Viewing the Collector through the Collection

My title does not immediately indicate who is the he associated with the his. In other words, which of the two named names, Cavaliere Giovanni Battista Piranesi or Sir John Soane, may have been said to have been mischievous in their conduct, or why. One of them did accuse the other of such mischievousness, yet given the received histories of these two designers it could be considered a matter conveyed by the saying that “it takes one to know one.” And it is. But what will be investigated here is the comparative and contrasting correlation of such mediated knowing—mediated in the sense that knowledge is always an act of interpretation and that this knowledge is conducted in and through built, drawn, and written mediums. What makes the media of both of these designers to be investigated here mischievous is that, more than just playfully admirable or annoying—as their various actions and artifacts have been to many—in both cases their works have been considered, by some, as actually harmful to culture and society. At root, in the meaning of the word, is that, to critics and supporters alike, their respective “achievements” mis-achieve, by deliberately seeming to refuse to provide definitive manifestations of what should be considered as proper cultural and social conduct. Each section in this investigation will start with debates seemingly internal merely to artistic disciplines and legacies—questions of style, space, scale, structure, surface—but in the critical responses that they elicited, what is revealed are anxieties regarding the very epistemological categories of cultural and social identities and their correlate conducts.

A case in point would be John Britton’s opening sentence of his account of John Soane’s House & Museum in Illustrations of the public buildings of London: with historical and descriptive accounts of each ediface, which he edited with Augustus Pugin: “We are now arrived at a singularly ticklish and perplexing subject—perplexing, if on no other account, because we have been quite at a loss in what division of this work to place it, it being neither a public nor a private building, but so strange an anomaly compounded of both, that we ought to have formed an Epicene section on purpose for it.”¹ I will return to Britton’s engendered consternation in a subsequent section, but such mischievous intentions and attentions will be often imputed to Soane, wherein cultural and social categories denominated as known become epistemologically ticklish and perplexing, particularly due to his techniques of compounding anomalistic interchanges through what will be described here as spatial porosities, comparably contrastive scaling, and structure demonstratively (over)expressed but held in suspension—techniques evident as well in Piranesi’s work. Such basic matters of architectural articulation and organization routinely raised fundamental questions in regard (and disregard) to acts of basic knowing.

In fact, Piranesi and Soane did know each other personally, having met briefly in Rome during Soane’s Grand Tour in 1778, just months before Piranesi’s death. So, the title quotation could have been said by either architect commenting on the other, but in fact the statement is dated thirty-seven years later, in 1815, in a footnote to the Eighth Lecture of the series Soane gave at the Royal Academy: “There is likewise a church built after the designs of Piranesi [Santa Maria del Priorato (Fig. 1)], which is another proof that it is not enough to have fine examples before our eyes. Indeed Piranesi seems not to have felt those beauties of the antique which he has so ably delineated, beyond the power of making out of ruins, bold and imposing pictures.”² Those pictures of bold and imposing ruins would include the very ones, for example, that Piranesi presented to Soane that summer in Rome—the Arch of Constantine, the Arch of Septimius, the Tomb of Cecilia Metella, and the Pantheon—which Soane hung in the Picture Room of his House & Museum.³ Soane’s footnote continues this oscillation of extolling and lamenting: “In that view, his labours, by giving a true splendour and value to the antique, deserve the admirations and gratitude of the artist, but when he forgets himself, and despises the Greeks, from whose works the Romans derived all their knowledge of architecture, his conduct is mischievous.”⁴

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In this lecture, Soane is referring to major debates in the fields of art and architecture that had been going on by that time for decades and in many ways are still going on today: questions of “simplicity” and “complexity” in searches for alternative origins to what was considered by many as the aesthetic monopoly Italy and its Roman antiquity wielded in the cultural fields. As the polemic then went, it was Greece, not Rome, that originated all that was noble and graceful in the arts, while the Romans had not only stolen their ideas from the Greeks but had debased those ideas with overly elaborate and confused ornamentation that ruined the straightforward and noble simplicity of Grecian post and lintel construction. It may seem surprising that Soane is criticizing Piranesi in this regard, as the latter’s drawings of Paestum would seem to convey that, on the contrary, each and every one is a celebration of the “noble simplicity” of Greek architecture. This critical attitude could be explained by the fact that when Soane made those remarks he was still two years away from acquiring these drawings—even, in the unlikely case, that he had not seen or heard about them from Piranesi himself in Rome, given that Piranesi was just then in the midst of working on them. Although the ruins of Paestum, outside Naples, are now ascribed to a period of Grecian colonization of Italy in the late seventh century BCE, as Lola Kantor-Kazovsky has proposed, Piranesi most likely believed the complex to have been constructed by the Etruscans, the Italian predecessors to the Romans, in keeping with Italian archeological positions of his time.⁵ Even if these buildings were supposed to be Grecian, Robin Middleton has proposed that Piranesi considered them “more beautiful by far … than those of Greece itself or even Sicily,” as they “were on Italian soil.”⁶ But as for feeling “those beauties of the antique,” this was not, by the way, an opinion felt by everyone, certainly not by the then twenty-six-year-old Soane visiting the ruins after his meeting with Piranesi in Rome, first in March 1779 and again in February 1780. While thirteen years after his mischievous comment regarding Piranesi’s lack of feelings, Soane does indeed cite the former’s Paestum drawings, self-quoting from later presentations of his Royal Academy lectures how “‘the simple grandeur and solemn effect of the Temple of Paestum’” were “‘so admirably represented in these original drawings of Piranesi,’” but in his travel sketchbook the younger Soane stated that Paestum had been founded not by the Greeks but “by the Phœnicans; The Architecture of the three Doric Temples are exceedingly rude, the Temples at the extremities have all the particulars of the Grecian Doric, but not the elegance & taste.”⁷

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Yet, decades later when Soane gave his Royal Academy lectures, “the great Temples of Paestum” had for him become among “the best work of the Greeks,” to the extent that he had illustrations prepared of them (Fig. 2) to present during the lectures.⁸ And thus, in the Eighth Lecture the now sixty-one-year-old Soane chides Piranesi for his infamous debates regarding the supremacy of Rome over Greece. Piranesi was engaging in those debates in the mid-1760s as he was designing Santa Maria del Priorato, imagining an intensively hybrid construction of what he termed the three manners of architecture—columns, pilasters, and walls—in response to direct and indirect attacks on his own work, as well as the cultural campaign to crown as supreme what Piranesi saw as not just the simple but rather the simplistic styling of the Greeks.⁹ In contrast, throughout his lectures, Soane calls for a return to the first principles of the Greeks and thus finds Piranesi mischievous, even if many commentators since have noted the distance between Soane’s own complex work and the ideas of Greek purity and simplicity he presented in his lectures. As in the “it takes one to know one” adage, the architect and author Sir Reginald Blomfield—who like Soane, had been Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy—would, a little over a hundred years later, in 1921, reflect some of those sentiments back at Soane, in the “Ugly Buildings” column of the British daily newspaper The Times (Fig. 3): “Soane was a man of some ability, with a mischievous passion for original design and for the rehabilitation of some of the ugliest details of the Classical.”¹⁰

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For Soane, the relation of what constitutes proper or mischievously passionate conduct with regard to “original design,” and consequently to what degree details rehabilitated from the Classical may be fixed or varied, is in flux throughout the Royal Lectures—sometimes all within a single passage. In the Third Lecture, for example, there is a paragraph that begins, “Many persons have considered the orders of architecture as unalterably fixed by the ancients,” but then continues with the counterclaim for the essential need for the alterability of Classical rules: “This is directly contrary to the doctrine of Vitruvius, who expressly says that the proportions of columns in theatres and private buildings are to differ in their proportions, forms, and ornaments from those used in sacred temples. Had not this variety been necessary, architecture would have been mere matter of routine.” But he then inversely concludes with a warning regarding the danger of an extreme disregard of rules that would counter both of these claims: “Others have held opinions directly opposed to those just mentioned, and having observed in many ancient buildings prodigious differences, even in the essential parts of all the orders, they therefore concluded that everything in architecture was only matter of whim, caprice, and fancy, unrestrained by rules and unregulated by any fixed principles. Nothing, however, can be less founded than this doctrine, nor fatal to art.”¹¹ Rules, in other words, may be anomalously altered but only as exceptions from within the restraint and the regulations of fixed principles, rather than as exceptions to the rules. Thus, for Soane, because John Vanbrugh “felt the force of the simplicity of the ancients,” his “bold flights of irregular fancy” are “superior to common conceptions, and entitles him to the high distinctive appellation of the Shakespeare of architects. To try the works of such an artist by the strict rules of Palladian tameness would be like judging the merits and mighty darings of the immortal bard by the frigid rules of Aristotle.”¹² Whereas Inigo Jones’s compositions at Blackfriars Bridge and the Banqueting House “must be considered as the playful fancies of genius, unfettered by rules, calculated to increase the pleasing effects, and likewise to show the varied powers of architecture, to interest the mind, but such designs will never reach true sublimity.”¹³

In these regards, perhaps the greatest scorn is reserved, in the Eighth Lecture, for Borromini—and, by quite direct association, Piranesi:

In many of our buildings there is much originality, novelty and variety but it must not be forgotten that novelty, although a bewitching siren, has bounds; variety, with all her charms has limits. In both, the artist must show moderation and sound judgement, not overstepping the modesty of nature lest he should fall into the excesses of Borromini and those of his school who, like Piranesi, passing by the fine examples of antiquity, carried what they called the powers of invention so far as to lose sight entirely of the simple and unaffected grandeur of those ancient compositions that have stood the test of ages.

The works of Borromini and his followers, on the contrary, can only be looked upon as mighty mazes of chaotic confusion, wherein nothing is defined, one form constantly running into another, without taste, use, or meaning, works frivolous, and expensive beyond measure.¹⁴

Piranesi is thus linked to the excesses of Borromini and his followers, such excesses all the more seemingly inexcusable given that, unlike the Grand Tourists, these architects were living among the fine examples of antiquity.

This sentiment is expressed even more directly with regard to Piranesi just seven paragraphs prior, in a single sentence in the passage linked to Soane’s “mischievous” footnote regarding Santa Maria del Priorato and the conduct of Piranesi:

That men, unacquainted with the remains of Ancient Buildings, should indulge in licentious and whimsical combinations is not a matter of surprise, but that a man, who has passed all his life in the bosom of Classic Art, and in the contemplation of the majestic ruins of Ancient Rome, observing their sublime effects and grand combinations, a man who had given examples how truly he felt the value of the noble simplicity of those buildings, that such a man, with such examples before his eyes, should mistake confusion for intricacy, and undefined lines and forms for classic variety, is scarcely to be believed; yet such was Piranesi.¹⁵

The eyes to which Soane asserted that he was setting examples of value for—right at the start of his First Lecture—were those of the students in the arts of design, tasked as he said he was by the laws of the Royal Academy. Those rules “declared that ‘there shall be a Professor of Architecture who shall annually read six lectures to form the taste of the students, to interest them in the laws and principles of composition, to point out to them the beauties or faults of celebrated productions, to fit them for the unprejudiced study of books, and for the critical examination of structures.’”¹⁶ In these terms, then, if you have examples of noble simplicity before your eyes, your conduct—in the etymological sense of leading, of gathering together—should be, in setting such examples before other eyes, similarly exemplary. And thus, any overelaborated mixtures or novel confusion in the definition of lines and forms—either in your words or in your works—would be evidence of mischievousness, of mis-achieving, in the etymological sense of missing some seemingly desired achievement, whether due to playful or to malicious intent. Throughout the lectures, Soane uses this term in the latter negative sense, referring to “mischievous tendencies, and sometimes fatal consequences,” “mischievous tendency of defective, hasty, and incorrect estimates,” and “dreading the mischievous consequences of innovation.”¹⁷ In the latter regard, five paragraphs later in Soane’s opening address in that first lecture, he states “I must caution my young friends not to expect great novelty in these discourses, for novelty and flights of fancy, however amusing, cannot be very instructive, and of course not very conducive to the main object of these lectures which is to trace architecture from its most early periods, and to show its various stages of progressive improvements in different countries, as well as the causes thereof.”¹⁸ In later historic periods, such terms shift repeatedly in their conducive signification, as already noted, and Soane’s own celebrated flights of novel fancy will be faulted—by future Professors of Architecture of the Royal Academy like Blomfield—as examples of his “mischievous passion for original design.”

As for Soane’s Royal Academy Lectures, these were presented and revised throughout a period (1810–1821) contemporaneous with the primary development of his House & Museum (1812–1825), the transformative genealogy of which I will examine in the concluding section in relation to matters raised by these lectures as well as by the Paestum drawings. His first set of six lectures, initially delivered in 1810, was held in suspension for two years after his Fourth Lecture, due to Soane’s censure by the Royal Academy for criticizing, in his stated task of “point[ing] out … the beauties or faults of celebrated productions,” the production of a living artist, fellow architect Robert Smirke’s Covent Garden Theatre. That questionable conduct was defended by Soane, who likewise felt the Academy’s response an “assassin-like attack on my own character and conduct.”¹⁹ Soane’s own attack on Smirke was the inverse of his attack on Piranesi, due not to Smirke’s lack of appreciation for Greek architecture but rather to the “mischief” resulting from his lack of understanding of its principles—particularly given the extensive “praises lavished on the exterior” of the building as an example of Grecian architecture:

Take a Grecian temple and place an attic on it. I know not from what strange notions the exterior of Covent Garden Theatre has been considered a work of Grecian architecture. Nothing … can be more calculated to do mischief and to injure those concerned in its formation. Whoever saw the front of the Grecian temple or any other Grecian building broken in a variety of parts, composed of fragments of different ages and different works?²⁰

Now, depending on your perspective, on what examples you have seen with your own eyes, Piranesi’s church might first strike you, as it has others through the centuries, as either an undefined, confused, licentious fanfare composed of a variety of broken fragments or a moderate and rather static neoclassical renovation (as it did appear to me on my very first visit), static certainly if your primary orientation to Piranesi is through his more extreme and dynamic spatializations of his imaginary Prisons drawings (as was mine then). In which case you might well find that Soane in his own House developed what some would consider more “Piranesian space” than what would appear Piranesi achieved in his church. Indeed, the term “Piranesian space” has, it seems, become a rather loose cultural-code phrase, as indicated, for example, when the New York Times art critic Ken Johnson described an art installation of the contemporary artist Douglas Gordon as “creating a breathtakingly expansive illusion of deep architectural space. In its vertiginous complexity, it’s like a vision by the 18th-century printmaker Piranesi.”²¹

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In Soane’s House, vertiginous complexity is manifest in a number of ways but most evidently as the multilayered interplay both within and between floor levels, which in the narrow confines of the house creates the expansive illusion of deep architectural space. While some general linking of Soane to created examples of “Piranesian space” occurs often in the literature, Helen Dorey, the primary archivist of the House & Museum since the 1990s, in her analysis of Joseph Michael Gandy’s early View of the Dome area by lamplight looking south-east (1811) (Fig. 4) has provided the most concerted attempt to give some characteristics to the terms of this relation:

This atmospheric watercolour was drawn early in 1811 and shows the Dome by night, dramatically lit by a hidden light source in the Crypt, illustrating exactly the kind of lumière mystérieuse that appealed to Soane. The striking light, exaggerated perspective and low viewpoint, which increase the apparent scale of the interior, are reminiscent of Piranesi’s views of the ruins of Rome. Both the piling up of fragments and the juxtaposition of diverse elements seem to owe something to Piranesi’s fantasies. Not only does the pile of fragments jut forward over the central space of the Dome area to the left, but another pile projects forward to the right topped by a model of one of the temples of Paestum. On the far north side of the Dome is the figure of Soane himself, dwarfed by his creation and gesturing to invite the spectator to view his collection.²²

Three significant attributes should be noted in this description: (1) oblique views and illumination are developed through adjacent and distant porous pockets of layered space, (2) comparative (enlarging or dwarfing) plays of spatial scale are fostered by the “piling up” and “juxtaposition” of elements within and between these spaces, and (3) pointed and poignant projective suspensions of structure are deployed to delineate and enframe these key subscenes internested within the complexity of the overall scene. What may be further noted is the self-referential metaprojection, literally and figuratively, and figurally, of the figure of Soane at the right side, projecting forward as well, his arm suspended in space and time, gesturing toward the left from deep within a layered pocket of the space behind one of the delicately insubstantial columns—both column and human comparatively scaled in contrast to the massive, jutting piles of historic memory. Soane is pointing not just generally to his collection but directly at not an example of Grecian noble simplicity but rather to a Roman exemplar for him—his prized cork model of the Temple of Vesta, Tivoli, which served as the precedent for his “Tivoli Corner” at the Bank of England. The Grecian example of Paestum, as Dorey has astutely observed, is visible at the right edge of the drawing, but only barely, seemingly just another piled-up fragment in the midst of what many commentators have considered—as Soane considered the works of Borromini and his followers, including Piranesi—a mighty maze of chaotic confusion, wherein nothing is defined, one form constantly running into another, without taste, use, or meaning, works frivolous, and expensive beyond measure.

