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9 Colen Campbell, James Gibbs and Sir John Vanbrugh: Rethinking the Origins of the British Architectural Plate Book
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Published:October 2020
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Abstract
Early eighteenth-century British architecture has generally been portrayed as a battle between the Baroque and Palladian styles. In this view, Colen Campbell’s Vitruvius Britannicus (1715-1725) was the great manifesto of Palladianism against the ‘official’ court Baroque of Wren, Hawksmoor and Vanbrugh, while James Gibbs’ Book of Architecture (1728) represents a subsequent rearguard action on behalf of the Baroque aesthetic. This chapter shows that the two publications were indeed profoundly shaped by their émigré Scots’ authors’ encounters with Vanbrugh—and notably by his own important, though nearly forgotten, attempts at architectural publishing—but in ways that directly contradict received views of their purposes. United by their Whig political sympathies, Vanbrugh and Campbell worked together to promote their architectural careers, regardless of their apparent stylistic opposition, while their common enmity towards Gibbs, a Tory and closet Catholic, reinforced his preference for an independent path. The resulting picture of the origins of the earliest British architectural plate books reinforces recent calls to fundamentally rethink the relationship between political identity and stylistic choice in early eighteenth-century Britain.
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