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‘The Professor’s Dream’: Cockerell’s Hypnerotomachia Architectura?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 April 2016
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In 1849, after teaching architectural history at the Royal Academy in London for just under a decade, the architect Charles Robert Cockerell (1788-1863) exhibited ‘The Professor’s Dream’, a graphic synopsis of the history of architecture (Fig. 1). Produced in an era dominated by historicism, the drawing operates between the two poles of historical relativism, negotiating the line between accumulation and rationalization. Some nineteenth-century architects, indiscriminately collecting, understood each style to have emerged from the particular conditions of their times, considering them distinct and yet equally valid. Other architects, critically ordering, privileged one style over another, variously justifying themselves on religious, technical, moral or structural imperatives. Cockerell’s ‘Dream’ is ambiguously positioned as a place of showing and a means of knowing, speaking both of an homage to the past and a vision of progress, apparently flattening a thousand years of history but inherently offering the depth of historical experience. David Watkin, Peter Kohane and, more recently, in the context of an exhibition at the Royal Academy, Nick Savage, have interrogated the drawing, the first two paralleling it with Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499), the latter framing it within a tradition of systematic charting of history, and suggesting a possible link to geological charts. While all these interpretations certainly stand, it is essential to recast them within a larger discussion of Cockerell’s understanding of history. Substantiating the different readings of the drawing — against Cockerell’s earlier drawings and surveys, within his architectural theory as expounded in his Royal Academy lectures, and in the larger perspective of the interests he cultivated since the 1820s — this essay brings to the fore the tension between ordering and experiencing, revealing how the architect was interested in the latent interstices between history and time.
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Notes
1 For a thorough discussion of the origins and conditions of historicism, see Pelt, Robert Jan van and Westfall, Carroll William, Architectural Principles in the Age of Historicism (New Haven, CT, 1991)Google Scholar, particularly chapters 1 and 3.
2 Noting that Soane and Cockerell both referred to the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, the architectural historian David Watkin suggests that Cockerell’s ‘Dream’ was his response to Colonna’s dream, ‘an image of the collective memory of an architect’, and a ‘parallel to the character and function of Sir John Soane’s Museum’. SirWatkin, David John Soane, The Royal Academy Lectures (Cambridge, 2000), p. 446 Google Scholar. Similarly, Peter Kohane links the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili with ‘The Professor’s Dream’, writing that Cockerell’s ‘illustration was an unsystematic, dream-like representation of the architect’s collective memory’. See Kohane, Peter, ‘Architecture, Labour and the Human Body: Fergusson, Cockerell and Ruskin’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1993), pp. 385–94 Google Scholar. Nick Savage, who is Head of Collections at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, expressed some of his views in the introduction to a 2005 Royal Academy display themed around Cockerell’s ‘The Professor’s Dream’, and in conversation with the author. ‘An introduction and guide to the display’ was published in conjunction to the exhibition shown between 2 April and 25 September 2005 in The John Madejski Fine Rooms at the Royal Academy, London.
3 For example, in a representation of the Cassas collection drawn by Bonvalet and published in 1806, models and paintings are quietly ordered, lining the wall in an even rhythm. See Szambien, Werner, Le Musée d’architecture (Paris, 1988).Google Scholar
4 Jean-Baptiste Louis-Georges Séroux D’Agincourt, Histoire de l’art par les Monumens, depuis sa décadence au IVième Siècle jusqu’à son renouvellement au XVIième Siècle (Paris, 1823), preface. My translation of the following passage: ‘[partie esthétique de l’ouvrage] — dans laquelle l’histoire des monumens doit se transformer en histoire de l’Art. Ce que j’en ai fait connaître jusqu’ici, pourrait être comparé à un immense Musée, où les principales productions des trois arts, pendant une longue suite de siècles, s’offrent aux regards classées et décrites dans un ordre en même temps systématique et chronologique.’ D’Agincourt continues to describe how in his ‘historical discourse’ he will lead the spectators to study the facts of material history and to set their ‘relative and absolute values’.