Given that Piranesi’s Paestum drawings are one of several spatially complex series that take a certain pride of place in his Picture Room in the House & Museum, alongside the three Venetian scenes by Canaletto and the two William Hogarth series (A Rake’s Progress and The Humours of an Election), one might well ask how these drawings may have influenced Soane. But perhaps the more pertinent question to ask is in what specific manners they may be said to resonate with the design of the buildings and representations of Soane—what modes and techniques, what senses and sensibilities? It is necessary to be careful here. Many observers have suggested, sometimes in passing, some general as well as some specific influences of Piranesi on Soane.²³ Indeed I will propose some additional specific references manifest in Soane’s work, even a few select ones, as yet unnoted in prior commentary, from the very church by Piranesi that Soane decried. But it is important to state that the complexity of architectural creation, particularly in complex designers such as Piranesi and Soane, is such that any attempt to ascertain one-to-one citational correspondence of precedent and influence, while important and even necessary, ultimately provides a limited perspective on the process of transformation and development in the work of design. What can be considered—as an interpretative investigation, an investigation into acts of interpretation—is how Piranesi’s Paestum drawings may provide a perspective with which to look back at Soane, how the sense and sensibility of this important part of this English architect’s collection may reveal aspects of the sense and sensibility of the collector.

Exhibitions of these drawings, most recently at the Morgan Library & Museum and at Stanford University, provided the opportunity to re-view these associations, utilizing the incisive curatorial descriptions in the exhibitions for further reflections on Soane’s work.²⁴ There are three aspects of Piranesi’s Paestum drawings that are relevant as evidence here, aspects noted by the curators of the Morgan and Stanford exhibitions as having been developed through exaggerated techniques in modes of representation, which some indeed might call mischievous. These three techniques coincide with the attributes and effects observed by Dorey in her description of the “Piranesian” manner of Gandy’s depiction of the Dome Area: (1) oblique views developed through adjacent multilayered porosities, (2) comparative plays of scale, and (3) structure suspended to delineate or enframe.²⁵ While I will make a few observations regarding the Paestum drawings beyond or in response to the curator’s descriptive observations on the specificities of particular drawings, my principal interest here is to use them as lenses through which to view the work of Soane, focusing particularly on the House & Museum. These curatorial sentences are especially pertinent here because they are not only some of the all-too-rare museum wall texts that actually attempt to describe the attributes of their artifacts (rather than just providing ancillary or auxiliary information with little attempt to relate this information back to the specificities of the work), they are also some of the rare lines written about Piranesi’s Paestum drawings that do so with close attention to each drawing.²⁶ One might imagine that our attentions to objects and representations in the work of architectural history would be on par with our attentions to other evidentiary material from primary documentation and secondary literature, whatever their proportional mixture. This would suggest that a form of research might begin with an active searching and re-searching into those objects and representations, especially in those artifacts that we have stopped seeing because we have used them too many times as mere illustrations—as many views of Soane’s House & Museum have become—in order to ascertain how primary and secondary documents (especially those that also have become too familiar) might be re-searched again to provide new perspectives and relations.²⁷

In these regards, digital visualization will be utilized in select sections of this essay as a means of investigating the cognitive processes and epistemological modes enacted in these works, rather than as an end to mere illustration—as a way to extend the digital humanities beyond their important but preliminary forays in basic reconstructive documentation and online archives. The purpose of these tools is to provide more extensive agency to engage analytically with and within representations, in order to avoid the tendency—common in all kinds of writing on art and architecture, from museum wall texts to scholarly literature—to talk alongside of or away from their designated artifacts. Whether one starts and develops one’s thought process through the analysis of representations or starts from the literature and then develops one’s thoughts through representations, the point to avoid is the mere inclusion of illustrations following after texts as after-thoughts, as illustrations that are literally and merely beside the (textual) point. However new these digital tools, their utilization is just one means to extend critical forms of philological exploration that in this case, as Manfredo Tafuri suggested, investigate representations “very slowly, since they should inspire as little emotion as possible and instead address the rational mind” as a way to “promote a kind of discovery”— as in the case of the one example he cited: “The discovery of a drawing by an artist that belonged to another artist.”²⁸

In this investigation of potential discoveries not of but within the representational relations between artists, the curatorial texts for these particular Piranesi Paestum drawings, already well known as having belonged to Soane, are thus only one part of a collection of evidence utilized in this essay, which includes artifacts (objects and representations and texts) of Piranesi and Soane, as well as a range of commentary from House of Commons records, museum catalogs and press releases, popular magazines, newspapers, and scholarly literature—authored across four centuries by architects, critics, curators, historians, members of Parliament, and writers of Letters to the Editor. The inclusion of increasingly diverse evidence in recent historical inquiry should make it clear that what is important is less (what may in any historical period be ascribed to the valuation of) their hieratical significance than the degree to which multiple modes of evidentiary material and their analysis may be developed as collective networks of corroborative or conflictual evidence, as one relates objects and representations to texts, and texts to objects and representations.

“Solid and voids should be in due proportion to each other”: Multilayered Porosity

In the relational manner and matter of objects and representations and texts, in contrast to what Soane described in his lecture text as the mischievous, undefined, confused, licentious fanfare of Piranesi’s church, the latter’s Paestum representations might appear, on a first viewing, barely distinguishable from similar static representations of Paestum in this period. As they did to me when I was asked to present a public lecture at the Morgan on the occasion of their exhibit there, having barely glanced at them—even during my extended analytic study of the church subsequent to that first visit²⁹—from among Piranesi’s vast array of seemingly more spatially dynamic views. But when observed more closely and slowly, one immediate distinguishing attribute of those drawings is that most of the other representations of Paestum up to Piranesi’s time emphasized each of the temples separately, in their whole isolated purity, or, when a number of the temples are shown together, they are kept distinctly apart, more or less equally, across the distance — as in Antonio Joli’s view, Fig. 5a, which in Soane’s Lecture view (see Fig. 2) was mirrored and, as in the Piranesi drawing later acquired by Soane, enframed by a foregrounded archway (see Fig. 17). Even in comparison to those views by other artists taken from a middle range that maintain a relatively clear depiction of the spatial layers of the temples (as in Pietro Fabris, Fig. 5b), Piranesi sets up compounded viewpoints that, as the exhibition noted, “blur the distinctions between the columns” of one temple and another—as in the View of the Interior of the Basilica, Looking Northeast (Study for plate VIII), where, “looking back at the entrance to the Basilica, the Temple of Neptune can be seen in the background beyond the columns to the left” Fig. 6a), and in the drawing the exhibition suggested was the most evocative of the series (Interior of the Temple of Neptune, Looking Southeast [Study for plate XVII], Fig. 6b).

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Throughout the Paestum series, Piranesi elides space and surface, blurring distinctions within and between layers, evidencing a complex sense of porosity wherein layers of luminescent voids manifest as enframed by the solid architectural figures of columns and entablatures. In his Fifth Lecture Soane stated, “In all architectural compositions the solid and voids should be in due proportion to each other.”³⁰ With regard to the porosity of the House & Museum, I will be referring not merely to inconsequential spatial gaps between “solid” entities but to the relational exchanges between the programmatically filled and voided spaces—taking Soane at his literal words, observing their “due proportion to each other,” the debt they owe each other in the manifestation of each other’s ideation and identity. In this section the relations between solids and voids will be examined first as to their ideation in the period’s debates in which Soane engaged regarding the geometric “quantity of air” of intercolumniation, leading to the degree these relations, as manifest in the House & Museum, put into dynamic inter-spatial play certain static conventions regarding the programmatic geometries of social and psychological identity.

In this regard Soane’s inversion of his evaluation and valuation of Paestum from “rude” to “one of the great works” may be ascribed to a figural inversion: from a focus on the columnar order to that of its intercolumniation, that enframement of porous space between architectural elements wherein the “negative” voids between the solid figures of columns and entablatures emerge as “positive” figures. In Soane’s Third Lecture at the Royal Academy, in which he discusses his theory of intercolumniation and in which the great temple at Paestum is cited as “a fine example” of the “species of temple called hypaethral” that “have peristyles externally and internally,” the “quantity of air” between columns becomes a quality, perceivable as a thickness, a mass visually massive enough to compress laterally the actually massive flanking columns in inverse proportion to its quantity: “In proportion as the distance between the columns is enlarged, so the thickness of the shafts should be increased also; for, according to the width of the intercolumniation, the air, in appearance, lessens, and diminishes the thickness of the shafts … and for the same reason the second set of columns in porticoes should be smaller than those in the front rows, because they are surrounded with a less quantity of air.”³¹

Given the decades and design-developmental distance since Soane had personally experienced Paestum, this inversion of his estimation may be linked to his close reading of Joseph Forsyth’s account of Paestum in Remarks on Antiquities, Arts, and Letters, during an Excursion in Italy in the Years 1802 and 1803 (1813), which Soane acquired in 1814 and annotated extensively while preparing for the second series of his Royal Academy Lectures.³² Sigrid de Jong notes that Forsyth observes a play of scale and space counter to certain Vitruvian notions wherein

intercolumniations should be in direct proportion to the relative thickness of the columns. Now these [the columns of Paestum], in proportion to their height, are the thickest columns I have seen, and yet their relative distance is the least. This closeness makes the columns crowd advantageously on the eye, it enlarges our idea of the space, and gives a grand, an heroic air to monuments of very moderate dimension.³³

It may be proposed that Forsyth’s paradoxically inverse conception in the relation of solids and voids provided for Soane, in the penultimate pages of his final lecture, the Twelfth, a counterargument to William Chambers’s criticisms of Greek architecture (alluded to in the Third Lecture), which Soane quotes from Chambers’s Treatise on the Decorative Part of Civil Architecture (1791):

I am inclined to believe that many of the deformities observable in the Grecian buildings must be described to their deficiency in the constructive part of architecture, such as their gouty columns, their narrow intercolumniations, their hypaethral temples which they knew not how to cover, and their temples with a range of columns running in the centre to support the roof.³⁴

Although Chambers neither visited nor named Paestum in his treatise, its attributes are recognizable here. This passage was originally written to be delivered at the Royal Academy in a series of lectures Chambers prepared around 1770–1771 in the event that Thomas Sandby, Soane’s teacher, who was ill at the time, was unable to deliver his own series as the designated Professor of Architecture.³⁵ As such, Chambers’s use of the word “gouty” is not too far removed in time or sense from the young Soane’s assessment, in 1780, of the Paestum columns as being “exceedingly rude.” In his own Twelfth Lecture, in 1815, Soane, sensitive perhaps to criticisms regarding any deficiency in the constructive part of his own architecture, seeks to defend and extol the perceptual virtues of narrow intercolumniation. Following Forsyth, he proposed that the quantitative increase in the density of the interstitial space between columns results in a qualitative effect wherein, as in rows of trees, smaller regular intervals paradoxically produce an apparent sense of more space than do rows with larger interstitial intervals:

If we compare two rows of trees, one row having small regular intervals, and the other large spaces between the trees, although both are the same in extent, the first will produce infinitely more variety and beauty, and more apparent quantity than the latter. Can it be supposed that the Grecian architects, whose acuteness led them to make the external columns of their porticos larger than the others, because they observed that the different quantity of air which surrounded them, made them appear smaller; having perceived this increased beauty, variety and enlarged quantity in the trees planted close, did not transpose the effect into their buildings?³⁶

And it may be supposed as well that Soane sought to emulate this acuteness by transposing this effect throughout his House & Museum, believing paradoxically, as did Piranesi, that increased density would increase the beauty, the variety, and not just the quantity but the quality of space. Creating, in due proportion, pockets of uncovered voided space within the complex. And so, not surprisingly, in the next two paragraphs he defends the Greeks with regard to Chambers’s charge that they did not provide enough built coverage over their structures. “The ancients did not think it suitable that particular divinities should be confined in temples,” he noted, so the “dome of the Pantheon was not left with a hole in the centre from any deficiency in constructive knowledge, not for light only, but rather it may be presumed in compliance with some religious mystery.”³⁷ The uncovered Monument Court (with its totemic Pasticcio) and Monk’s Yard (with its tomb for Padre Giovanni, which in Soane’s words “adds to the gloomy scenery of this hallowed place”) that Soane carved out of the existing building fabric convey some sense of his attempt at “religious mystery.”³⁸ So too did the lamplit evening House tours that Soane, ten years hence, would choreograph around his newly acquired Belzoni Sarcophagus in the Sepulchral Chamber and the adjacent Egyptian Crypt. Similar sentiments are expressed by the “future” narrators of Soane’s fictive texts on Pitzhanger Manor (written in 1802) and the House (Crude Hints towards an History of My House in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, written in 1812), who, encountering these “mysterious” buildings, imagined ancient rites having been practiced throughout—particularly in those multilevel internal void spaces reminiscent of, as Soane wrote, “one of those Carcerian dark Staircases represented in some of Piranesi’s ingenious dreams for prisons.”³⁹

These spatialized evocations may suggest the motivation—related to Soane’s notion of uncovered zones in Grecian temples and the interest and sensation that the views of those internal spaces in the Paestum drawing and in so many of Piranesi’s other works may have evoked for Soane—for the distribution of these uncovered and top-lit voids throughout the building, this bringing in of light through the filtering porosity of the building in order to produce a lumière mystérieuse, an intended fabrication of the sense and sensation of a “gloomy” (and thus to some, overbearing) atmosphere. Or perhaps inversely: that his own design sensibility may have provided further motivation for his defense of the Greeks against the charges of Chambers. Yet in the lecture, following this defense, Soane then exonerates Chambers, as he did Piranesi, stating, “The criticisms just alluded to, are, however, only venial sins, the results of early prejudices, and zeal for established opinions,” referring perhaps by extension to his own earlier “rude” prejudices toward Paestum.⁴⁰

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The multiple layers of columns and entablatures filtering indirect sources of light in Piranesi’s Paestum drawings evoke this lumière mystérieuse that Soane mentions experiencing in France in 1778 on his way to Italy.⁴¹ He would have experienced a similar phenomenon, it should be said (even if he did not), in Piranesi’s church, whose altar, an accumulated mass of multiple figurations, is enframed by the oblique permeation of indirect light (Fig. 7a), a familiar visual sensation in Soane’s House (Fig. 7b).

