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GILES Worsley. Classical Architecture in Britain: The Heroic Age. New Haven and London: Yale, 1995. Pp. xiii + 350. $55.
In this ambitious project, the aim is to replace the "conventional view" of British architecture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with a new "sense of order." The conventional view, typified by Sir John Summerson's Architecture in Britain, 1530-1830 (1953, most recently revised 1991) has acquired classic status. Mr. Worsley does not seek a revolutionary overthrow of the ancien régime, but rather a repatterning of familiar material. His view of classical architecture in Britain is, paradoxically, more complex than traditional history, and yet simpler.
The complexity lies in the encyclopedic (even gazeteer-like) deployment of evidence which Mr. Worsley uses to subvert simplistic linear history or selective stylistic or ideological groupings. They disintegrate before empirical diversity. The simplicity is in the importance given to Inigo Jones as a conduit for the Palladian school. Rather than Jones being a "lonely genius," his influence is so pervasive in the seventeenth century that the Burlingtonians were continuing rather than reviving Palladianism in the eighteenth century. Such is the "ascendancy" of the style that even later neoclassicism is called "Palladian neo-classicism." The peripheries of British culture were likewise pervaded by Palladianism, and Mr. Worsley' s panoptic eye encompasses Ireland, Scotland, colonial and Federal America (with brief excursions to France and Germany). Summary cannot do justice to the combination of detailed and complex alertness to the variety of the evidence and yet...