5 Szambien, Le Musée d’architecture, pp. 112-14. J- Mordaunt Crook also points to its similarities with the methodologies used by scientists such as Linnaus, Cuvier and Darwin in Crook, J. Mordaunt, ‘Architecture and History’, Architectural History, 27 (1984), pp. 555–78 (p. 566).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
6 See Galvin, Terranee G., ‘The Architecture of Joseph Michael Gandy (1771-1843) and Sir John Soane (1753-1837): An Exploration into the Masonic and Occult Imagination of the Late Enlightenment (England)’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2003), pp. 54–56.Google Scholar
7 For a broader discussion of Gandy’s drawing, see Lukacher, Brian, ‘Joseph Gandy and the Mythography of Architecture’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 53 (1994), pp. 280–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
8 The drawing is discussed in Jenkins, Ian, ‘James Stephanoff and the British Museum’, Apollo, 131 (1985), pp. 174–81 Google Scholar. Stephanoff’s drawing is dated 1845 and held at the British Museum.
9 RIBADAC (RIBA Drawings and Archives Collections), Cockerell Box 1, COC 1/13 (xv). See also his lecture notes for 1842 and 1843, held at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. He stated clearly that the knowledge of history and theory, but also literature, was necessary to the architect, saying how an architect needs to have ‘his Vitruvius, his Palladio, his Scamozzi, Vignola, Blondel, Chambers &c. &c.’. RA (Royal Academy of Arts, London), mis/co 1, First Lecture, 1842.
10 RIBADAC, Cockerell Box 1, COC 1/13 (xv).
11 RA, mis /co 1, First Lecture, 1842.
12 RA, mis/co 1, First Lecture, 1842, ‘Value of History to Architecture’.
13 RIBADAC, COC 1/2/i-xxii, First Lecture, 7 January 1841. Cockerell had first-hand experience of some of Soane’s drawings, having attended his lectures in 1809-10.
14 For a discussion of Soane’s lecture illustrations, see Watkin, David, Sir John Soane, Enlightenment Thought and the Royal Academy Lectures (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 399–406.Google Scholar
15 The ‘Tribute to the Memory of Sir Christopher Wren’ was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1838. Both the ‘Tribute’ and the ‘Dream’ were produced similarly: after making separate studies of the individual buildings, these were cut out and laid out for the final composition. For notes on the making of ‘The Professor’s Dream’, see Cockerell, Robert Pepys, ‘The Life and Works of Charles Robert Cockerell, R.A.’, Architectural Review, XII (1902), pp. 137–39 Google Scholar. On ‘Tribute to Sir Christopher Wren’, see Charles Robert Cockerell’s Tribute to Sir Christopher Wren, intro. John Schofield (London, 2003).
16 On the SDUK, see Barrow, Ian J., ‘India for the Working Classes: The Maps of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge’, Modern Asian Studies, 38:3 (2004), pp. 677–702.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
17 The description of this earlier drawing read as follows: ‘To form a just idea of the relative sizes of the two buildings, we have added an outline, showing the comparative size of St Peter’s and St Paul’s, and the vacant spaces have been filled up with the outline of some of the most remarkable buildings now existing, all on the same base and all drawn to the same scale, but unfortunately, owing to an error, the height of St Paul’s in the figure is a little less than it should have been. The buildings have principally been taken from the work of Mons. Durand, the Parallel of Architecture, by far the most important production of the kind which has yet been published, and affording great facility for the consideration of the general principles of architecture.’ Journal of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (1828), p. 22.
18 RIBADAC, Goodchild Album, vol. 8, p. 72.
19 ‘Professor Cockerell’s Lectures on Architecture at the Royal Academy’, The Builder, 1 (1843), p. 27.
20 The 1816 map was a wall map, measuring 49 cm × 64 cm. Smith, Charles, ‘Comparative View of the Heights Of The Principal Mountains &c. In The World’ (London, 1816).Google Scholar
21 Thomson, John, ‘Heights of Mountains’ (Edinburgh and Dublin, 1817)Google Scholar. Atlas map, 51 cm × 64 cm.
22 ‘Principal Mountains, &c. Throughout The World’ (Philadelphia, 1822). Atlas map, 42 cm × 53 cm.
23 This was mostly copied from Thompson’s 1817 comparative drawing. Fielding Lucas, Jr., ‘Comparative Heights of the Principal Mountains … in the World’ (Baltimore, 1823)Google Scholar. Atlas map, 39 cm × 32 cm.