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But to say that Piranesi’s Paestum perspectives merely manifest multilayering is insufficient as a description to distinguish them from limitless other representational artifacts. To provide a more apposite visual analogue to this multilayered permeation, you could imagine the porosity evident in a dried loofah. If this sounds metaphoric, I would propose that metaphor has little productive use in historical inquiry, except to the extent that its attributes can be analogically and metonymically linked through comparison to the artifact in question. A dried loofah is not just a solid mass with a collection of holes but an object wherein the “solid” masses, the membranes around the loofah’s major voids, are themselves full of pockets of voided space, at a smaller scaling. If this analogue still seems far-fetched, fetched too far from the realms of architecture, in this case Soane’s architecture, Joseph Michael Gandy’s drawing of Soane’s Bank of England as a ruin, with its large rotunda spaces surrounded by porous membranes, might seem to fetch it nearer to our subject (Fig. 8a), nearer still if we also fetch its precedent in Piranesi’s depiction of the Ruins of the Antonine Baths (Fig. 8b). Nearly every drawing and print of Piranesi’s Paestum work reveals a similar multilayered porosity, which Soane developed throughout the interior of the House & Museum through what Middleton has incisively characterized as a series of techniques enabled through porous skeletal frameworks around pockets of space:

Soane creates what appear to be perfectly regular, symmetrically framed spaces. He then wraps layers of space around these skeletal frameworks and proceeds to subvert the geometry of these conglomerate spaces by dematerialising the architecture, flooding the walls with light from concealed sources … and breaking the surfaces with linear patterns and a mess of accumulated objects. The prime pockets of space are connected to one another in the most extraordinary ways.⁴²

It is this layering of pockets of space around skeletal frameworks while deploying lights from concealed sources that Dorey observed in Gandy’s View of the Dome area: “dramatically lit by a hidden light source in the Crypt, illustrating exactly the kind of lumière mystérieuse that appealed to Soane.”⁴³

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The principal metonymic of these skeletal frameworks correlating to porous loofah membranes in the House & Museum are the human-scaled cabinetry and the field of figural fragments of the collection, which are accumulated and dispersed in the building, drawing your eyes through the layering of socially and culturally curated space. These smaller-scaled subarchitectural displays combine with the larger pockets of voided space in the inner and outer courts to intensify the porous and diaphanous layering throughout. The spatial play of display through the cabinetry and shelving—inserted into or positioned onto or pulled out from walls—becomes an extensive enclosed inner membrane dispersed throughout the house. While cabinetry is delineated in the main floor plan for the first edition (1830) of Soane’s Description of the house and museum on the north side of Lincoln-Inn’s-Field (Fig. 9a), the chromatic preparatory survey drawing (by C. J. Richardson et al.) for this plan provides a more representational revelation of those inner membranes. Here are revealed these wall pockets of display space in their relation to the larger pockets of courtyard space that Soane inserted into the building—highlighting their distributive significance as he did in an orange tone for the smaller skeletal “voids” of the display cabinetry (including the movable display panels of the Picture Room) and in a blue tone for the larger “voids” of the exterior courts (Fig. 9b). So significant to Soane were the former domestically scaled furnishings that he labored to provide a detailed elevational view of their framework in the limited edition of Description printed privately five years later (Fig. 10).⁴⁴ An analysis of View of the North and East-sides of the Library, drawn by C. J. Richardson (Fig. 11a), reveals the porosity of these glazed display membranes and the ways they accumulate and disperse in a gathering of space that frames the view through the window glazing beyond to the objects on display in the open Monument Court (Fig. 11b).

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Indeed, the most dramatic drawings and photographs of Soane’s House, the ones commentators have tended to call Piranesian, are those that look into and beyond given spaces, not just within a given floor level but, dramatically, through the multiple vertical levels of the House (Fig. 12). As will be discussed in the following section, these views show contrasting scales of porosity, the larger pockets of voided space lined with what Dorey called the “piling up of fragments,” as though the ornamental “confusion [mistaken] for intricacy, and undefined lines and forms for classic variety” that so exasperated Soane in Piranesi’s church had emerged from those vertical and horizontal surfaces to become manifest in the House & Museum—similar to the display cabinetry—as inserted into or positioned onto or pulled out and suspended from its walls and ceilings.

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Thus, to Soane’s own porous plan can be added further the inner “courts,” the larger pockets of space that cut vertically downward from the ground level to the basement level, which I have toned here in a darker blue in reference to his light blue outer courts: the inner atrium in the Dome Area looking down into the Sepulchral Chamber and the recess by the movable display panels of the Picture Room that open up the area to views of the Monk’s Parlour below (Fig. 13a). Finally, the upward, top-lit vertical cuts of the multiple skylights (toned here in yellow), which act as interfaces within and between spaces, can be added as well (Fig. 13b).

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Whether within Soane’s House & Museum the solids and voids are—as Soane stated they should be—in due proportion, or in undue proportion, or in, for architecture, a radically transformative and variable proportioning and reapportioning (Fig. 14), this multilayered porosity is evident, in a compressed way, as it emerged outward to the building’s famous and infamous front loggia as well (Fig. 15). This porosity is particularly evident as pockets of space in the painted pine model—helping us to perceive the more nuanced articulation of porous layering in the well-known view by Gandy—that was presented as evidence by Soane in a trial held on October 12, 1812 after district surveyor William Kinnard filed a suit against the plan for this extension. Just one month after the trial, a curious article, “Observations on the House of John Soane, Esq. Holborn-Row, Lincoln’s Inn Fields,” noting its open perforation appeared in the European Magazine and London Review, the author, most likely Soane himself, remaining officially anonymous.⁴⁵ The article “proposes” (as a way actually to assert “precisely”) that “the sides of the building are perforated on ‘the ground-floor story’ in a manner which seems to us to render it an open portico, and, of course, to bring it precisely within the meaning of sect. 49, of the statute 14 Geo. III.”⁴⁶ The author is referring to the Building Act of 1774, which he quotes as follows: “that no bow-window or other projection shall … be built with, or added to … so as to extend beyond the general line of the fronts of the houses … except such projections as may be necessary for copings, cornices, facias door, and window-dressings, or for open porticos, step, and iron pallisades.” The projective necessity to make this juridically anomalistic compounding of inside-out “seem” to be rendered as “an open portico” developed in the design as an ever-attenuating articulation in its layering. This erosive transformation is visible in the model, which phase-changes from the plain surface of the ground level to the emergent vertical pillars in the second level, which in turn fully emerge in the open-air pavilion of the third level. Also visible in model is that this variety in the scaling of the front and side porous perforations is achieved through the multilayering of the façade: the ground-level arched openings (mirroring the apertures of the original house front at that level) are shifted in the next level slightly back to a shallow second rectilinear layer (mirroring the original rectilinear apertures of that level) whose recess make prominent on the front layer the manifestation of pillars. These rectilinear elements continue up to the third level in the pavilion, in addition to becoming the backmost framing.

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The constant variety in the scaling of multilayered porosity of the House & Museum, on both the interior and the exterior, is one of the means through which to track the very techniques Soane observed in the comparison he made between Paestum and John Vanbrugh’s Blenheim Palace, in an important passage noted by De Jong, from what David Watkin called a “sadly discarded version” of the Ninth Lecture.⁴⁷ Here Soane proposes that in the work of Vanbrugh

there is a constant variety of outline that pleases from whatever point is viewed (as are viewed ancient temples), whether at a distance wherein the great masses only are made out, or at a nearer approach when the prominent features are distinguished, or still nearer where the general details are distinguished. Here the eye reposes to enjoy the whole picture… . In this respect the interest is kept up as in ancient temples, but this would not be the case if variety of outline and continuity of character were confined to one front only. To keep up the first impression there must be the same character observed in every part externally and internally. This is seen in the great temple at Paestum. Its interior is of the same character as the exterior.⁴⁸

The author of “Observations on the House of John Soane,” although writing three years prior to this version of the lecture, not surprisingly shares this point of view and viewing with regard to the need for a “variety of outline and continuity of character” from various viewing positions (distant to near). As “Observations” appeared in a general cultural magazine, the exemplar in this article is not Vanbrugh but the more widely known Canaletto. The author refers to this painter’s ability to picturesquely “break the dull uniformity, which pervades those perspective lines” in his depiction of the “long rows” of Venetian houses, thus revealing a rather deep familiarity with specific attributes of the paintings of the artist in Soane’s personal collection. The author concludes this passage by stating,

Upon these principles, founded, as we conceive, on the operations of art and the sensations of nature, we must insist that the elegant front of the house of Mr. Soane, to the view of which we again direct the attention of the reader, breaks the dull uniformity of the line of Holborn-row in the most agreeable manner, relieves the eye of the passenger when near, and gives to its situation a local importance, when distantly seen from the other side of the beautiful square in which it is placed.⁴⁹

Upon these principles: while Soane purchased his three Canaletto paintings in the years 1796 and 1807, it should be noted that the Ninth Lecture was given, like the previous Eighth Lecture and the three remaining ones of the second series, in 1815, two years prior to his purchase of Piranesi’s Paestum drawings, so no causal link is being proposed here, only a sharing of particularly principled sensibilities. In Piranesi’s drawings—more than in the other depictions of Paestum already mentioned—a shared interior and exterior porosity is developed through distant, nearer, and still nearer viewing. This recursive character is visually staged through a set of exaggerated techniques, noted in the exhibition, that draw attention deeper into the scene and out through a given view, as in the already mentioned View of the Interior of the Basilica, Looking Northeast (Study for plate VIII; see Fig. 8), and the Interior of the Temple of Neptune, Looking East (Study for plate XVI), in which, referring to the inner colonnades, it was noted that “beyond these columns, through the columns of the facade, we can make out the surrounding mountains. The Basilica can be glimpsed to the right” (Fig. 16a). It is was observed where multiple oblique views were generated, as in Interior of the Temple of Neptune, Looking South (Study for plate XIII): “Here Piranesi used multiple vanishing points[,] … sacrificing strict architectural accuracy for a depiction that more vividly represents the experience of visiting the building” (Fig. 16b).

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As for “sacrificing strict architectural accuracy for a depiction that more vividly represents the experience of visiting the building,” those who have been to Paestum will tell you there are many ways to view these works as isolated objects manifest in pure idealizations, as can be seen in most of the earlier or contemporaneous depictions of the site by Fabris, Joli, and Hubert Robert. The position from which an artist views the world is not just a viewpoint in physical space, it is a point of view—an aesthetic, cultural, ideological, epistemological point of view—enmeshed as it is in the artist’s historical and disciplinary circumstance, mediated by the media they employ. The trick of every artist is to get you to perceive the world as they imagine they do. Piranesi mischievously gets us to perceive Paestum not as the isolated Greek ideal, as others would have it, but as one of his own imagined, vertiginously complex architectural fantasies of expansively deep architectural space—such as those he gave in the mid-1750s to an earlier English architect on Grand Tour, Robert Adam, and that Soane later acquired, along with some drawings of Piranesi’s church, in sales of the Adam drawings in 1818 and 1833 (Fig. 17), or of the many Prisons series among the extensive Piranesi drawings and publications that Soane himself collected. In each of these representations, the “variety of outline and continuity of character” in what is distant, nearer, and nearer still, rather than being “confined to one front only” with clearly demarcated zones, is ambiguously related “in constant variety of outline that pleases from whatever point is viewed.” And as just noted, Soane indicated that to keep up this impression “there must be the same character observed in every part externally and internally. This is seen in the great temple at Paestum. Its interior is of the same character as the exterior.”

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At the Paestum exhibition, a technique that intensifies, even within a given interior, this constant variety of outline that pleases from whatever point is viewed was noted by the curators in View of the Interior of the Basilica, Looking North (Study for plate V): “One distinctive aspect of the Paestum drawings is that Piranesi … often used off-center vanishing points to enhance the drama of a view” (Fig. 18). A comparable effect may be noted in analyzing Joseph Michael Gandy’s composite view of Soane’s House from 1822 (Fig. 19a), which reveals similar spatial unhinging of what would at first appear to be simple one-point perspectives but that, like Piranesi’s drawing, actually utilizes multiple vanishing points to enhance the drama of view (Fig. 19b). This might be ascribed just to the fact that Gandy practiced a combination of mathematical and subjectively optical modes of perspective.⁵⁰ But I would propose—with reference to the exhibition’s sense of Piranesi’s attentions and intentions—that Gandy is attempting here to represent his and Soane’s view-points regarding some startling inventions of spatial experience in the House. As in the Paestum drawings, oblique views look beyond to look through, and also look through to look beyond, the effects of which Middleton has provided the most exacting description:

All the principal architectural spaces were of the regular, balanced, symmetrical kind… . But he subverted the geometry soon enough, wrapping pockets of space around his volumes, shattering them with shafts of light, askew, from the side and above… . Yet the geometrical frameworks survived. And they were linked together, not by corridors, though there are a few, but by carefully contrived vistas, slipping through the openings, from one space to the next and then on to another. The vistas are, on occasion, on axis, but more often oblique, to left and to right, above and below.⁵¹

Views to the left, to the right, down and up into, askew, from one pocket of space to another and then onto another—Middleton’s characterization parallels Dorey’s description of Gandy’s View of the Dome area by lamplight looking south-east that I quoted earlier. Some of the techniques Soane used to choreograph these effects—such that the building, in De Jong’s apt phrase, “stages the gaze of the beholder”—may now become more evident when seen through the lens of the spatial choreography of Piranesi’s Paestum views.⁵² Such views first might be perceived as straightforward documentation, until further attention reveals their complex modes of visualization, within which, in Middleton’s similarly apt phrase regarding the House & Museum, “unexpected views are opened up both between spaces and from one series of spaces to another.”⁵³ As “documented” in Gandy’s complex two-dimensional representations, in both Soane’s designs as constructed and in the representations of those designs there are transmedial exchanges, two-dimensional effects played out into three-dimensional constructions, as well as intensive plays of spatial depth (beyond the normative illusionary mode). Gandy’s “straight views” already strain the principles of mathematical perspective—as did Piranesi’s—in order to encapsulate the complex mise-en-scène layering of space both horizontally and vertically in their depictions. These “tricks” occur not just in the representations but in the work as ultimately designed and built. Evidently Soane did not consider single representations to be wholly sufficient to fully encapsulate these multimodal “points of view,” and thus drawings that play off of representational tropes were deemed necessary, as in Gandy’s composite views of Soane’s projects as well as in his “imaginative compositions” of Public and Private Buildings Executed by Sir John Soane between 1780 and 1815 (1818) and Architectural Vision of Early Fancy (1820).

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In a similar vein, Middleton has observed that while Soane’s House was first conceived as a geometrically straight and straightforward sequence of rooms, as seen in the 1811 plan (Fig. 20, left side), site conditions made this arrangement untenable, so Soane put into play the complex existing geometries between adjoining buildings through an oblique circulation, as developed in the plan of 1822, generating views through concatenated pockets of space (Fig. 20, right side).⁵⁴ Middleton has stated that, “lest there is any doubt that this concatenation of views was intended, Soane commissioned Gandy to paint compositions with myriad alternative views jostling alongside each other.”⁵⁵ Yet what first appears as a jostled or even jumbled array of undefined confusion in Gandy’s layout of this composite drawing may be revealed as a highly choreographed interplay, both of the space and of its representation. Intricate relations are developed through oblique and tangential exchanges, instigated through the complex porous play of solid and void, principally through the physical and visual circulation of domestic and nondomestic space around and in relation to that uncovered void of the House known as the Monument Court.

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Middleton’s description of the spatial techniques of the House can also serve to describe the techniques of Gandy’s composite drawing: views shattered, askew, from the side and above, linked together by carefully contrived vistas, slipping through the openings, from one space to the next and then on to another, vistas occasionally on axis but more often oblique, to left and to right, above and below. Using the plan in Gandy’s drawing as a guide, one can track this ricocheting representational interplay, which I have rendered in this next sequence (Figs. 21a–g, 22)—by maintaining in full opacity solely the selected scenes and toning their relational positioning in the plan—to convey the visual slipping through of openings that choreograph those carefully contrived vistas. Just to suggest one of many possible peregrinations, the top center scene looks through the Dining Room from the Library on to the Monument Court (Fig. 21a), the latter portrayed to the left side of the drawing as the sole fully vertical image, in keeping with its multiple-storied height (Fig. 21b). The Court’s central feature (surprisingly missing from the previous scene) is Soane’s monumental multistoried Pasticcio, often referred to as a Piranesian assemblage of architectural fragments, atop the finial of which appears to be a red-breasted bird and behind which is visible, through the glazing, a view on to another space, that of the antique brackets and busts of the Museum. To the right side of the Dining Room scene is a glimpse toward yet another space, Soane’s Study, suffused with further fragments of his collection, an intimation again to the larger Museum beyond. A fuller view of the Study is visible farther over on axis (if not to scale) to the far-right edge of the drawing (Fig. 21c), which does have a slipped glimpse of the Pasticcio through the open window, as well as a view deeper into the adjoining Dressing Room, as well as what would appear to be a view further into the Museum but is actually a mirrored reflection. To the left side of the Dining Room scene is a glimpse through to the Breakfast Room (a full view of which is positioned below the Study at the bottom right) and into the Dome Area of the Museum (Fig. 21d). While these views look inward toward the rear of the house, the three remaining images on Gandy’s drawing are interrelated with respect to the front of the house. The full view of the Breakfast Room (Fig. 21e) looks to the right side, toward the stairway (Fig. 21f), and to the left side to the Dining Room toward the Library—rendered in a fuller view in the bottom center image—and beyond to a small corner of the front loggia (Fig. 21g), visible above in a tiny view just left of where we started at top center. The complete sequence is animated in Figure 22. But, as in the constructed House & Museum, there is no one correct processional route: both Gandy’s composite representation and the building enact this circuitous circulation from “one space to the next and on to another,” which could be a way of describing the pictorial experience of Piranesi’s Paestum just as it could of his Prisons.

