Virtually Italian

Our programme of events has gone Virtual. The President introduces the first talks in the series.

The Society’s series of online seminars and study tours, which begin this week with a virtual study tour of Saltaire, is already proving very popular: bookings are coming in fast and the limited number of (free) places are almost all taken – so please do not risk being disappointed.  It is no more than coincidental that the first three presentations address, in reverse chronological order, the influence of Italian architecture on nineteenth and eighteenth-century Britain.  Saltaire, where we go on the afternoon of Wednesday 24 June, is a picturesque assemblage of terraces drawing frequently from the Italian Villa style as found in John Claudius Loudon’s Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm and Villa Architecture (1833).  Loudon, however, was not a great fan of the Villa style, warning that ‘it is not a style which can be trusted in the hands of any Architect not a master in the art of composition.’  Were Lockwood & Mawson good enough to be trusted with it at Saltaire?  ‘To produce it’, he warned, ‘requires a much higher degree of talent, than to compose in any species of regular architecture.’

Lockwood Street, Saltaire

If in 1833 the Villa style’s urban counterpart, the Italian Palazzo style, the subject of our Seminar on 2 July, was not yet a ‘species of regular architecture’, then by the time Saltaire begun in 1853 it certainly was, as the miles of white, stucco terraces in west London can attest.  It is Charles Barry who can best be credited with the introduction of the Palazzo style, first at the Travellers Club (1829-32) in Pall Mall, London, which was based upon Raphael’s Palazzo Pandolfini in Florence, and then at its neighbour, the Reform Club (1837-41), clubland’s version of Antonio da Sangallo and Michaelangelo’s Palazzo Farnese in Rome.  Even before the Reform Club was started, Soane’s pupil, George Basevi, had built Pelham Crescent (1835) in a white stucco finish on the Henry Smith Charity Estates in South Kensington and sowed the seeds for ubiquitous developments such as Thomas Cubitt’s Pimlico in Westminster and Thomas Allom’s Ladbroke Estates in Kensington, London.

In 1817, in the immediate aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, Barry had left for a tour of Europe which, in 1820, culminated with his studies of the Renaissance architecture of Florence and Rome.  Exactly sixty years before, James Adam had set out for Italy on a similar educational exercise, one which his older brother, Robert, had commenced six years earlier.  It is their Grand Tours which are the subject of our Seminar on 9 July.  Robert arrived in Rome in early 1755 and soon wrote, in one of his weekly letters home: ‘Rome is the most glorious place in the Universal world.  A grandeur, a tranquillity reigns in it.  Everywhere noble and striking remains of Antiquity appear in it …’  There he, like James after him, was tutored in draughtsmanship and antiquarian studies by the Frenchman, Charles-Louis Clérisseau, who was to accompany Robert to Split to work on the hugely important book, Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalatro, published in 1764.  But it was Rome that captivated both men.  There Robert met and was befriended by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, whom he described as ‘the most extraordinary fellow I ever saw …’: Piranesi, in turn, dedicated his 1762 study of the Campus Martius antiquae urbis to ‘Roberto Adam Britann. Architecto Celeberrim.’  He was to remain in Rome for over two years and from there, when writing to James in 1756, referred to himself as ‘Bob the Roman’.  It was not an inappropriate appellation.

Please join us for our three Italianate events:

‘A Virtual Visit to Saltaire’, a Study Tour led by Neil Jackson on Wednesday 24 June, from 15.30 to 17.00

‘The Italianate in British Urban Architecture’, a Seminar given by David McKinstry on Thursday 2 July, from 17.00 to 18.30

‘Robert & James Adam: The Grand Tour Correspondence and Writings’, a Seminar given by Colin Thom and Adriano Aymonino on Thursday 9 July at 17.00 to 18.30

Neil Jackson is the President of the SAHGB and co-author of Saltaire: The Making of a Model Town.