24 ‘Table of the Comparative Heights of the Principal Mountains &c in the World’ (Philadelphia, 1831). Atlas map, 29 cm × 22 cm.
25 The 1823 map of mountains and rivers, which measured 30 cm × 38 cm — ‘New and Improved View of the Comparative Heights of the Principal Mountains and Lengths of the Principal Rivers In The World …’ (London, 1823) — was published in a slightly different and larger version (81 cm × 59 cm) two years later (‘A Combined View of the Principal Mountains & Rivers in the World; Accompanied by a table shewing their relative heights & lengths …’ (London, 1825)). I thank Nick Savage, from the Royal Academy in London, for drawing my attention to two other geographical maps: Gardner’s map (1825) and another by Frederick Wood and William Moffat (1828). According to the information available on the site of David Ramsey collection, the 1823 map was probably the first that combined comparative heights and lengths of mountains and rivers. Another, better-known similar map was Bulla’s ‘Tableau Comparatif published in 1826. See David Rumsey Collection, http://www.davidrumsey.com/maps5216.html (accessed 22 January 2006). This type of drawing continued to proliferate well into the nineteenth century.
26 Quoted in Obituary, ‘The Late Mr. Charles Robert Cockerell, R. A. Architect’, The Builder, 21 (1863), p. 685.
27 The Builder, 1 (1843), p. 27.
28 This situation is acknowledged in Greenough’s own introduction to his 1819 map. See Greenough, George Bellas, Memoirs of a geological map of England, to which are added an alphabetical index to the hills, and a list of the hills arranged according to counties (London, 1820)Google Scholar. See also Oldroyd, David. R., Thinking About the Earth, a History of Ideas in Geology (London, 1996), p. 113.Google Scholar
29 The scale was finally reversed in Cuvier and Brongniart’s new publication of the map in 1822. The contextualization of Smith’s work is based on Cecil J. Schneer, ‘Introduction’, pp. 1-18, and Eyles, Joan M., ‘William Smith: Some Aspects of His Life and Work’, pp. 142–58, both in Toward a History of Geology, ed. Schneer, Cecil J. (Cambridge, MA, 1969).Google Scholar
30 Cecil J. Schneer, ‘Introduction’, Toward a History of Geology, p. 8. For the consideration of how three pioneers of geology understood the relation between their science and history, see Gould, Stephen Jay, Time’s Arrow Tim’s Cycle, Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time (Cambridge, MA, 1987).Google Scholar
31 RIBADAC, Goodchild Album, vol. 7, p. 25 (paper clipping from the Cambridge Paper, July 1840). The museum of geology was designed as part of Cockerell’s project for Cambridge University Library (1829-40). During that period, Cockerell also initiated discussion with the Revd William Whewell, a polymath who acted as president of the Geological Society between 1837 and 1839. There would have been a fair amount of shared interest between the fields of geology and architecture, an architect such as Decimus Burton was a fellow of the Geological Society and Greenough himself was associated with the Royal Institute of British Architects.
32 RIBADAC, Goodchild Album, vol. 8, p. 80.
33 ‘Athens, Acropolis’, Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (London, 1832).
34 Cockerell was familiar with the techniques of the panorama, having visited the Panorama of Pompei in 1824. However, he noted that he found it ‘very unsatisfactory tho[ugh] the admirable climate is well expressed & the feeling of tranquility [sic] is inexplicable’ (RIBDAC, COC 9/5, March 1824). Generally disappointed, Cockerell nonetheless appreciated the general atmosphere, the expression of the climate and the mysterious serenity derived from the experience of the space. He went back to this last aspect while sketching different possible modes of lighting galleries: ‘The idea is to introduce the light without seeing whence it comes & producing that agreable [sic] illusion felt at the Panorama’ (RIBADAC, COC 9/5, 1824, pp. 27-28). Consequently, Cockerell recognized the peculiar power of the panorama in creating an illusory and pleasant atmosphere. He was impressed by how he had been momentarily and mysteriously immersed in a different reality. Perhaps his own panoramic restoration of the Theatre of Pompei, ‘Theatre at Pompei as it might have appeared in the interval between the earthquake of A.D. 68 and the final catastrophe of A.D. 79’, was his response to the panorama he had visited earlier. The drawing, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1832, is now held at RIBADAC.