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Fig. 21. (h) Relational analysis of Composite View of Lincoln’s Inn Field, 1822. Joseph Michael Gandy drawing courtesy of the Trustees of the Sir John Soane Museum. Digital animation by the author.

As Grady’s composite drawing demonstrates, in Soane’s House & Museum these spaces are not merely obliviously adjacent to each other, as most rooms are in most buildings. Rather, as in Piranesi’s Paestum views, spatial experience in the House is both defined and elided in a deeply layered near, middle, and far mise-en-scène, drawing us deeper and deeper into a concatenation of what now becomes not separated but relational space, all the more unsettling as what might seem to be clearly delineated and delimitated domestic space now becomes elided with office and museum space—that compounded anomaly of public and private which so perplexed Britton. In other words, what has been made relationally porous in the House & Museum are the very delineation and delimitation of the presumed formal and ideological differences of scale between domestic and institutional space, considered thus by some to be a mis-achievement, a breach of proper conduct to such an extent as to instigate the debate on these matters in the House of Commons, engaged in the next section.

“Some Remarkable Disproportion of Parts”: Comparative Scaling

If, for Soane, in “all architectural compositions the solid and voids should be in due proportion” not in and of themselves but “to each other,” and if literally this means that they should manifest not an autonomous separation but the relational debt they owe each other in the manifestation of each other’s ideation and identity, then a similar relational debt may be observed in the distinctive scalar differences evident in both Piranesi’s Paestum drawings and in many of Soane’s works. The positive potential, or the potential negative risk, depending on your viewpoint, with regard to making the domestic scale seem monumental may be seen as an aggrandizing—in all senses of that word—in due or undue proportion. Inversely, bringing what is institutionally considered more monumental into or down to human scale may be seen as positive or as a diminishment—in all senses of that word as well—equally, in due or undue proportion.

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In the Paestum drawings, this latter bringing into or down to scale may be observed in the groupings of individuals in View of the Interior of the Basilica, Looking East (Study for plate IX), which the curators described as adding “a human element to the scene” (Fig. 23a), although at first this “added element” would hardly seem to be mischievous. And yet at the exhibition, what was noted in the frontispiece for the final set of engravings (Fig. 24) is that around the slab bearing both the title of the Paestum site and that of the drawing set itself was a word that was not a documentation of some actual inscribed typography found at the ruin but a typographic title meta-inscribed in the scene as if part of the ruin. “Curiously,” the curators noted, “the word pesto is hidden behind the cowherd making music in the center of the composition,” which might seem indeed to indicate some form of mischief. While several words of the full title of the drawing set—Différentes vues de quelques restes de trois grands édifices qui subsistent encore dans le milieu de l’ancienne ville de Pesto—are hidden behind the cowherd with the horn, in fact the word PESTO is visibly framed as edged behind this figure, just to the left of his right thigh. Nonetheless, the visual game of hide-and-seek noted by the curators suggests that these individuals are not merely included to add a human aspect to the atmosphere but that these figures and spatial figurations are positioned pictorially to distribute, direct, and enframe views throughout the scene. What may also be noted regarding all the human figures in the Paestum drawings is that very few seem to be directly looking at or even attentive to the ruins. Instead, those that are attentive are mostly in attention to their domesticated animals (the cows, dogs, goats, horses, and pigs) that are also distributed throughout the view. But what these human and animal figures do provide, beyond perhaps Piranesi’s frustration at such indifferent neglect due to the diminished appreciation of the monumental past in his own time, is a sense of scaling, through their strategic accumulations and dispersals throughout the pictorial field, to draw our attention progressively from the foreground into the middle ground and finally into the distance, which may become more evident when we highlight these figures (Fig. 23b). In addition—seemingly to bely Soane’s statement regarding the “simple grandeur and solemn effect … so admirably represented in these drawings by Piranesi”—through their intensely contrasting scale, these figures bring the monumental down to size, both spatially and iconographically, pointedly and poignantly raising questions about cultural and social rescaling. Such questions as to the relation and role of the monumental past to the hardly solemn domesticated life and work of the everyday, the layered scalar status of their cohabitation, hardly spatially or socially simple. Major questions that similarly may be raised with regard to Soane’s House & Museum.

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That for Soane it was crucial that the architectural engagement be manifest with equal attention at the scale of everyday furnishings—as well as and in relation to the scale of the building—such that it “must mark the same mind,” may be evident in a note he made in August 1818, while translating J.-F. Félibien’s Recueil historique de la vie et des ouvrages des plus célèbres architectes, to the passage within which the Grecian mythological “architects” Anchasius, Trophonius, and Agamedes “had made with great attention” the bed for the couple Amphitryon and Alcmene:

Architects designed furniture in ancient times. Address this to those who reproach Mr Adam with designing furniture for his buildings. When speaking of Mr Knight’s house, Gothic without and Grecian within, observe the late Sir W. C[hambers] designed tables &c, Mr Adam furniture of every kind. Kent did the same, so we see the ancients did: unity in the building was not sufficient in their great men. Even the furniture must mark the same mind.⁵⁶

The degree to which the development of the same architectural mind at the level of furniture might manifest was, in the House & Museum, not just through the addition of autonomous and static furniture pieces isolated from the architecture but through their integration into and outward from the building’s surfaces as a way of enacting dynamic scalar comparisons.

In this regard, both Middleton and Watkin, in their observations on the importance of Soane’s detailed and annotated reading of Lord Kames’s Elements of Criticism in preparation for his Royal Academy Lectures, noted distinct passages on such scalar relations.⁵⁷ At the furniture scale, Middleton noted the following passage from volume 1 of Soane’s copy of Elements of Criticism: “Furniture increaseth in appearance the size of a small room, for the same reason that divisions increase in appearance the size of a garden. The emotion of wonder which is raised by a very large room without furniture, makes it look larger than it is in reality: if completely furnished, we view it in parts, and our wonder is not raised.”⁵⁸ What may be noted further is that Kames continued in the next two sentences to propose that the sense of proportion in the room that might raise our wonder is not the due proportion conventionally expected: “A low ceiling hath a diminutive appearance, which, by an easy transition of ideas, is communicated to the length and breadth, provided they bear any proportion to the height. If they be out of all proportion, the opposition seizes the mind, and raises some degree of wonder, which makes the difference appear greater than it really is.”⁵⁹ At the opposite end of this scaling, Watkin noted Kames’s passage on grandeur from volume 2, specifically annotated by Soane: “Of all the emotions that can be raised by architecture, grandeur is that which has the greatest influence on the mind; and it ought therefore to be the chief study of the artist, to raise this emotion in great buildings destined to please the eye. But as grandeur depends partly on size, it seems so far unlucky for architecture, that it is governed by regularity and proportion, which never deceive the eye by making objects appear larger than they are in reality.” Watkin punctuated the last sentence of this passage with a full stop and observed that, “in opposition to this view, Soane once more noted, ‘but architecture gives by comparison greater apparent quantity than the objects themselves really contain.’”⁶⁰ Interestingly, Soane’s notation here echoed Kames’s “which makes the difference appear greater than it really is” in the previous cited passage. The relation between these passages is further developed in the latter text, as in fact Kames punctuated that point in the sentence not with a full stop as did Watkin but rather with a pause in the form of a colon, in order to complete and qualify it accordingly: “which never deceive the eye by making objects appear larger than they are in reality: such deception, as above observed, is never found but with some remarkable disproportion of parts.”⁶¹ To effect a sense of wonder requires, according to Kames, that the relations between the room and its furniture not be in due proportion but rather in some compounded undue proportional relation—out of proportion, at least as far as conventions of the time apply, with regard to some remarkable disproportion of parts. This, it may be argued, following Kames, would make any viewer wonder more about the debt each scale owes to the other than if these two scales were just in a duly conventional proportion to each other to the degree that our “wonder is not raised.”

In the House & Museum it is this undue proportional relation, the compounded anomaly of its intensive compressive and its intensive expansive scaling within and between its rooms as well as within and between its floors—enacted through it porous display membranes, both the human-scaled cabinetry and the expanses of the fragments of the collection—which gives its architecture “by comparison greater apparent quantity than the objects themselves really contain,” making the space, and the objects in it, “appear larger than they are in reality.”

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The exhibition curators suggested the second and seemingly inverse orientation of such an enlarging scaling in Piranesi’s View of the Temple of Neptune, Looking Northeast (Study for plate XI): “This dramatic close-up view of the back of the Temple of Neptune provides a better sense of the scale of the buildings than do the other drawings of the series” (Fig. 25). But dramatic close-ups are enacted in Piranesi’s drawings not just as views at a larger scale but as a rescaling, so that the smaller figurations in this view are played off of, and provide the sense of, the monumental—by the diminutive human figures on the lower right side and the diminutive second-story columns of the inner cella, visible in the center through the porous outer intercolumniation. As discussed, the views of the House & Museum that commentators have cited as Piranesian show intensive compressions related to extensive expansions, contrasting scales drawn in (and thus into) comparison, which are given their sense of scale and rescaling by the figures of the collection. These are the drastically contrastive scaling in the comparative figurations of human actors, architectures, and artifacts that had been noted in Dorey’s reading of the Dome watercolor:

The striking light, exaggerated perspective and low viewpoint, which increase the apparent scale of the interior, are reminiscent of Piranesi’s views of the ruins of Rome. Both the piling up of fragments and the juxtaposition of diverse elements seem to owe something to Piranesi’s fantasies. On the far north side of the Dome is the figure of Soane himself, dwarfed by his creation and gesturing to invite the spectator to view his collection.⁶²

In that view of the Dome, the monumental extent of the space exceeds the uppermost extent of its pictorial representation, as in many of Piranesi’s graphic works, enhanced further through another of Piranesi’s techniques, which is to view a grand space through a more diminutive space, as in so many of his Prison series etchings: looking into a vast space made vaster by looking from under a lowered foreground framing toward smaller scale figures and object in the middle and far distance. In the Dome view, from its “low viewpoint” within and from under the soffit of the walkway, one is looking, across to the other diminutive walkway space opposite, at the diminutive (“dwarfed”) figure of Soane and his collected artifacts.

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Even on midway landings of the stairways of the House & Museum Soane carved out further scaled pockets of space, for his Shakespeare Recess and his Tivoli Recess, just as he pocketed a mezzanine Student Room/Drawing Office right in the midst of the Museum. In the Paestum drawings, the nesting of space within a space is manifest in the relations between the outer and inner colonnades, porticos, and cella, in which dispersive subscaling, intensive superscaling, and porosity are interrelated and mutually reinforcing techniques, as evident in Piranesi’s depictions of the Temple of Neptune. This comparative rescaling within a given space is a favorite theme throughout Soane’s work and particularly throughout the House in the distribution of its collections (Fig. 26).⁶³

With regard to this recursive nested spatialization of Soane’s collections, we tend to believe that we create spaces for ourselves and then bring all that we have collected—our stuff—to fill or to stuff into that space. But it could be said that Our Stuff “R” Us, that it is our collections that are the enclosures we build around ourselves—our collections through which we represent who we imagine we are (or would like to be considered to be) to ourselves and to others, the meaningful membranes around our voids, our emptiness that requires the collection of things to provide our meaning. This is the act of our collective inhabitation. What we occupy is the porous space of our collections. In our current day, home increasingly serves as office, but in the history of architecture few buildings exemplify that condition with such bittersweet poignancy as the House & Museum, wherein Soane reconfigured domestic space and institutional space, the home and the museum, the private and the public. Or to state it in the fullness of its actual evolution, Soane developed a radical remix of how to envision a mixed-use building—initially as home and office, not so uncommon at that time, but later as home, office, study center, and museum. “We are now arrived”—to John Britton’s previously cited opening sentence of his account of the building in Illustrations of the Public Buildings of London—“at a singularly ticklish and perplexing subject—perplexing, if on no other account, because we have been quite at a loss in what division of this work to place it, it being neither a public nor a private building, but so strange an anomaly compounded of both, that we ought to have formed an Epicene section on purpose for it.”⁶⁴ Three years prior to his death, Soane had extended the public collection’s display up into the private quarters of the House by converting the bedchamber of his late wife, who had died two decades prior, into the Model Room, which housed models of monuments of antiquity side by side with models of his own work: “By 1835, it is thought that Soane would invite visitors to view the Model Room and Eliza’s Morning Room, and that they would probably be permitted a glimpse of the Bath Room through the door. This would have been intriguing for visitors, as Soane’s home was one of the very few town houses to have a bath room with a plumbed in hot water bath at the time”—a conflation of the public and semiprivate, along with a glimpse of the particularly private, all of which seems to constitute Soane’s famous and infamous legacy.⁶⁵

What remains singularly ticklish and perplexingly telling is Britton’s use of the term “Epicene,” derived from the Latin epicoenus, meaning “of both genders.” In the House & Museum these private and public categories are not merely distinctly adjacent as was common enough practice, but rather, for this critic, manifest as a so strange, anomalous conjoined compounding of genders. With the implication of the private as feminine and the public as masculine, the evocation of this term is Britton’s way of implicating how Soane mis-achieved—through some remarkable disproportion of programmatic parts displaced and distorted—the decisive and hieratical division necessary for such categorical and typologically engendered social-spatial identities. If anyone should have been able to know how to classify this building, it would seem to have been Britton, given his inside knowledge of it. As Brian Lukacher observed, not only was it the case that in “the five years leading up to the death of Soane’s wife in 1816, the Brittons and Soanes were frequent social companions,” but even more significantly Soane had entrusted Britton “with the first publication about his house museum,”⁶⁶ The Union of Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting: Exemplified by a Series of Illustrations, with Descriptive Accounts of the House and Galleries of John Soane, published nine years prior to their falling-out, and eleven years prior to that mischievous opening sentence in Illustrations of the Public Buildings of London.⁶⁷

If, to the interest and consternation of numerous critics and visitors then and now, this building threw into question many basic architectural categories and classification systems, Soane’s campaign to have the House & Museum become a “public institution,” which required an act of Parliament, threw the House of Commons into these ticklish and perplexing debates with respect to a number of very basic social and political classifications. What is private and what is public? What is rightfully a domestic institution and what is rightfully a part of the greater institution of the nation? The discussion in the House of Commons on April 1, 1833, entailed a debate as to whether Soane was amoral (“worse than a heathen”) for breaking the domestic lineage of primogenitary property distribution to his surviving eldest son (from whom he was estranged) or whether, as the counterargument went, “it was most monstrous to suppose, that in a free country, like England, a man had not a right to dispose of his property as he pleased.”⁶⁸ Could not a private citizen, as was stated in the earlier discussion on March 15, turn “the advantages of his researches, and the benefit, of his labours” over “to the public … for the benefit of the country?”⁶⁹ And a further fundamental question regarding its national status: should it be incorporated into an existing national institution like the British Museum or become a national institution itself? These questions instigated in turn an extended debate in that session on matters of class, as related to who might have access to the collection and when. In other words, when, in the course of the general public’s workday and holiday schedule (in contrast to the more flexible schedules of the professional, noble, or gentry classes) would they have access to what was proposed as a public/private institution?⁷⁰ These debates underscore how the ambiguous entity of this House & Museum mis-achieved one definitive identity or the other, and consequently two years after Soane’s death an article appeared in the Civil Engineer and Architect’s Journal with the ironic title “Our House in Lincoln’s Inn Fields,” in which the author wondered how this private individual’s vision could have become a public institution, how his house could have become “Our House.”⁷¹

