John Gwynn

“ Thus, for example, the heavy, plain Tuscan order is appropriate for "A little Structure; built for Use alone," the "gaiety" of the middle Ionic order for a country villa, and the "delicacy" of the Corinthian order for an elegant church or palace (p. 25) . An architect's skill is most often measured in the poem by his adherence to decor.
One violator of decor serves as a focus in an important passage wherein Gwynn tries to integrate Vitruvius and Horace while making a transition to one of his central concerns, the peculiarly English reinterpretation of decorum of situation. ”

“ And thought by that; to gain immortal Fame.
Let Architects, and Builders, mad as they,
In Folly; run, and make themselves away;
Why should it be a Sin, such Men to kill,
More than to keep alive, against their Will? ”

“ Vitruvius's attention is almost exclusively on the physical requirements of sites for maintaining men's health and comfort; Gwynn's is on the requirements for maintaining men's psychological well-being. His conceptions of decorum of situation begin with Vitruvius and the Renaissance demands that a site be healthy, that it permit efficient transportation, and that, if possible, it provide raw materials for building, rich lands for crops and pastures, and natural beauty conducive to ease and contemplation. ”

“ Gwynn's general critical bias is readily identifiable because it is consistent with that of many conventionally trained architects of the 1720's and 1730's, and with that of most propagandists for English Palladianism. Like the Earl of Burlington, William Kent, Colin Campbell, Morris, Ware, and Alexander Pope, Gwynn venerated Inigo Jones as England's Palladio, as the architect who showed how Palladio's rules could be [pg iii] naturalized for the English climate (pp. 14, 25) . ”

“ The emphasis on the giving and systematizing of rules, although without precedent in Horace, reflects the same preoccupation with the authority of origins as John Wood's Origins of Building, Pope's Essay on Criticism, or even Locke's Two Treatises on Government for that matter.
Horace provides less precise correspondences for one of the most important rules. Vitruvius's rule of decor (De Architectura, I, ii, 5) is only generally parallel to the rules governing decorum of language, characterization, and genre. Gwynn nevertheless introduces all of its major implications. ”

“ Two more architects whom he mentions, besides Gibbs, Vanbrugh, and Ripley, were employed on the notorious projects of the Duke of Chandos—John James and Andrew Shepherd (pp. 10, 23) .6 Gwynn's taste and principles were those of an educated elite to which he did not belong—conventional in their moral and aesthetic implications, and conservative in their political ones.
But the significance of The Art of Architecture is not merely as evidence of contemporary attitudes toward Hawksmoor or James, Chapman or Banks. ”

“ The perfect fitting of a building to its site, as of the parts to a whole, will result in what Gwynn calls "Ideal Harmony," for it "ariseth from such Numbers, Parts, or Proportions, which may be resolved in the Mind, and ranged together in Order, by Contemplation."15
For Gwynn such harmony still has quite clear religious and moral implications, although he does not, like Morris, attribute to it a specifically religious function. ”

“ Gwynn's attempt to buttress the rules is far more mundane. He seeks support from contemporary philosophy; for example, he introduces the epistemological and ethical systems of Shaftesbury to account for some principles of decorum, but without perceiving the subjectivity he was imposing on them. He rationalizes some of Vitruvius's analogies between natural and architectural forms. But even more clearly indicative of the futility of his effort are his appeals to authority. He implores such aristocratic patrons as Pembroke, Chesterfield, and Burlington to "Be to my Muse a Friend ”

“ Although neoclassical critics generally accepted the reality of correspondences between architectural and literary criticism, Gwynn did not find the Ars Poetica an entirely manageable model.10 Horace's figures of the mad painter and the mad poet which frame the poem at either end serve Gwynn well, for his imitations of them as the mad painter and the mad architect emphasize the personal, social, and artistic consequences of attempting to build without rules, talent, or even a clear need to build. ”

“ For once Horace is almost uncompromising enough for Gwynn's purposes. He adopts a similarly magisterial tone, but reorders Horace's materials so that the emphasis is more fully on this principle:
But yet, my Lord, this one important Truth,
This Law of Science, which we teach our Youth
Even THIS, no Mediocrity admit,
Rules, Nature, Reason, all must jointly fit:
A Painter may Raphael's Judgment want,
And yet, we some Abilities will grant: ...
In Building, there's no Laws of human Kind,
Admit a Medium ”

“ By the 1740's consciousness was growing of threats against the ethical and aesthetic values of Renaissance humanism (best expressed in Pope's Dunciad in Four Books) , and of the consequent need for new sources of authority for the rules of art. One highly eccentric quest for authority was published just a year before The Art of Architecture: John Wood's The Origins of Building ”

“ The poem is significant in a number of ways. It is the work of a young, inexperienced architect, with literary ambitions, who has learned most of what he knows about the principles of his art from published sources—treatises, pattern books, and measured drawings—rather than in an architect's studio or in a master mason's stone-cutting yard. ”