35 Brougham, Henry, ‘Objects, Advantages, and Pleasures of Science’, in The American Library of Useful Knowledge (Boston, 1831), pp. 139–40 Google Scholar. Quoted in Barrow, ‘India for the Working Classes …’, p. 680.
36 G. B. Greenough to Coates, 1843. Quoted in Barrow, ‘India for the Working Classes …’, p. 683.
37 RA, mis/co 2, Second Lecture, 1842.
38 RIBADAC, COC/9/4, Diary, 10 December 1823.
39 Goodchild adds: ‘In -/52 I had a reduced copy of the drawing made for engraving, which however never got beyond the outline, altho’ Mr C was very desirous of having it engraved, the expense was too great it could not be done as he would wish to see it for less than £500.’ RIBADAC, Goodchild Album, vol. 8, p. 80.
40 RA, mis/co 2, Second Lecture, 1842.
41 RA, mis/co 9, Third Lecture, 1843.
42 For example, Cockerell also asserted that the study of history resulted in ‘the great enlargement of the invention faculty, the (just?) choice and power of application which the knowledge of all that has been done will communicate to us’. RA, mis /co 1, First Lecture, 1842.
43 RIBADAC, Cockerell Box 1, COC 1/1 (iv).
44 Antoine Chrysostôme Quatremère de Quincy, De l’architecture égyptienne: considérée dans son origine, ses principes et son goût, et comparée sous les mêmes rapports à l’architecture grecque (Paris, 1803), p. 12. Cockerell drew attention to this passage: ‘The invention of Architecture must be put on the same level as that of language, that is to say, neither one nor the other may be attributed to any single man but both are attributes of man.’ My translation of the original passage: ‘L’invention de l’Architecture doit se mettre sur la même ligne que celle du langage, c’est-à-dire, que l’une et l’autre invention ne peuvent s’attribuer à aucun homme, mais sont les attributs de l’homme’ (Cockerell’s copy is in the RIBA Library).
45 RA, mis/co 8, Second Lecture, 1843.
46 RIBADAC, COC 1 /1 / iv (Box 1).
47 See Cockerell’s marginalia in Quatremère de Quincy, De l’architecture égyptienne, p. 59.
48 RIBADAC, Cockerell Box 1, COC 1 / 2 (xv).
49 RA, mis/co 1, First Lecture, 1842, ‘Value of History to Architecture’.
50 RA, mis/co 8, Second Lecture, 1843.
51 RIBADAC, Cockerell Box i, COC ½ (xxvi).
52 RIBADAC, Cockerell Box 1, COC ½ (x).
53 RA, mis/co 1, First Lecture, 1842. In 1843: “This year, in the present course, I have endeavoured to offer you some motions of the literature of our art, not only in aid of its history but that you may refer to the fountains of that knowledge which we now possess & which is derived from them. […] those fountain heads will be found much more fresh & pure & inspiring, than the diluted stream we are now supplied with — & we shall derive much more vigorous fruits & recover many lost secrets, by referring to them as I thing to have shewn more than once. — in making acquaintance with those authors we make acquaintance with the aristocracy of our arts. & we may be wit, or radical, or chartists — but in art & science there is nothing but aristocracy —.’
54 Other examples of dreams are by the British painter Charles Eastlake, ‘Lord Byron’s Dream’ (1828) and the American Emanuel Leutze’s ‘The Poet’s Dream’ some years later. These dreams are not discussed here, as they do not have the same complex compositional qualities as those of Cole, Gandy and Cockerell.
55 Town, however, rejected the painting as completed. See Griffin, Randall C., ‘The untrammeled Vision: Thomas Cole and the Dream of the Artist’, Art Journal, 52:2 (1993), pp. 66–73 (p. 66).Google Scholar
56 Griffin, ‘The Untrammelled Vision’, p. 68.
57 Plot of Colonna’s work as summarized by Cockerell in an 1842 lecture. RA, mis/co 5, Fifth Lecture, 1842.
58 Continuing his dream, Cockerell noted how this displacement in time could offer a critical standpoint from which to observe the present. RIBADAC, COC 9/4, June 23 1823.