This disproportionally scaled compounding of the domestic and the monumental was operative throughout Soane’s work, and long before this debate he would be repeatedly chastised for aggrandizing his house with a monumentalizing façade. And the inverse criticism was leveled at him as well with regard to one of his most monumental works, the Bank of England, by Charles Robert Cockerell, the very designer who took over as chief architect in 1833 following Soane’s retirement after forty-five years of service to the bank and who later, from 1841 to 1856, was similarly Soane’s successor in delivering the Royal Academy Lectures. Cockerell, in his “An Account of the Architectural Progress of the Bank of England,” officially sponsored by the bank’s Governor Sheffield Neave in 1857, expressed the opinion that a number of the features of his predecessor’s design for the building were too domestic in character and thus not befitting the monumental character of the bank, complaining particularly about the excessive and “common domestic arrangement of doors and windows” along the south front. The en-gendered anxiety of Cockerell regarding this more intimate scaling would extend moralistically, in his official history of the bank, not only to asserting that such conduct mis-achieved what properly should be an elevated monumentality, but all the way misogynistically downward in his suggestion of some form of mischief by his pejorative characterization of Soane’s ornament in the bank’s Rotunda as “characteristically called Whore’s Lace.”⁷²

In contrast, the first term Cockerell used to describe “the character and grace suited to the exterior of a bank” is “strength,” and referring to himself in the third-person posited “nor can it be questioned that the parapets erected by Sir John’s successor, conveying palpably the idea of such a fortification as suits the nature of a Treasure house capable of defence, improve and give expression to the whole Edifice.”⁷³ As noted by Daniel Abramson, this expression of a defensive show of strength in “Cockerell’s most visible alternation of the Bank of England’s exterior was to fortify the walls during the 1848 Chartist Riots by raising Soane’s attic to accommodate a patrol rampart, firing platforms and a new balustrade with gun loopholes.”⁷⁴

As Watkin observed, Cockerell, in his personal diary, had expressed a more varied and ambiguous valuation of the mix of scales in Soane’s Bank of England design: “Corridores are narrow & petites but highly studied & some beautiful effects,” but nonetheless felt that the impression created was at once “little & great, the taste sometimes flat, sometimes unreasonably bold.’”⁷⁵ In his official report, the effects and taste of Soane’s intensely contrasting—(too) little & (unreasonably) great—scalar comparisons are further noted with significant concern: “Round the summit [of the Bank’s Rotunda] a chorus of Caryatides adorns the lantern, as disproportionally small as [those in] the adjoining office of Three per Cents are surprisingly large.”⁷⁶ Cockerell’s concern, expressed throughout his report, signifies that at stake in these seemingly mere aesthetic debates were matters of societal propriety, which in Soane’s work all too often were comparatively scaled in undue proportion or even out of all proportion (as when in the Three Per Cents office the “chorus” of female Caryatids are made unreasonably bold in scale). In Cockerell’s view, Soane mixed the domestic with the monumental, aggrandizing the former and diminishing the latter—thereby calling into question conventional understandings of social structure and even, as conveyed in Cockerell’s latter sentence above, calling into question the very constructional conduct and achievements of structure in architecture, as will be evidenced with regard to the next technique.

“Rather … in the air than supported”: Structural Suspension

In the official report to the Bank of England, one play of structural scaling that seemed to Cockerell particularly unreasonable in its insufficient boldness was Soane’s flat segmental arch, “a recent and northern invention of unclassical stamp, and without authority in the great masters, ancient or modern,” which as a “debased style, loses all dignity, as compared with the hemispherical or semi-circular arch.”⁷⁷ Again, another moral mis-achievement—unclassically weakened, debased, and undignified—the sort of structural conduct one would find in buildings ignobly gendered or of a lower class: “To be convinced of the objection, we have only to suppose the dome of the Rotunda in a segmental and depressed, instead of a hemispherical form, at the expense of all propriety and nobleness of design. Such contrivances may be excused in domestic or industrial buildings, but never in what may justly be called monumental architecture.”⁷⁸

But Cockerell would not be the only critic of what had become Soane’s signature flattened domes. Soane would attempt litigation against Knight’s Quarterly Magazine, which satirically suggested that, for the domes in his own house and in the New Courts, Soane had “knocked away the natural supports,” leaving “the arch miraculously suspended by the back, like a stuffed crocodile on the ceiling of a museum.”⁷⁹ Supports removed and the structure thus somehow suspended—this is the third exaggerated representational technique noted in the Paestum exhibition regarding Interior of the Temple of Neptune, Looking Northeast (Study for plate XII) (Fig. 27a) and View of the Interior of the Basilica, Looking East (Study for plate VII), wherein the curators observed that Piranesi “omitted several of the temple’s exterior columns” to accentuate the scene, the effect of which leaves the entablature suspended, cantilevering off of its vertical support and out of the visual field at the top of the drawing. “Compositional tricks such as this,” the commentary continued, “are fairly common in Piranesi’s work” (Fig. 27b).

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And fairly common in Gandy’s work as well: as in the example of the previously noted View of the Dome area by lamplight looking south-east, wherein Gandy depicts the Dome Room’s beam in the foreground cantilevering off and out of the visual field, in suspension at the top of the drawing (see Fig. 4). As cited, in this area Helen Dorey has described two additional instances of projective suspension in her analysis of this drawing: “Not only does the pile of fragments jut forward over the central space of the Dome area to the left, but another pile projects forward to the right topped by a model of one of the temples of Paestum.”⁸⁰

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Looking back at Gandy’s composite drawing of the House & Museum, we can see further instances of suspended structure (Fig. 28a). First, there is the aforementioned dome in the Breakfast Room, its exposed northern edge (generated through one of those vertical slices through the building) accentuating its appearance of astructural suspension. Christopher Woodward has noted that, in the Sixth Lecture, Soane refers approvingly to the appearance of such suspension in the dome of Saint Sophia in Constantinople.⁸¹ Soane stated that for this “happy invention we are indebted to two Grecian architects, Anthemius and Isidorus. This dome, although less simple than those in ancient buildings, is far superior in lightness of appearance and boldness of construction… . The entire dome, reposing on four points, seems rather suspended in the air than supported by piers.”⁸²

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While there has been much discussion regarding the origin of Soane’s canopy “domes,” but there are two additional potential precedents, as of yet unnoted in the literature, that may be proposed with respect to Soane’s Grand Tour. One is the ultrathin, edge-exposed “canopy ribbed and radiating like a shell” that Piranesi constructed in Santa Maria del Priorato (Fig. 29a), probably modeled, as Fabio Barry has noted, and this is the second precedent, on the apsidal vault in Raphael’s Villa Madama (Fig. 29b).⁸³ This latter building is notable as a particular significant example of a Renaissance precedent, beyond those from antiquity, measured and drawn by Soane (with Thomas Hardwick) the same summer he met Piranesi.⁸⁴ With further regard to Piranesi, it should also be noted that Gandy’s edge-exposed trompe l’oeil, with its meta- overstatement and suspension of representational structure through its peeling up of the Breakfast Room view, may have its precedent in the frequent depiction of trompe l’oeil drawings curling up at their edges in Piranesi’s etchings (as in his Lake series, Fig. 28b). Its presence in Gandy’s view as a curling up at the left top edge to overlap and emphasize the edging of the canopy in a duplicate arching is particularly pointed and apt.

In addition, in the Breakfast Room there is the puzzling asymmetrical detailing of the arch that is unaccountably suspended out from its vertical support—from which three wooden spheres in turn are suspended from this offset—that upsets the clear structuring of this dome (Fig. 30). This detail can also be related back to Santa Maria del Priorato, with regard to the suspended spheres on the suspended architrave-capitals of the entrance gateway. In terms of structural suspension, it is worth observing that these “capitals” are inset within, yet projected outward from, the recessed traces of their associated pilaster-shafts in the portal and the corners (Fig. 31a). But even more strangely suspended are the pairs in the spaces between those areas, wherein all traces of the implied structural shafts have been omitted (Fig. 31b). One of the many attributes of the church through which Piranesi is most definitely playing, some might certainly say mischievously, with the overstatement and suspension of applied and implied classical structure, in this case with an epistemologically compounded anomaly of what commonly is known as a portion of the vertical structure (a capital) is hybridized with a portion of the horizontal structure (an architrave), which deliberately mis-achieves even as “properly” symbolic structure.

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Above the suspended spheres in the Breakfast Room are the spherically convex mirrors that were added in the mid-1830s, replacing what were the original circular voids.⁸⁵ These mirrors, while maintaining still the visual effect of porosity, are then rescaled and multiplied along the undersides of each arch, all of which suspend above both the view of the room and your view of you as a viewer. The spatial inversion generated through these mirrors might also be considered either a conscious or subconscious response to the line from an earlier satirical poem about Soane—“To see your order in confusion move, / Scrolls fix’d below, and pedestals above”—published in The Observer, in response to which Soane also attempted libel litigation.⁸⁶

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The second overstated yet suspended structure visible in the bottom center view of Gandy’s composite drawing is the spatial divider situated between the Library and the Dining Room, itself seemingly doubled or divided, hollowed as a porous beam in order to further contain and display Soane’s collection (Fig. 32). Populating within and without these delaminated layers are numerous display brackets, puzzling ribbed conoidal forms of which may be considered as bearing a sub-scaled resemblance to Soane’s depiction of suspended Gothic pendant vaulting, one of the possible “Designs to make the approaches into the House of Lords more Commodious,” as he titled it in his Designs for Public and Private Buildings (Fig. 33).⁸⁷ The outward-facing brackets are positioned along the implied lines of arch support, simultaneously and surprisingly submerging embedded into and emerging with their boss-like rotational pendants suspended out from the structure’s surface on both sides. With regard to the matters of support in this area, Soane considered the Library and Dining Room as “one room” yet “separated by two projecting piers formed into bookcases”—another instance of domesticated displays structuring the house—“from which springs” what Soane curiously referred to as the term for this structure “a canopy composed of three segmental Arches.”⁸⁸ The original form of these circular arches may be perceived as having been drawn inward as another porous manifestation of the three south-facing Georgian windows of the original façade, resonant with the outward manifestation of their form in the porous loggia. One additional trick of structural suspension in the Library is enacted through the mirror that Soane positioned between its two front windows—providing the illusion from certain views of a rescaled third arched window matching the rows of triple windows that compose the façade (visible in Gandy’s composite drawing), while from other views it provides a multiple play of the arches of the suspended canopy.

Once these arch-forms are positioned inside, their structural capability as arches is omitted by Soane, while their edge springing is supported by the slenderest of what Tim Knox has called “colonnettes,” influenced by the slender supports of the Roman wall paintings discovered in the excavations of Villa Negroni in the years Soane was in Rome, Angelo Campanella’s series of engravings of which were arrayed by Soane in the Breakfast Room (Fig. 34).⁸⁹ These slight “colonnettes” occur again in the adjoining Dome Area, visible in the view already cited (see Fig. 4), incongruously seeming to support the massive accumulations of the collection’s “pile of fragments.” One individual who certainly would have found the “springing” of this Library “canopy” and these Dome Area supports mischievous is Vitruvius, given that he railed against the structural suspension portrayed in the wall paintings of his time wherein “reeds are put up in place of columns … as well as candelabra supporting representations of shrines… . For how, in the real world, could a reed possibly support a roof, or a candelabrum the moldings of a pediment … ?”⁹⁰

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Soane reworked and transformed this split and layered triple-arched figuration of this canopy on the two side walls of the Library: “On the east side of the library, over the chimney-piece, upon the cornice of the bookcases, springs a large flat Arch, forming a recess; and to connect the symmetry, there are two semicircular Arches.”⁹¹ On these side walls this middle expansion causes the central arch to be, in Cockerell’s term, “depressed,” as was often Soane’s inclination, drawing up its endpoints even as the normative ends of the now narrowed outer circular arches are maintained (visible in Figs. 10, 11). Decades later, in 1832, Soane would recursively redesign the arched canopy separator/connector between the Library and Dining Room utilizing these side-wall coordinates, drawing up the inner endpoints of the outer arches to match those of the depressed central arch, thus transforming its figure into a mix of the varied figurations of the wall arch profiles on both the front and the sides (Fig. 35). John Summerson speculated that the purpose of this redesign was “perhaps to afford better views of the paintings of Henry Howard which were installed in the ceilings of the two rooms.”⁹²

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Perhaps. But in Piranesi’s Paestum drawings the suspension of structure is not just a matter of, in the exhibition’s phrasing, “sacrificing absolute architectural accuracy in order to present a more intelligible view,” but rather of holding in suspension the structuring of space in order to present more intelligibly the very act of viewing.⁹³ In Soane’s work this enactment of viewing is principally manifest either as a framing of a view from one space into another space or as a subdivisional canopy within a given space to demarcate the nesting of space within space. As noted, Soane’s suspended canopies have become a signature attribute of his work, most extensively developed in the Freemasons’ Hall and the Law Courts at Westminster.⁹⁴ As for the latter, Knight’s Quarterly Magazine continued its satire by stating that “over the lawyers’ heads in the passage to the New Courts, he has suspended an infinite series of the ‘fabricks’—‘baseless’ as their arguments, and interminable as their harangues.”⁹⁵ Cockerell’s diary entry two years after this satire echoed that sentiment regarding their structural mis-achievement, judging “them trivial, absurd in their arch[itectur]e. should not expect to hear Sense in such foolish Rooms.”⁹⁶

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Contemporaneous with Soane’s designs for the Law Courts, in 1824 an even greater sense of suspension overhead in the House & Museum was developed in the Picture Room, wherein the original circular arching that subdivided the Library and Dining Room evolved into the complex structure of, again in Soane’s words but now more aptly termed, an arched canopy,” (Fig. 36).⁹⁷ More aptly termed because in this room these “arches,” structurally speaking, hang as a canopy, springing from nothing. The entire assembly is not only suspended from the ceiling but suspended off from the walls as well, on all four sides, as they are in the Law Courts and in the Freemasons’ Hall. These arched canopies are also more metonymically apposite to the etymological origin of the word “canopy” as a porous suspended net—which underscores what is so curious about Soane referring to the flatten linear divider/connector of the library/dining room as a “canopy composed of three segmental Arches.” The Picture Room canopy is not developed as a uniform series of vaults but curiously as a matrix of flattened linear rounded-arches between which are an array of flat, barrel-vaulted, and cross-vaulted infilling. These distortions through the flattening of the pendant form, these displacements through the literal, figurative, and figural suspension of the Gothic, these mis-achievements, underscore Summerson’s observation that “we have the feeling Soane was trying to produce ‘Gothic’ effects by the distortion and displacement of classical themes.” Yet it would be equally if inversely apposite to suggest that Soane was trying to produce “Classical” effects by the distortion and displacement of his collection of Greek and Roman—and subsequently Gothic—artifacts, references, and themes.

