortable feeling that there is more to the story than this identification provides. All the drawings in the portfolio containing these four seem to date from about 1700. If this small group was produced solely for All Saints, it represents a great deal of work completed in a very short time, soon after March 1700 when the spire of the existing church collapsed. The base of the tower — 30 feet square — is unusually large for a parish church. Few even of the London City churches had towers on such a base, aside from, notably, St Mary-le-Bow and St Bride, Fleet Street. One of the four designs shows a combined tower and steeple rising to a height of about 250 feet. This too would have been unusual, exceeding that of all the City churches, although St Mary-le-Bow and St Bride, Fleet Street come close.

One of Thomas Gray’s admired poetic gifts was the ability to convey striking visual images with a very few, aptly chosen words. As Samuel Johnson put it, Gray’s Elegy written in a Country Church-Yard ‘abounds with images which find a mirrour in every mind’. The visual imagery in Gray’s poetry attests not only to his ability to use words, but also to his ability to use his eyes. Keen observation that underlies Gray’s poetic images also emerges in prose in his letters, journals, and notebooks. He wrote memorable descriptions of landscape. His discerning criticism of paintings is well known, as is his recording of extensive observations in the field of natural history.

Historians of British architecture have long suggested that a fundamental characteristic of the ‘neo’-classical style of the later eighteenth century was the developing relationship between architectural design and the practice of archaeology. John Summerson, for example, opened his account of British neo-classicism by defining it in terms of a ‘concept of art through archaeology, that is, of the enrichment of the present by persistent inquiry into the nature of the past’. More recently, Robin Middleton and David Watkin found that James Stuart and Nicholas Revett’s ‘Proposals’ for The Antiquities of Athens represented a ‘clear statement of a neoclassical aesthetic in 1748 [which] emphasizes the close connection between the study of archaeology and the practice of architecture’, whilst Damie Stillman has suggested that later eighteenth-century classicism ‘combined the imaginative use of the past with a new scientific and archaeological approach’. Such definitions of the interrelation of the creative and the academic, placed as all are in the context of chapters discussing the travels of British architects in the Mediterranean, may be taken to imply that fundamental aspects of late eighteenth-century British design resulted from archaeological research undertaken by the architects themselves. It has perhaps been too readily assumed, however, that British architects who travelled in the Mediterranean in the period between about 1740 and the Napoleonic Wars really did engage personally in a kind of study which can legitimately be called ‘archaeology’. Moreover, although residence at Rome was unquestionably their principal objective in travelling, the activities of British architects there have tended to become conflated with the degree to which ancient Greek architecture was coevally being explored.

‘Mr Gregory may be said to have accomplished one of the greatest domestic architectural works of his time; and Harlaxton will be a lasting monument to posterity of his taste and perseverance’. So wrote the noted genealogist James Burke in 1853 of Harlaxton Manor in Lincolnshire, the house and gardens of which, he asserted, ‘show that a plain English country gentleman of moderate fortune can erect a pile which might be envied by the greatest princes of the continent’. Harlaxton still survives as testimony to the caprice of its patron Gregory Gregory and as justification for Burke’s encomium. However, despite the splendour of the ensemble few contemporary descriptions of it survive and documentation relating to the design of the house is tantalizingly incomplete. The discovery of four previously unrecorded designs for Harlaxton is therefore of considerable importance to our understanding of this early and sophisticated mansion in the revived Jacobean taste. The newly discovered drawings are designs attributed to Anthony Salvin (1799–1881), architect of the house, and comprise pen and watercolour perspective views of the house from the north-west, south, and west, and a proposal for the staircase hall. The drawings date from c. 1831–32 and are among the earliest surviving designs for the house.

Gothic churches of the 1880s bear little resemblance to those of the 1850s. Within less than a generation, a style based on an aesthetic of sublimity, proclaiming an ideal of ‘muscularity’ and eclectic in its sources, had been replaced by a picturesque mode which upheld ‘refinement’ as an ideal and preferred exclusively English models. This change can be traced back to the revisions G. F. Bodley made at the end of 1862 to his designs for All Saints, Jesus Lane, Cambridge. His abrupt abandonment of the style of the 1850s now known as ‘High Victorian’ was early, decisive, and astonishingly influential. However, though All Saints is well known and well documented, the only attempt to explain its architect’s apparently surprising change of direction is the assumption of unsympathetic historians that it represents a failure of nerve. Was it no more than a retreat from the provocative stylistic innovations of the High Victorian years into the safe arms of irreproachable historicism?

A recurrent preoccupation in the history of taste, especially as manifested in architecture, is the attribution of national characteristics to individual styles. Among the better-known examples is the customary nationalist definition accorded to the so-called Château style in Canada, whose stylistic features are as clearly defined as its geographical and historical locations. Thereby it provides a descriptive matrix for the means by which retrospective subjective association can be confused with contemporary cultural intention, in a process here defined as initiation, identification, consolidation, tradition, and recapitulation.

Few, if any, of the passers-by in one of Birmingham’s quieter back streets might guess that one building embodies in its façade the aspirations of two major architectural and social movements. The Eagle Insurance Company building, Colmore Row, Birmingham (1900), by William Richard Lethaby, despite being central to the development of both the Arts and Crafts and Modern movements, has never received its full recognition, although in 1942 Nikolaus Pevsner hailed it as an early native example of the Modern movement. My purpose here is to reassess the façade of the ‘Eagle’ (Fig. 1), though not in terms of any art-historical style — Lethaby himself rejected the contemporary approach to architectural design based on historical styles — but instead within the context of Lethaby’s own theory of architecture, and his intellectual development. The Eagle façade resulted from a problem Lethaby posed in 1891 in one book, and which he ultimately solved in 1928 in another.

The following letters were written to John Summerson by the architect Percy Ernest Newton in 1948. Summerson first met Newton in or about 1922, the year in which Summerson left school and entered the degree course at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. In the same year, Summerson joined the Oxford and Cambridge Musical Club, which at that time occupied 6 Bedford Square. Several notable architects were members of the club, including Halsey Ricardo and F. C. Eden. Newton was a resident member, an accomplished pianist and frequent performer at the musical evenings. Summerson remembered him as a neat, private, and rather cross-looking man. But Newton was a great talker, always ready to gossip about the past, and in Summerson he found a good listener.