Architecture - Andrew Ballantyne [36]
but carefully wrought pavilion next to his house at Chiswick in west London (Figure 16). He worshipped Palladio and collected his drawings, and set himself up with his close friend William Kent as arbiters of architectural taste. The artistic salon that operated at Chiswick was presided over by Lady Burlington, who was the only person who actually lived in the villa, and was undoubtedly important in seeing that there was a congenial atmosphere at the place, in which ideas could be freely exchanged. The villa became a focus of artistic creativity, which accounts for a part of the building’s great influence. Without this influence it is quite possible that the Baroque in England might have flourished for as long as it did in France and Germany. It is possible that Jefferson, isolated in Virginia and learning from books, might have picked up on Palladio’s ideas, but he might have been seen as an eccentric individualist rather than a man of taste by Chastellux when he visited. The current of changing taste cannot be generated entirely by a very small group of people – there must have been receptive audience ready to listen to the Burlington circle’s ideas – but nevertheless the villa has a significance in architectural history that is much greater than its small size would suggest. Along with the architectural work and the influence of Lady Burlington’s salon, the architect Colen Campbell worked to achieve similar ends with his monumental scholarly undertaking, Vitruvius Britannicus, which was a three-volume publication that illustrated architectural works that met with Campbell’s approval – all of them in a classical manner, and many of them Campbell’s own designs, some of them executed commissions, some of them flights of fancy. Burlington employed James Gibbs, who designed in an Italianate manner that evidently suited Burlington well enough, when he returned from his travels, to remodel his town house, Burlington House in Piccadilly. However, he was replaced by Campbell, who persuaded Burlington that he, Campbell, was the more correctly schooled and authentically Palladian architect. (The building incidentally was on the same site, but is not the same building, as the current Burlington House on Piccadilly that houses the Royal Academy.) Campbell’s publications helped to establish and to spread the idea of simple well-proportioned buildings as a model of excellence, always contrasted with the trashy barbarism of the Baroque, which was portrayed as overladen with ornament that distracted the viewer from its neglect of fundamental principles.
Burlington’s villa at Chiswick established an idea of fashionable architecture that dominates our view of 18th-century architecture. What did it mean to Burlington and his contemporaries? It should be noticed in passing that it is only in the wealthiest part of society that there were fashions in architecture. Houses are always expensive to build, and finely wrought carefully considered houses built in dressed and sculpted stone were only ever available to the rich, who had retinues of servants to support their domestic arrangements. Most people were not caught up in any concern to live in a fashionable house, but would be content to have a sound dwelling to live in. Inevitably, in understanding what the building would have meant to its designers, we are involved in seeing the world from a particular point of view, that could be characterized as élitist, because it has always been most readily accessible to the people who did not have to worry about making money for basic necessities. The consequences for the working population of being fired with a passion for the arts gave rise to the Romantic stereotype of the starving artist, who finds a way into an élite culture without having the means to support a reasonable level of comfort. Talented people without private means managed to make their way in 18th-century England by having a patron adopt them, though this was not seen as a suitable arrangement for a man of property to make with a woman, and few women managed to establish themselves