If the inclusion here of Gothic themes—and their distortion and displacement—seems surprising, given the principal Greek and Roman references enumerated throughout Soane’s lectures, the recent Description proposes that the intention of the “gloomy scenery” of the Monk’s Yard and the adjoining Monk’s Parlour positioned directly below the Picture Room—the respective ceilings of which are ornamented with linear arrays of those suspended conoid pedants now manifest in their completely exposed rotation—seem “to have been to satirize the rising fashion for Gothic antiquarianism while at the same time producing a picturesque arrangement of space and objects.”⁹⁸

“The rising fashion for Gothic antiquarianism” is quite an understatement, given the intensive and extensive backlash Soane received for proposing Classicizing rather than Gothicizing themes in his role as “Attached Architect” responsible for Office of Works projects in the Westminster area, not only in the press but in debates in the House of Commons regarding questions of style and national identity, as will be addressed further in the following section. As for the “arrangement of space and objects,” among the numerous items cited in this purportedly gloomy scenery, the Description notes in passing

two arches which originally formed window openings in the old House of Lords, Westminster, a 13th-century building demolished in 1822 when Soane built his Royal Gallery. In the centre, between the arches, is a well-preserved late 14th-century canopy removed from the north front of Westminster Hall during the restoration of 1819-20… . Other fragments in the courtyard include several from St Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster (14th-century), the old House of Commons. … Soane acquired these fragments while serving as architect to the Office of Works with responsibility for the Government buildings at Westminster⁹⁹

The mischief circulating around these acquisitions, accordingly arranged in suspension of their original structural capacities so as to satirize the “rising fashion” for the Gothic, was expressed in the House of Commons by a foremost advocate for such Gothic antiquarianism and thus a foremost adversary of Soane, a “Mr. Bankes”—cited in The History of the King’s Works as “the mischievous Henry Bankes, MP… . who opened an attack in the Commons when, on 1 March, the vote of £30,000 for the works to be done in 1824 was moved, objecting to the ‘abominable taste in which new buildings of a different order of architecture had been grafted onto the old Gothic.’”¹⁰⁰ And who later that same day stated that he “was very sure that had the House, last session, been aware of the mischief that was to be done, they never would have sanctioned the proceedings of those, who had demolished so much of the remains of the most interesting edifices.”¹⁰¹

If in the Monk’s Yard this spolia from Soane’s Westminster battles were arranged in satiric suspension of their original Gothic structural capacities, in the Monk’s Parlour there are other poignant and pointed suspensions of certain fragmented figures, not the least of which with respect to, in Soane’s words, this room’s “rich Canopy” (Fig. 37). Regarding this space, Soane wrote in the Description, “It may, perhaps, be asked, before leaving this part of the Museum at what period the Monk existed whose masonry is here preserved, and whether he is to be identified with any of those whose deeds have enshrined their names. The answer to these questions is furnished by Horace: Dulce est desipere in loco.” The current volume of the Description, the twelfth edition, translates: “The quotation (‘it is pleasant to be nonsensical in due place’) is a warning not to take the ‘Parlour of Padre Giovanni’ and its attributes too seriously. ‘Padre Giovanni’ (‘Father John’) is, of course, an eponym of Sir John Soane himself.”¹⁰² Or as Knox termed him: Soane’s “alter ego.”¹⁰³ But it may be proposed that there is another fragment of a figure in this room, an alter John, another Giovanni: Giovanni Battista Piranesi. The evidence of which is right overhead in the suspended cast-plaster “rich Canopy” one of the few moments in the House, along with the Tivoli Recess (Fig. 38), where the figural relief ornament is fused with the figuration of architectural surface—and which it may be suggested take some degree of inspiration for their dimensional modeling and sunbursts from the ceiling reliefs of Piranesi’s church (Fig. 39).

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Grady’s drawings of these museum areas of the building may be said to portray Soane’s attempt—relative to Soane’s critique of Inigo Jones—to bring playful fancies, pleasing effects, and the varied powers of architecture to interest the mind, all in order to achieve (which he felt Jones did not) the spectacle of sublimity. And yet, from the sublime to, if not the ridiculous, then at least the whimsical: the critical reception of the House & Museum has often turned on the perceived mischievous whimsy of its theatrical suspension of structure. Both the sublime and the whimsical share the condition of being nonsubstantial, the latter by being perceived as insubstantial, the former by being perceived as suprasubstantial. Thus, while the criticism of the House’s front loggia (Fig. 40) as being an “anomalous excrescence” and “far more of whimsicality than of originality” in the previously mentioned “Our House in Lincoln’s Inn Fields” is rather snide and as supercilious as the author’s nom de plume (“Ralph Redivivus”), it is worth noting the way he considered “this adscititious structure” to be not only supplementally extrinsic rather than intrinsic, but indeed to be a mis-achievement in the conductive expression of structural security and stability as well:

Besides being remarkably poor and insipid in itself, this odd appendage to the front of the house is decidedly contrary to all just architectural principle, inasmuch as though really of stone, it has the appearance of being constructed merely of boards, the thickness of the stone-work being only a few inches, a species of delusion as disagreeable in itself, as it is at variance with that usually practiced, for if most of our buildings are, according to some very veracious critics, mere “lath and plaster,” they have, at all events, the merit of looking substantial, whereas in this case stone has been employed to form a flimsy-looking fabric, whose front is scarcely thicker than a wall of stout blanks, which appearance is in some degree increased rather than diminished, by the arches of what was originally an open veranda, having been filled in with windows, since this adscititious structure has been thereby rendered the external front of the house, and the window sashes hardly recede at all within its surface. The upper story of it, on the other hand, which remains as before, looks as it always did, a child’s fabric of cards—thin slabs of stone set up on edge, but how held together it is impossible to guess. That there is any want of real security or sufficient solidity is not to be supposed, but there most certainly is a great want of the expression of the latter, if not altogether of the former.¹⁰⁴

What the author is particularly disturbed by is not the sham substantiality of most of our national “lath and plaster” built fabric but that this building utilized a “higher class” of material yet revealed the very insubstantiality and astructural attributes of stone veneer construction to create “nothing better than a poor flimsy meagre box-looking erection, very little, if at all superior in its puny taste, to many of our London gin palaces” with much of its collection “stowed away without half so much aim at arrangement as may be seen in the ‘show-rooms’ of many tradesmen,” an additional slight perhaps at Soane’s working-class background.¹⁰⁵

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The author’s sense that the loggia manifested “whimsicality” was probably aided by Soane having added onto its surface in 1825 the capital-like Gothic cap and shaft of the statue pedestals from the north front of Westminster Hall, where they had been previously positioned within niches flanking the hall’s entrance. When the height of these niches was increased during the renovation work “all the surviving statues were removed and not replaced, the result was to emphasise the vacancy of the empty niches.”¹⁰⁶ More spolia acquired, seemingly in an effort to make solids and voids of Westminster Hall in some proportion—whether due or undue remains always debatable, and indeed Soane’s Westminster campaigns were intensely debated in the House of Commons. These Westminster pedestals, which had originally operated structurally in compression, were subsequently hung in suspension off of the House façade, part of the way up the ground-level and second-level—even more pointedly on the latter, given that they are positioned in the “intercolumnar” space between the pairs of pilasters (Fig. 41)—and even more structurally inexplicable than the aforementioned mischievous and structurally oxymoronic architrave-capitals suspended off from the entrance gateway of Piranesi’s church complex. Another “it takes one to know one” echo of Soane’s charge in his Eighth Lecture against Piranesi’s indulging in “licentious and whimsical combinations.” A recombination of stylistics that resulted in a remarkable disproportion of parts on this façade, seeking it seems to raise some sense of wonder. With the addition of these pedestals, the inner layering of the collection is further drawn outward through another of Soane’s categorical and spatial inversions—the outside in and the inside out, the upside down and the downside up—perhaps this time quite consciously and satirically to hurl defiance at The Observer’s accusation by blatantly actualizing it: “To see your order in confusion move, / Scrolls fix’d below, and pedestals above; / To see—defiance hurl’d at Rome and Greece.”

With reference to a task Soane stated at the start of his Royal Academy Lectures, that of the critical examination of structure, Soane’s structures were often perceived as significantly separated and suspended enough to be judged by critics through the centuries with respect to the matter of certain national identities. It was a judgment of conduct that not only circulated around whether one had a respect for or a mischievous defiance of Greece and Rome, but further whether both or neither of these antique cultures might represent best the development of a proper English national identity.

Between and beyond Greece and Rome

Soane’s conduct in regards to his own conflicts between Greece and Rome that were expressed externally in the House & Museum will be tracked later in this section through an investigation of the genealogy of the building’s façade, but first it is productive to examine the discursive context in which the very status of those expressions came into question relative to a national style. As for the perception of Soane’s seemingly defiant suspension of structure, Abramson has observed that, in a similar manner, “a false simplicity and material cheapness in Soane’s thin, plaster ornamentation” was perceived not only by Cockerell, whose architectural thinking is “usually located in the sphere of cosmopolitan, academic classicism,” but also interestingly in the antithetical thinking of the time represented by “the moralistic, nationalist Gothic Revival initiated in part by Augustus W. N. Pugin’s book Contrasts, published in 1836… . Pugin’s opinion of Soane was expressed most vividly in the last plate of this book, contrasting a richly articulated French Renaissance housefront with the dry, flat façade of the ‘Professor’s House,’ that is Soane’s, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.”¹⁰⁷ One major aspect at stake in these positions is the ever-cyclical pronouncements of which styles of one’s time and place appear structurally false and cheaply (or lavishly) stuck on and thus, by extension, what would be the more proper style in which to build, the style that would be best to convey the constructional and social structural “propriety and nobleness” appropriate not just to the institutional identity of a bank but to the nationalist identity of the Bank of England. In his An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England, published seven years after Contrasts, Pugin excoriates an extensive range of recent paganized (read: non-Gothic) examples of English public architecture, and his tour of shame and shaming included an extended stop along the way at Soane’s Bank of England:

The street elevations of the Bank of England are certainly the most costly masses of absurdities that have ever been erected. It appears to have been the aim of the architect to perpetrate as many unreal features as possible in a wall. Sometimes we have a row of blank windows; sometimes a blocked-up entrance, five-feet from the ground;—now the wall is set back to diminish the internal space, and a row of columns occupies its place, well railed up to prevent any body getting under the recess;—now it rises up, to make a break, and support some stone urns and amphoræ, to hide the chimney stacks and skylights.¹⁰⁸

Even though Cockerell concurred with the complaint regarding the blank windows and blocked-up entrances, in yet another instance of “it takes one to know one,” he did not, as Soane’s successor at the Bank, escape Pugin’s censure of superficial (and suspended) plaster ornamentation: “the Soanean eccentricities in which they [the bank directors] have indulged so long seem only to have led them to continue the meretricious system under new management, if we may judge by the decorations of the New Dividend Office, where a room for the mere transaction of ordinary business is overloaded with all sorts of unmeaning plaster ornament, stuck up without the slightest propriety, or reference to the purpose of the building.”¹⁰⁹ The characterization of meretricious and unmeaningful eccentricities recalls the panegyric for Soane delivered seventeen days after his death at the subsequent meeting of the Institute of British Architects by one of its founders Thomas L. Donaldson, which purported in the published subtitle to honor “his genius and production” while taking almost every opportunity to level slights against both—as in his description of Soane’s late work as although “still retaining a feeling for ancient art, he sought for novelty in the employment of embellishments, trivial and unmeaning, and by the introduction of meretricious effects lowered the character of the art.”¹¹⁰ Given the etymological origin of the word meretricious in the Latin word for prostitute, the projection of this accusation of a lower gendered and social characterization onto both Soane and Cockerell ironically will be echoed fifteen years later when, as mentioned, Cockerell will similarly accuse Soane by stating the design in the Bank for the Rotunda’s “plaster ceiling was formed, with radiating lines and ashlar walls, without any other relief than a certain Masonic wave, characteristically called Whore’s Lace.” And in this recursive history, Pugin also takes Cockerell to task regarding the latter’s role as Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy, for “poison[ing] the minds of the student of that establishment by propagating his erroneous opinions of Christian architecture.” Thus instead of the neglect of Greece, of which Soane accused Piranesi, it is neglect of the Gothic, “our national architecture,” of which Pugin accuses Cockerell, and not merely of neglect but of “contempt” and of “utterly destroying” Christian “models of perfection” in his work at King’s College (where, according to Pugin, he was engaged in “a monstrous erection of mongrel Italian, a heavy, vulgar, unsightly mass”) and at Oxford (where he was “erecting another unsightly pile of pagan details, stuck together to make a show”).¹¹¹

It may be said that Cockerell’s and Pugin’s shared concern about the thinness of Soane’s work reveals a deeper anxiety about the very possibility of positing any sense of depth in the development of a true national identity—the always present crisis of the architect’s ability, whether claiming native status or seeking to enhance that status by borrowing from a past and foreign heritage, to convey the depth of its meaning, literally and figuratively, as well as figurally. That this matter of achieving the proper figuration of a national identity was of particular concern in this period, and that Soane was a particularly concerning factor in the discourse around this matter, is evident in the title and content of an article published in the London Magazine eight years prior to Pugin’s Contrasts. That article, “Our National Architecture: Public Buildings in the Department of the Office of Works,” while also imputing “the love of meretricious ornament” to Soane, included a scathing censure of his neoclassical urban proposal for a processional route through London and Westminster as being decidedly not of a proper British character. Accusing the architect of “Soanifying the British Metropolis”—one “wing” of which was yet again characterized as insubstantially “in the clouds”—the very first part of the title “Our National Architecture,” echoed eleven years later in “Our House in Lincoln’s Inn Fields,” similarly wonders, as that later article did, how it is that His Architecture could come to stand for Our Architecture:

This gentleman is, as every body knows, an infallible architect, who, throughout a long life, has been multiplying his mannerisms under every possible variety of situation and object. Whether the building to be erected is a bank or a mausoleum, a court of law or a church, a hospital or a palace, the arrangement and the ornament must not be determined by their adaptation to the purposes of the edifice, but to the universal idea of beauty pre-existing in the mind of Mr. Soane. This gentleman has, from his earliest years, been engaged in the concoction of various ingenious devices for Soanifying the British metropolis. . . . [His] genius has been held in subjection to common-minded men, who have dared, for instance, to think, in contravention of his canon, that the façade of Westminster Hall ought to be Gothic… . Really, the mental hallucination which this unfortunate gentleman displays is very awful… . He talks of the grand design,—and “my own design”; “I contemplated the plan which I have now before me,” and “most undoubtedly, in order to carry into effect that whole plan, Downing-street was to be altered, the buildings on the opposite side were to be pulled down, and triumphal arches erected in different parts of Downing-street.” … Would to heaven his genius had lighted upon a colder clime. He might have built snow-palaces for Russia, instead of deforming London with edifices that have one wing at Whitehall and the other in the clouds.¹¹²

In basing its commentary of this Soanifying plan in part on what it sarcastically termed the “superb portfolio” within which Soane has “published a series of elaborate designs,” this anonymous article referred without specific citation to one of the numerous variants of Soane’s multiple media campaign to defend himself, at least seven of which have been listed by Middleton as being (self)published prior to this article’s own publication.¹¹³ Middleton has extensively documented the history of these publications, instigated by “the humiliation he had endured at the hands of a government Select Committee, headed by Henry Bankes, during the early months of 1824, when his Palladian elevation for the New Law Courts, alongside Westminster Hall, was vilified both in Parliament and the press, and he was instructed to demolish it and rebuild in a Gothic style.”¹¹⁴ Two excerpts from the House of Commons records on the 1st of March 1828, “animadverting in strong terms” on Soane’s “incongruous absurdities,” should provide a sufficient sense and tone of this vilification:

Mr. Tennyson:

But in what taste was it proposed to rebuild the House?—In the Gothic; or the Grecian? The hon. gentleman animadverted in strong terms on the incongruous absurdities that were manifested in the modern additions of mongrel architecture evinced in the new entrance to the House of Lords.

Sir J. Mackintosh:

He could not help adverting to the new building which now showed its front so impudently in the face of Westminster Abbey. That building was called Grecian—for no other reason that he could conceive, but that it was not English, it was not national so it had been denominated Grecian… . He, however, instead of calling it Grecian, must denominate it most barbarous.¹¹⁵

Denominated as “not English:” in the face of such opposition, in one subsequent variant of Soane’s publications, Civil Architecture: Designs for Completing Some of the Public Buildings in Westminster and for Correcting Defects in Others, privately distributed by Soane the following year in 1829, attempted to mollify this criticism by adding a Gothicizing style—without, it may be noted, using that term and indeed referring only to (the effects) of Ancient Ecclesiastical Structures—to his standard Grecian and Roman references regarding, what might be compounded to compose his National Architecture.