59 Reported in the publication of the lectures that were carried out by students in The Builder, 4 (1846), p. 98.
60 RA mis/co 5, Fifth Lecture, 1842.
61 The Builder, 4 (1846), p. 98.
62 Lefaivre, Liane, Leon Battista Alberti’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Cambridge, MA, 2005), p. 76.Google Scholar
63 Trinity College Library Archives, R. 2. 1. The full mention read as follows: ‘— our contemporary the ingenious Mr. Whightwick has written a beautiful work with the same idea — called the Palace of arch[itectur]e — but he has not like colonna interested our natural feelings by interweaving with it the story of a passion of the hearts namely the adventure of a love of flesh & blood — together with the colder love of antiquity.’
64 Cockerell commented: ‘his work contains all the mistical [sic] notions of the day conveyed in a jargon language often obscure mixed with terms of Greek, Hebrew, Arab, & it must be confessed that much leisure is necessary both to understand & enjoy the substance of his work.’ RA mis/co 5, Fifth Lecture, 1842.
65 Agamben, Giorgio, ‘The Dream of Language’, p. 49, in The End of the Poem, trans. Heller-Roazen, Daniel (Stanford, 1999).Google Scholar
66 Agamben positions Dante at this turning point. For Dante, the vernacular was the language known, which allowed the true love of language in which Latin ‘lived’. In this understanding, the vernacular was inert, a conception that was later reversed — Latin became considered as the dead language and the vernacular as the living one. Agamben, ‘The Dream of Language’, p. 58.
67 Agamben, ‘The Dream of Language’, p. 59.
68 RIBADAC, Cockerell Box 1, COC 1/2 (xxiii).
69 RIBADAC, Cockerell Box 1, COC 1/9 (i).
70 RIBADAC, Cockerell Box 1, COC 1/13 (xiv).
71 RIBADAC, Cockerell Box 1, COC 1/2 (xv).
72 RIBADAC, Cockerell Box 1, COC 1/13 (xiv).
73 RIBADAC, Cockerell Box 1, COC 1 / 2 (xv).
74 Ibid.
75 RIBADAC, Goodchild Album, vol. 8, p. 72.
76 RA, mis/co 9, Third Lecture, 1843.
77 See note 2.
78 RA, mis / co 6, Sixth Lecture, 1842: ‘in these lectures, of the present & the past year, I have endeavoured to offer you the best materials for thinking, which my experience & my present pains have been able to devise’. What is significant is that the situation that Cockerell sought to portray was that of the history of architecture as a whole, and this was whence the materials for thinking were supplied.
79 Nick Savage in ‘An introduction and guide to the display’, published in conjunction with the exhibition shown between 2 April and 25 September 2005 in The John Madejski Fine Rooms at the Royal Academy, London.
80 RA, mis/co 1, First Lecture, 1842, ‘How to Study Antiquity’.
81 Quoted in Steiner, George, After Babel, Aspects of Language and Translation (New York, 1975), pp. 338–39 Google Scholar. Significantly, Steiner is referring here to Rudolf Borchardt’s adoption of Novalis definition in his challenge of the conception of the past as immutable: ‘Even as the human mind can dream a future so it can reshape a past. […] Borchardt conceived of translation as having a unique authority against time and the banal contingency of historical facts. By virtue of “creative retransformation”, the translator could propose, indeed enact an alternative development for his own language and culture. True archaism […] is not antiquarian pastiche, but an active, even violent intrusion on the seemingly unalterable fabric of the past.’
82 RIBADAC, Cockerell Box 1, COC 1/2 (x).
83 Cockerell, Letter To the Honorable the Vice chancellor and the Syndics appointed to consult respecting the appreciation of the premises lately purchased by the University for the enlargement & improvement of the Public Library, the erection of Schools, lecture rooms, museums &c, 31 October 1829, C.U.L. Add. 6630 (1).
84 Ibid.
85 Ibid.
86 For a discussion of the active role of ornaments in Cockerell’s architecture, see Bordeleau, Anne, ‘Charles Robert Cockerell’s Architecture and the Language of Ornaments’, Journal of Architecture, 14:4 (2009), pp. 465–91 (particularly pp. 477–88).CrossRefGoogle Scholar