“ Gwynn is more suspicious of originality than Horace (p. 17) , and uses Ripley as an example of one who erred in trying to avoid customary forms. Ripley's Custom House (1718) and Admiralty building (1723-26) become the equivalent of the Cyclic poet's bad verse, while Morris, Flitcroft, Gibbs, Leoni, and Ware become the modern Homers of architecture (p. 18) . Gwynn ends the verse paragraph with Horace's theme of suiting the parts to the whole. With Ripley's performance as a background Gwynn turns to architecture's most fundamental rules:
[pg x]
Criticks, attend the Rules which I impart ”

“ Horace's wit, his reliance upon his audience to grasp the implications of his many examples, and his avoidance of [pg vii] positiveness subvert Gwynn's purpose, as he reveals frequently in contradictory outbursts and in shifts in tone. Yet in one important passage Horace provides him with a stance and a theme which help him prop up the rules. After discussing pardonable faults (11. 347-365) Horace addresses Piso's elder son, compliments him for his wisdom and training, and reminds him of the activities in which mediocrity may be tolerated. ”

“ It is rather what Gwynn believes they indicate: the failure to establish in England a building practice firmly based upon a body of principles which architects and men of letters in the first half of the eighteenth century had wanted to believe inviolable. ”

“ They are at least; instructive to the Art:
Mark how Convenience, Strength, and Beauty join:
With these let Harmony of Parts combine.
(p. 18.)
These lines may be construed as the architect's equivalent of Horace's advice for winning applause. ”

“ Such assumptions provided immutable bases for the rules external to the individual work of art, but the breakdown of analogical reasoning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries necessarily undermined such philosophical-theological foundations. ”

“ Maximillian E. Novak, University of California, Los Angeles
Corresponding Secretary: Mrs. Edna C. Davis, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
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Correspondence concerning memberships in the United States and Canada should be addressed to the Corresponding Secretary at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 2520 Cimarron Street, Los Angeles, California. ”

“ Secondly, the belabored inference drawn from the principle in the final couplet has no precedent at all in Horace. Gwynn has made every effort to place the rules outside the realm of human eccentricity and to give them the stature of "Nature's Laws." ”

“ Some dare not leave the old, the beaten Way,
To search new Methods, or in Science stray ...
(p. 8.)
Similarly clear are Gwynn's adaptations of such commonplaces as the need to subordinate parts to the whole (p. 8) or for consistency of style (p. 15) . Again, Horace asks whether a good poem is the product of nature or art—of native talent or of training—and denies that either is adequate alone (11. 408-418) . Gwynn raises the same question about the architect, although in the first person, and answers,
If Art, or Nature, form'd me what I am ”

“ And banish'd Gothick Practice from the Schools.
Use is the Judge, the Law, the Rule of Things,
Whence Arts arose, and whence the Science springs.
(p. 11) 11
Horace and Gwynn both think of "use" operating as a kind of historical necessity causing the resurrection of a rule or a form. Gwynn adds to this the concept, drawn from Vitruvius and his commentators, that the rules of architecture prescribe forms which satisfy particular uses and reflect directly the strengths and limitations of building materials and techniques. ”

“ Accompanying it was an unprecedented deluge of publications, all of which helped to create a greater popular consciousness of humanist architectural principles than had previously existed. Yet the revival was proving ineffectual, and perhaps the clearest evidence is in Gwynn's attack on Kent: "See the old Goths, [pg iv] in K——'s Designs survive;/ And Modern Fools, to imitate his strive" (p. 26) . Kent edited the drawings of the English Palladio for the Earl of Burlington (The Designs of Inigo Jones, With Some Additional Designs, 1727) ”

“ Their careers exhibit two more instructive parallels. Both began as amateurs, possessed of no specific training, and ended as self-supporting "professionals," able to exercise their skills on demand and fully conscious of the qualifications needed for membership within their professions.3 Second, both began with the hope of "fixing" the rules of their arts, but ended by disavowing the intention or by implicitly contradicting it. Johnson records his disillusionment with one such attempt in the "Preface" to his Dictionary (1755) . ”

“ As it relates chiefly to Situation in Building he quotes Shaftesbury on the title page, acknowledges his debt to Thomson, and quotes long passages from The Seasons to illustrate various rural "situations."14 In The Art of Architecture he follows Morris's example in writing his own verse in language imitative of Thomson's (except for one direct quotation, "From the moist Meadow; to the brown-brow'd Hill") . ”

“ Take, for example, one of his lists of architects worthy of study: "With M——s, F——ft, G——s, L——i, W——e,/ Let Admiralty, or Custom-house compare" (p. 18) . Four of these architects published treatises or translations of treatises which Gwynn certainly knew: Robert Morris, Lectures on Architecture, 1734-364; James Gibbs, Rules for Drawing the Several Parts of Architecture, 1733 ”

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[pg]
REGULAR PUBLICATIONS FOR 1969-1970 139. ”