In designing a National Monument to perpetuate those glorious achievements, the best energies of the Artist would be exerted, and every effort in his power made to “snatch a grace beyond the reach of art.” In composing a Design for this purpose, I endeavoured to combine together the classical simplicity of the Grecian Architecture, the magnificence of the Roman, and the richly varied playful effects so strongly marked in our Ancient Ecclesiastical Structures.¹¹⁶

A decade before these recombinant comments, back in 1815 in his Royal Academy Lectures, Soane ends his Tenth Lecture and begins his Eleventh with his own lament about national architecture, couched in his extolling “the spirit of improvement, which had so happily shown itself in many parts of the cities of London and Westminster,” which he hoped “would be extended, not only to every part of the metropolis but to the utmost confines of this mighty Empire.” What Soane proposed as a national architecture was not a nativistic architecture, in other words not one supposedly native to Britain, but one formed and in-formed by Grecian and Roman principles:

I wish for a national architecture also on the same principle of taste as that of the Greeks. The Romans endeavoured to produce a new order to decorate the arch of Titus. Why should not our artists do the same and establish the first specimens of a national architecture in forming a palace for a Wellington and show the surrounding nations that architecture at least of this country can still boast its old creative powers?¹¹⁷

Thus, in the Eleventh Lecture Soane indeed looks back at the empires of Greece and Rome, as he had throughout the lectures, swinging back and forth between them, and between extolling and lamenting, in order to establish the principles for a proper national architecture. But Soane’s principles keep shifting: even as he extols the way Palladio, Scamozzi, and Vignola established their “decorative system chiefly on the enrichments they observed in the remains of ancient temples,” he laments how these “great architects appear too often to have overlooked or neglected the lighter and more fanciful decorations of the ancients with which Raphael was well acquainted, and which were occasionally transposed by that great painter, his scholars, and his contemporaries, into the Loggia of the Vatican, the Villa Madama, the Palazzo del Te, and other works of those happy days wherein painting united her powers with architecture.”¹¹⁸ Those happy days were the days when architecture “shone with all the noblest powers of graphic art.”¹¹⁹ The “noble powers of graphic art” seem to have provided him with an associative link to Piranesi, and so in the very next paragraph he returns to him, first to lament yet again Piranesi’s dismissal of Grecian architecture, only to extol him immediately as the “great artist,” but mostly to exonerate him of his “architectural blasphemy”:

It is much to be regretted that the great restorers of art in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had not visited Greece… . And it is still more to be lamented that so late as the time of Piranesi, Grecian architecture with all its superior elegance was neglected, or rather so entirely misunderstood by the Italians. Had it been otherwise the great artist could never have drawn such a parallel as he did between the Roman works and the finest monuments of Greece.

It should be remembered, however, in extenuation of the architectural blasphemy of Piranesi, that he quotes not from the accurate and laborious representations of Stuart and Revett, who measured those proud remains of ancient glory to the thousandth part of an inch, but chiefly from the loose and imperfect representations of Le Roi, who visited Greece more as a historian, than as an architect. Piranesi is not the only great artist who has been blind to the charm of Grecian architecture. The late William Chambers, having formed his taste on the buildings of Italy, was unable to eradicate early prejudices and fell into the same error.¹²⁰

The seeming compounded polarities in these criticisms of Soane—between lightness and density, between insubstantiality and monumental bearing—are the very polarities that Piranesi enacts in the Paestum drawings with his interrelated techniques of porosity, comparative scaling, and the evocation and suspension of structure. With regard to the prior discussion of intercolumniation, for example, in Piranesi’s depictions the greater the density, the greater the opportunity to create an interplay of lightness—especially when generated by the paradoxically porous double density of the inter-nested internal columns that Chambers had considered a deformity.

And yet these polarities are also the very ones used to criticize Soane, and thus while, in Illustrations of the public buildings of London, Britton proclaimed that in Soane’s House & Museum the intercolumniation within the Museum area that supports the office section hardly seemed dense enough to achieve anything more than the appearance of structural props, he goes on to state that this space was crowded and choked up with a dense array of displays:

To the preceding division succeeds that portion of the Museum (20 feet in extent) which has an upper room over it, used by the architect as his office. Its ceiling is supported by four small Corinthian columns on each side, only 8 feet high, and leaving a passage in the centre little more than 3 feet wide. In proportion to the size and height, the columns are too few in number to produce—if such was intended, the appearance of a centre avenue flanked by them, being now spaced so exceedingly wide apart as to look only like props put at intervals beneath the ceiling. Yet if not at all crowded with columns, this part of the gallery is so filled with cases and stands, models and casts, as to look quite choked up by, and encumbered with them.¹²¹

These seemingly contradictory structural interplays are noted with regard to the exterior of the building by the author of “Our House in Lincoln’s Inn Fields,” who complains that the loggia had been “rendered very conspicuous by being made to project beyond the line of the other houses,” but goes on to note that “this building looks little better than a narrow upright slip, and far more insignificant than it would do if it did not thrust itself more forward than its neighbours.”¹²² The paradoxes of this building appear manifest: overbearing in its forward thrust, yet “little better than a narrow upright slip,” insignificant and insubstantial in its appearance and in its construction.

Indeed, some of Soane’s formally densest moments came in for the charge of being both overbearing and insubstantial, such as his intensive ceiling treatments, the already mentioned suspension of “an infinite series of the ‘fabricks’—‘baseless’ as their arguments, and interminable as their harangues.” This was the Knight’s Quarterly Magazine’s satirical play on Prospero’s description of “the baseless fabric of this vision” from The Tempest. The “enchanted isle, and its inhabitants,” which, as Soane noted, are depicted in the painting he commissioned from Henry Howard for the Shakespeare Recess in the House & Museum, as the play stated, as melting “into air, into thin air.”¹²³

In this matter, once again, Soane in his publications is given to quoting the harshest and most sarcastic criticism, in this case of his Royal Hospital Infirmary: “If the House appropriated to the Clerk of the Works is a monster in the art of building, the Infirmary belonging to the same Hospital is not a jot behind it in absurdity. Heaviness and frivolity are there most delightfully blended: the mass of the Building is dull and cumbersome, while all the ornaments are of the most light and trifling kind. There is something exquisitely ludicrous in this union of contrarieties; the effect of which is hardly to be conveyed in writing.”¹²⁴ And most interestingly, this “anonymous” critic, in actuality Soane’s own estranged son George, evokes in the negative the very previously discussed technique that Kames evoked in the positive: “Disproportion is the most striking feature in the Works of this Artist.”¹²⁵

If this union of contrarieties—the cumbersome and overbearing compounded with the insubstantial and trifling, seems to present a paradox, it is one Soane himself set up in his Eleventh Lecture, by swinging from extolling the most insubstantial “lighter and more fanciful decorations of the ancients” in the one paragraph to extolling the substantial power of Greek architecture in the very next one. Soane attempted to develop such a mixture of an insubstantial graphic with a substantial tectonic through a technique of ornamental indentation that he designated as “sunk moldings,” but what a poem published in The Observer in 1796 satirized as “pilasters scor’d like loins of pork”—resulting, as mentioned, in another attempted libel lawsuit by Soane—and which slight was mischievously reprised by Cockerell in his official report to the Bank of England.¹²⁶ Holding in abeyance such judgments, Soane’s “sunk moldings” may be considered as doubly in-substantial, not only as an in-cised graphic representation of stylized structure (arches, bases, shafts, and capitals), but again as literally and figuratively and figurally removing some of the substantial material of the “pilasters”—voids and solids reapportioned—such that the depth of its meaning was, for many commentators then and since, put into question. Lack or excess, structure removed or “adscititious” (to use Redivivus’s term): two relational techniques by which Soane put into play the (cultural) expression of (structural) meaning, considering of course the shallowness of any pilaster already reveals that it is insubstantial, in the sense that pilasters symbolically represent structure rather than actually supporting any loads. The degree to which this seemingly minor and supplemental graphic play could be considered not merely a mis-achievement of, but indeed a threat to, national identity has been conveyed by Abramson, who noted that according to the lawyer representing the defendant against Soane’s libel suit, this “‘hieroglyphic’ ornament was un-English, un-patriotic and un-Christian. ‘A sort of architecture that would please Buonaparte’s Egyptians and Jews.’”¹²⁷ All told, a triple slander against Soane twice over, with France thrown into this xenophobic bargain bin for (less than) good measure.

That mere abstract decorative ornament may emerge in a court of law to signify the status of a building’s national identity underscores that “Soane’s crime,” as Abramson has stated elsewhere, “was to have transgressed classical architecture’s categorical distinctions between the figural, the tectonic and the decorative,” a statement that could certainly be extended back to Piranesi.¹²⁸ If we exchange the word “crime” with “sin”—as in Soane’s characterization as blasphemous the criticism of architects (like Piranesi and Chambers) who extolled the virtues of Roman architecture over Greek architecture—then it may be said that some later critics (like Pugin, Cockerell, or Blomfield) seem less forgiving than Soane in this regard, having found Soane’s architectural sins more mortal than venial (sins that nonetheless, judging from his previously mentioned private diary, still held some allure and temptation for Cockerell). Thus, it is worth noting again those damning lines in The Observer that follow immediately after the oft-quoted “loins of pork” lines: “To see your order in confusion move, / Scrolls fix’d below, and pedestals above; / To see—defiance hurl’d at Rome and Greece.”

Defiance hurl’d at Rome and Greece? What can be stated with regard to Rome and Greece is that Soane circulates back and forth with his engagement within and between and beyond these two empires, in his lectures as well as in his architecture. One can track this evolving back-and-forth orientation not only through the whole trajectory of his career but in the genealogy of a given work, which, depending on one’s point of view, may account either for his blasphemous confusions of categorical and spatial inversions (where what is supposed to be below is now above) or for his engagingly transgressive inventions. In the case of the design evolution of the loggia of the House & Museum, his combinatory back-and-forth allusions to Rome and Greece developed through similar plays of porosity, comparative scaling, and suspended structure evident in the Paestum drawings and throughout the inside of the House. There are six pertinent developmental schemes of the project, and what is proposed here is a reading of attentions evident in the schemes related to the mixing of Roman and Grecian motifs (along with a few further notable allusions to Piranesi’s Santa Maria del Priorato), tracking this motif-mixing in a sequential and consequential manner—without, however, assuming any direct correspondence to the manner in which Soane might have attempted to describe his intentions through the process of these versions.

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If we start from the well-known view Gandy produced in late August 1812 (Fig. 42a) and strip it back to the Georgian vernacular (Fig. 42b), we can follow the genealogical process of design, digitally reconstructed step by step in sequence, so that each step can be perceived not as just another alternative (to the final design) but as transformative from the prior version. Each version shifts back and forth in its mixture of allusions to the architectures of Greece and Rome, recorded in the chronological sequence of studies that Gandy prepared for Soane, as shown on the right side of each illustration in this sequential visualization.

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The first study we have, from July 1812 (Fig. 43a), draws forth the very form of the Georgian arched openings at the ground level (Fig. 43b), which are copied and rescaled upward into the expanded height of the second level (Fig. 43c).

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Then, in order to achieve the denser, more monumental presence of a Roman palazzo with noble orders on its piano nobile (Fig. 44a), pilaster-like lesenes are drawn forth (Fig. 44b). This articulation is already structurally mischievous, given that these proto-trabeated elements are emerging from a field of arches (their structural opposite), all the more so mis-achieved as there is barely any material left on the sides of the arch—as indeed is also the case in the central opening of the aforementioned garden façade of Piranesi’s church, shown here in the Adam elevation from Soane’s collection (Fig. 44c). And the irony performed in the very architecture of the building is that here in the piano nobile, the structural force of the noble orders that are being represented comes not from fully emergent members of the noble orders of Grecian first principles, nor even from Roman pilasters in relief (as these lesenes have neither actual bases nor capitals), but rather from their submergent inverse as incised lines of symbolic structural force: base supports for the arches and abstracted Ionic capitals and shaft-fluting for the vertical members (Fig. 44d). These “capitals” are scaled down and positioned inset within the lesenes, which again may be compared to Piranesi’s architrave-capitals inset with their pilasters, also visible in the Adam elevation.

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As for the next level, the shorter top attic level, there is a further transformation of tectonic and decorative support, as six statues aligned with the pilasters are added, providing a figural rescaling (Fig. 45a). As with the drawing out of the vernacular context on the ground level, the roof is then drawn out over the central four statues to evoke the caryatid porch at the Temple of Erechtheus in Athens (Fig. 45b). So even from this first version there is a mixture of Grecian and Roman attributes. In his Third Lecture, Soane cited the “fine specimen of caryatides” in that porch while attempting in this version of the loggia to correct what he expressed in the lecture as an error in the Athenian structure, in that its “architrave and cornice … seem heavy, being nearly equal to the half of the entire height of the statues,” a ratio that he lightens closer to one-quarter of the height.¹²⁹ But whereas that original caryatid porch is associated with the base of its temple, Soane’s version is a categorical and spatial inversion, where what is supposed to be below is now above, as The Observer foretold (Fig. 45c).

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In the next process drawing, from later in July 1812 (Fig. 46a), the neighboring vernacular returns on the second level in the form of a metal railing (Fig. 46b), and on the upper level, while the outer statury remain, the central four Grecian caryatids disappear and in their place appears a comparatively scaled-down version of the romanized arch and “pilaster” mixture of the second level (Fig. 46c). The paired lesenes that are positioned in place of the paired caryatids have sunk moldings that now symbolizing both capitals and bases. This rescaled figuration, capped with Grecian palmette acroteria and one of Soane’s domes, creates a denser, “miniaturized” version of the level below, almost model-like, and, due to its density, provides a sense of a more porous space than the previous version’s more open caryatid porch. It constitutes the paradox that, as mentioned, Soane would attempt to elucidate three years later in his Twelfth Lecture using the visual analogy that smaller regular intervals in tree rows will provide an apparent sense of more space than larger intervals. We have now arrived at July 25, 1812 (Fig. 46d). A pair of versions developed three days later involved only minor variations: removing the abstracted capital and bases while keeping the sunk fluting, as well as testing alternative ways of transitioning to the dome.

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In early August, a more Italian Renaissance–styled top level appears (Fig. 47a). The central pavilion, now topped with a porous Roman balustrade instead of the prior dome, has narrowed to the innermost of the previously paired pilasters with the outermost ones reverting to statuary, albeit freestanding rather than covered. (Fig. 47b). Between the now astylar nonfluted pilasters that have been distributed as well to the back wall, Soane increases the density of the structurally-symbolic ornament by introducing, seemingly in a frieze-like position, a sunk version of the pattern termed variously the Greek fret, key, or meander (Fig. 47c).

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What may be considered as mischievous here is that this index of horizontal structure is positioned on both upper levels in an uncanonical manner, suspended coplanar with (rather than over) the index of vertical structure symbolized by the capitals—on the piano nobile level even inset suspended away from the sunk capitals over the arched openings. Summerson, in his early book on Soane, stated that “Piranesi has, I suppose, something to do with the invention of this kind of decoration, although none of his incised lines ever end in a Greek fret.”¹³⁰ Summerson’s initial supposition is accurate—both with regard to Piranesi’s “invention” (or more accurately, his documentation and redeployment) of this motif in this period and its influence on Soane—even if his subsequent contradictory assertion of nonverifiable non-evidence (“none … ever”) regarding its occurrence in Piranesi’s work is not. In fact, in the same years Piranesi was designing Santa Maria del Priorato, he illustrated a series of friezes from Etruscan tombs, including one with a Greek fret pattern (Fig. 48a) in plate III of the very book, Osservazioni di Gio. Battista Piranesi sopra la lettre de M. Mariette aux auteurs de la Gazette Littéraire de l’Europe (1765), in which he argued for the supremacy of the Romans over the Greeks. And one year earlier, on the dedication page of his book Antichità d’Albano e di Castel Gandolfo—which further extolled the Romans, this time for their hydraulic engineering prowess—Piranesi depicted a (ruinated) fretted frieze over an architrave-like band composed of vertical hollowed pods surmounting a central circular frame—all three tectonic figures of which are present in relational association on the façade of the church. It should be noted that even though no extant constructed frieze example seems to have existed in the antique ruins Soane might have viewed on his Grand Tour, the particularly notable example of a frieze of Greek fretting that he would have seen in Rome was indeed in the front façade of Piranesi’s church (Fig. 48b).¹³¹ This series of steps bring us up to the August 8, 1812 version (Fig. 48c).

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By late August 1812, the design is close to the standard Gandy view with which we began (Fig. 49a). The metal railing on the second level and the solid parapet on the ground level have been replaced by the Roman balustrade from the top level (Fig. 49b), but “Grecian First Principles” have returned to the top pavilion as a seemingly “simpler” trabeated post and beam structure (Fig. 49c). The pavilion has reverted back to the original width of the caryatid porch but with the denser sense of porosity evident in the model of the loggia that will be presented two months hence at the court trial against the building. In this version the Greek fret pattern first seems to indicate a more proper horizontal beam structure above the now non-(sunk)-fluted shafts, but this pattern has also started to meander down along the shafts flanking the central opening as well. It is worth noting that there is a similar albeit more complex inverse structural a-logic of horizontal structure in the façade of Santa Maria del Priorato, as the upper architrave figuration (rather than the frieze) is turned from its proper horizontal orientation downward to run vertically along the side of the pilaster, back horizontally near the building base, then vertically back up along the doorway, emerging outward as it surmounts the doorway pediment under the oculus, repeating this inversive traverse on the other side (see Fig. 1). We are now back to Grady’s most well-known version (Fig. 49d).

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There are two last versions of the House to track here. The first is the more ambitious expansion from January 1813 (Fig. 50a), clearly reflecting the interest that Soane, in his Fifth Lecture (and the illustration he presented then), expressed for Baldassarre Peruzzi’s Palazzo Massimo in Rome (Fig. 50b).¹³² This version shares the mixture not just of the pairs of “pilasters” flanking a loggia of pairs of free-standing columns (Fig. 50c) but of the startling pairing of column “pilaster” at the loggia’s edges, where in Soane’s version we can see all the more, in comparison, the sunk molding stylization of the Ionic capitals (Fig. 50d). The central section projects forward at the ground level but establishes continuity across the second level by replacing the Roman balustrade with a solid parapet inscribed with sunk Grecian palmette decoration. Similarly, while the original six statues have returned in the central section, the addition of a statue at each end (to constitute four pairs) links the center and the side sections by linking across the divide between the central column and side pilaster at their conjoined edges. Even as Soane repeats a version of the single-lot House on either side of the central section, their differential mixture of density and lightness relative to the center may be said to provide the external “variety of outline and continuity of character” Soane admired in Vanbrugh’s Blenheim Palace, so as to avoid what that author claimed as

the dull monotony … of unvaried forms and ornamental repetitions, be they ever so correct and consistent,

“Fades on the eye, and palls upon the sense.”

This is obvious in contemplating the unanimity of the buildings at Bath, the newly-erected piles in the vicinity of this metropolis, or to advert to their prototypes, those of Florence the fair, or Venice the fantastical.¹³³

In this version, as well as all the other versions, Soane “followed” the advice offered by the “author” of “Observations on the House of John Soane, Esq. Holborn-Row, Lincoln’s Inn Fields,” to utilize Canaletto’s “picturesque advantage” with the effect that “we must insist that the elegant front of the house of Mr. Soane, to the view of which we again direct the attention of the reader, breaks the dull uniformity of the line of Holborn-row, in the most agreeable manner, relieves the eye of the passenger when near, and gives to its situation a local importance, when distantly seen from the other sides of the beautiful square in which it is placed; and that so far from being, as it has been in legal language termed a nuisance, it is, graphically considered, an ornament.”¹³⁴

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Not being able to accomplish that more expansive version, twelve years later, in 1825, Soane made several significant additions precisely in order to vary its formal and ornamental iteration through a variety of its outline within the continuity of its character. Most notable in this version, the House has been expanded to include a fourth level (Fig. 51a) using the surface pilasters on the loggia’s back wall, with the arches reappearing and rescaled in the porous rooftop parapet—in comparison and contrast with the Roman palazzo-style balusters curiously remaining on the second level (Fig. 51b). But now also added are the aforementioned Westminster Hall pedestals incongruously suspended on the first and second levels, hanging off of the House (Fig. 51c)—resulting in a façade that could be described, in the words of his critique of Smirke, as even more so “a variety of parts, composed of fragments of different ages and different works.” It still seems so inexplicable that the Gothic would return here, but it does so with a vengeance in mind. In spite of the fact that three years hence in his A Brief Statement of the Proceedings Respecting the New Law Courts at Westminster, Soane will state that “I deprecate the bad taste of blending Grecian and Gothic in the same structure,” perhaps it may be considered more metonymical than metaphorical to suggest that these trophied parts taken from the Gothic façade of Westminster Hall stand (in) defiantly for the whole of Soane’s protracted battles with the House of Commons over national style, to the extent in that same self-publication—subtitled as “Submitted to the Consideration of the Members of both Houses of Parliament … and Others Interested in the Taste,—Utility,—and Scientific Construction, of National and Private Works“—he adopted the semblance of some warrior-worn words to state: “After all the chilling blasts which the blistering tongue of malice has uttered in dispraise of these Buildings, I shall be proud to have it engraved on my tomb, ‘Here lies the Man who designed and directed the construction of the New Law Courts at Westminster.’”¹³⁵

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And finally, and similarly defiantly, to complete the sequence, the loggia glazing begins to appear four years later (Fig. 52a) at the ground level, in order to extend the library (Fig. 52b), shown here in a drawing dated sometime between 1829, when the ground level was glazed—clearly not in keeping with the Building Act, section 49, which explicitly stated, as quoted earlier, “that no bow-window or other projection shall … be built with, or added to . . . so as to extend beyond the general line of the fronts of the houses”—and 1834, when the upper levels were glazed in as well.

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Fig. 54. Genealogical design sequence, John Soane, 13 Lincoln’s Inn Field, 1825–1834. Digital animation by the author.

The full sequence of the transformative design genealogy of the single House scheme from 1812 to this pre-1834 drawing is shown in Figure 53, as well as animated in Figure 54 with the area that will be developing in the subsequent illustration highlighted in advance. The englazed layering in this latter drawing—which both enclosed but maintained, through the varied depth of its window recess, the sense of porosity of the former loggia—completed the process of extending the enclosed space of the building beyond the plane of its neighbors. This act privatized the “public” space that had been contested at the start of the trial, even if by 1833, with the Soane Museum Act of Parliament, the entire space of the House & Museum arguably (and indeed, as noted, it was argued about vehemently) had started its transformation from private house to “public” institution.

This debate over the projection of self into the public realm “extending beyond the general line of the fronts” of the neighboring houses had been performatively rehearsed two decades earlier, as previously mentioned, in “Observations on the House of John Soane, Esq.” The first pages of this promotional, indeed as I have proposed self-promotional, defense of the loggia extolled the “superior architectural knowledge, and superior erudition” of “Mr. Soane,” how he had contemplated the refinements of architecture “in a much more extended, a much more philosophical point of view, and appreciating the advantages that, in instances of classical taste and classical purity, might arise from rendering modern architecture more systematic, has devoted his time, his talents, and his fortune, to that liberal, that patriotic pursuit.” Given the perpetual attacks on his conduct relative to expressions of national identity, this crucial assertion of his “patriotic pursuit” is posited as his amassing artifacts and self-produced representations of such classic taste and classical purity, this “large collection, which forms, what was in this country, as we have already indicated, much wanted, an Academy for the study of architecture upon such principles both scientific and philosophical, Mr. Soane has, with a liberality of sentiment that does him the highest honour, in a manner, thrown open, to professional student.”¹³⁶ In other words, the personal private takes the form of a nationally imperative public institution. The article tells us in the following paragraph that Soane was “determined, laudably determined, to give its front a consequence commensurate to the scientific purpose to which it was devoted, and to the collection which it contained.”¹³⁷ What follows in the next two pages are the previously discussed passages regarding the Building Act and the lessons it should take from Canaletto, all of which just sets the stage in the final pages for the documentation and denouement of the trial of this “open loggia,” as recorded in The Sun, and the subsequent unsuccessful appeal, as recorded in The Times, concluding abruptly and dramatically, as did The Times, by quoting the latter’s decisive two-word full-stop pronouncement of “Motion refused.”¹³⁸

Between the lessons of Canaletto and the conclusive account of the trial, the author utilizes the rhetorical technique of expressing counterarguments to the loggia by quoting the difference of “opinion of two gentlemen,” according to the “proverb which says ‘Audi alteram partem’“—in this case, this “hearing of the other side” involved a page of letters “To the Editor of the Morning Post.” Among the arguments cited is another instance of “it takes one to know one,” as three years prior to Soane’s castigation of Piranesi for his disregard of Grecian simplicity in the Eighth Lecture, that same argument was invoked against Soane by two of these letters, signed by “Inigo’s Ghost.” The pseudonym referred to Inigo Jones, characterized in these letters as “a Modern Grecian, the first architect who planned and ornamented Lincoln’s-inn-fields, and who saw every object through Grecian spectacles” and who in the persona of this letter-to-the-editor writer expressed his indignation against what he termed “that annoyance,” that “unsightly projection in Lincoln’s-inn-field.”¹³⁹ Contrary to this Grecian characterization, the real non-ghosted Inigo Jones’s viewpoints were overwhelmingly Roman in orientation—as Soane in fact stated regarding Jones: “his blind attachment to whatever was Roman would not allow him always to think correctly”—yet given Soane’s glorification of Grecian architecture in the first series of his Royal Academy Lectures earlier that year, this implied accusation of not appreciating Grecian principles enough may have been so disturbing to him that three years later, in the second series of lectures, he defended himself by launching that charge against both Chambers and Piranesi. ¹⁴⁰

To bring this investigation to a conclusion, consider one more accusation from Soane’s Bank of England and Royal Academy successor Cockerell: “Sir John Soane lived in a period of transition, always unfortunate for the artist… . The desire for novelty and the reproach of pedantry against the past, occasioned as usual in such revolutions every licence and every anomaly.”¹⁴¹ As for the desire for novelty, reproaches against the past, license, and anomaly, the same might be said of Piranesi—and indeed was said by Soane, as quoted earlier:

That men, unacquainted with the remains of Ancient Buildings, should indulge in licentious and whimsical combinations is not a matter of surprise, but that a man, who has passed all his life in the bosom of Classic Art, and in the contemplation of the majestic ruins of Ancient Rome, observing their sublime effects and grand combinations, a man who had given examples how truly he felt the value of the noble simplicity of those buildings, that such a man, with such examples before his eyes, should mistake confusion for intricacy, and undefined lines and forms for classic variety, is scarcely to be believed; yet such was . . .

Soane?

Indeed, such was the echoing panegyric opinion of Donaldson, who asserted that in Soane’s “declining years, he seemed often desirous, as in some parts of the Bank, at Dulwich College, the Courts of Law, the royal entrance to the House of Lords, and other places, to shake off the trammels of the Orders; and by a continuity of small mouldings, and the absence of cornices or other regular details, to produce equal effect. In this, however, the results were rarely happy, and show how dangerous it is for an Artist to depart from those examples of the best masters and of antiquity, which have received the sanction of many ages and are founded upon good sense and good taste.”¹⁴²

But contra Cockerell, rather than unfortunate, I would say the continual interest in Piranesi and Soane today and through time is a result precisely—and thus also contra Britton as well as Donaldson—of the compounded anomalies that may emerge in such moments of phase-change transitioning. Revealing as such the licenses and anomalies that may be found in the trammeled networks of “achieved” engendered, material, national, social, and structural ordering systems in any period—the historical arrivals and departures in the ongoing debates of what constitutes exemplary practices of good sense and good taste. Piranesi’s and Soane’s respective knowledge of the variety within history manifested in their own work as defined (rather than undefined) transformative enactments of sense and taste—regardless whether considered, then or now, as achievements or mis-achievements.

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These matters are not without their own ironies, as when, to cite one last example, Piranesi eerily seems to presage and adopt the very criticism Soane would level against him, by extolling in his Della Magnificenza e d’Architettura de Romani (written just prior to his design of the church), Paestum’s builders as a “nation which inclined towards the grave and the simple,” in contrast even to those Greeks and even Romans who “have no true theory of art” and so “always prefer an architecture loaded with garlands, flowers and other ornaments to one which has nothing but simple purity.”¹⁴³ Yet, mischievous until the end, Piranesi also noted a significant anomaly at Paestum—as John Pinto has observed regarding the captioned commentary in the etching of View of the Interior of the Basilica, Looking West: the exceptional capital, a novel moment of uncanonical lightness and license among the Doric density of all those “gouty” and “rude” columns (Fig. 55).¹⁴⁴ The caption states,

The B capitals [Fig. 56] are of a different shape to those on C columns, they are of an architecture that appears grotesque, and they seem to characterize themselves more as Ionic than Doric… . The artist who did not have difficulty in borrowing the idea of the Ionic Volute did, however, diminish it in D, which gives them an air of lightness [légereté], which they would not have had if he had been compelled to copy the entire Ionic order. We see here nevertheless the traces of an invention, which one was not expecting and which, despite their boldness, obliges us to recognize that one could not conduct oneself better in a similar case [et qui malgré leur hardiesse obligent d’avouer qui l’on ne pouvoit pas mieux se conduire en pareil cas].¹⁴⁵

This last phrase seems uncannily to address, decades in advance, Soane’s charge regarding the inventive mischievousness of one’s conduct. Piranesi is speaking about the invention of an artist twenty-five centuries in the past, but of course he could have been speaking in the present of himself or, for that matter, a third of a century into the future, into the lifetime of Soane, who gave the canonical Ionic volute a new air of lightness. Soane inscribed the latter into his architecture—his own versioning of “the lighter and more fanciful decorations of the ancients” in the hope of developing in his time an architecture that once again “shone with all the noblest powers of graphic art”—held in pictorial suspension in his suspended stone façade (Fig. 57).

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As for Soane’s (or Piranesi’s) inventions, this conduct in these epistemological experiments of novelty, should it be said that “his conduct is mischievous,” or rather, as in Piranesi’s caption, that what is evident is “the traces of an invention, which one was not expecting and which, despite their boldness, oblige us to recognize that one could not conduct oneself better”?

What has been said, as noted at the start of this investigation, by Soane at the start of his Royal Academy Lectures, was a caution and claim for his “young friends” in the audience “not to expect great novelty in these discourses, for novelty and flights of fancy, however amusing, cannot be very instructive.” Nearly a half century later, as though said in direct response, Cockerell—whose own Royal Academy lectures, Watkin posited, “resemble those of Soane which he certainly heard as a young man”—would use that same claim against Soane and thus co-caution that “in the exterior architecture and in every part” of Soane’s work in the Bank “the same experiment of novelty was practised: we must rely on time and the judgement of posterity to condemn or justify the changes then presumed upon.”¹⁴⁶ Fortunately—given such practices, such judgments and presumptions, such matters and mannerisms especially of those parties seemingly so concerned with “simple purity”—the task of historical inquiry does not reside in the binary opposition of condemnation or justification. Fortunately because, in the intercultural and intracultural exchanges between architects and critics and historians through the ages, such cultural categories—precedent “models of perfection” and novel inventions, substantial and in-substantial manifestations of encultured structural and decorative meaning, formations and reformations of national identity—are always in the midst of transfiguration, as manifest in and through these works, which always remain in question and constantly thus in need of reinvestigation through ever ongoing transfigurations in modes of historical inquiry.

Acknowledgments: This research was initiated by a request of the Morgan Library & Museum and the Sir John Soane’s Museum Foundation to present a public lecture in March 2015 regarding the Morgan exhibition, Piranesi and the Temples of Paestum: Drawings from the Sir John Soane’s Museum. My thanks for this invitation go to Chas Miller and Suzanne Stephens at the Foundation, and to Linden Chubin and Per Rumberg at the Morgan. The exhibition then traveled to Stanford University, and an abbreviated version of the lecture was presented at the “Piranesi, Paestum, Soane” conference in November 2015, convened by Fabio Barry of the Department of Art & Art History. Portions of the study were subsequently presented in “The Digital Publication of Architectural History” conference, convened by Martin Delbeke and Thomas Hänsli of Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture, ETH Zürich, in February 2018. My thanks to the organizers of these two events. Access to the Piranesi and Soane materials was provided at the Sir John Soane’s Museum through the gracious assistance of Directors Abraham Thomas and Bruce Boucher, Archivists Helen Dorey and Sue Palmer, and Picture Library Assistant Nathan Emery. Further generous archival assistance with Columbia University Avery Library’s collection of Soane publications was provided by Lena Newman and Dylan Rosenlieb. The essay has benefited from the dedicated and detailed readings by Daniel Abramson, Martin Delbeke, and especially Aaron White. Equally dedicated assistance in the digital visualization for this research has been provided especially by Brain Lee, along with help from Kyle Faircloth and Leo Kim. At Aggregate, my thanks again go to the incisive readings by Lauren Jacobi, Pamela Karimi, Michael Osman, Laila Seewang, and Meredith TenHoor, as well as to the attentive copy-editing of Maureen Bemko and insightful management of Elliott Sturtevant.