ay. In the book of designs pre-pared by Burges each page shows oneaspect of the ruins as they were in 1872contrasted with his own ideas for thereconstruction of the same elevation(Fig.48) It was while working on thisproject that Burges declared 'I have beenbrought up in the thirteenth-centurybelief, and in that belief I intend to die'.Castel Coch was rebuilt as a fairy-talecastle, the like of which never existed inthe British Isles; the architect cited theprecedent of manuscript illustrations inthe British Museum to justify authentic-ity, but the castle, with its parapets,towers and soaring, conical roofs, owesmore to the inspiration of L'Aigle and theChateau de Chillon, as well as toViollet-le-Duc's restoration at Carcas-sonne, than to any British e

. The great presentation booksof Knightshayes and Castell Coch have adepth and luminosity, which, despitetheir austerely architectural presenta-tion, link them visually to the Books ofHours of the Middle Ages, which Burgesadmired so much, and to the famousthirteenth-century sketchbook of Villardde Honnecourt in the BibliothequeNationale in Pari

is use of mosaicwas based on a knowledge of medieval techniques unequalled inhis generati

nd he considered the study of antique andmedieval sculpture crucial to any architect’s training.

urges was not a religious man. His religion was the art of theMiddle Ages, not its theology. The bulk of his church work wasAnglican, but two of his greatest patrons — Lord Ripon andLord Bute — were Roman Catholics. His dream was the churchcandescent, an aesthete’s version of the church militant: Faithmade manifest in Art.

urges’s report on Castell Coch was prepared in 1871-2.Work began in August 1875. The structure was finished by theend of 1879.° But when Burges died in 1881 the interior hadhardly been begun.

Archaeology was a passion with Bute, second only toliturgy.

as originally built early in the thirteenth centuryby Gilbert the Red, Earl of Gloucester, to guard the Taff valley’gainst the Welsh.

o, the explanation must be Ruskinian:architecture as a vehicle for the decorative arts, eclectic, didactic;plus a special Burgesian gloss: architecture as fantasy, architectureas fun

Now Burges’s fascination with Islamic art was by nomeans unique. The Paris Exhibitions of 1867 and 1878 had arousedcuriosity about the style,® not least in the mind of Ludwig II ofBavaria.

e Trustees naturally looked askance at Burges’sfeudal extravaganzas. Cardiff Castle and Castell Coch had,therefore, to be paid for out of Bute’s personal income; much oftheir cost must have been floated on borrowed money

his phase of activity, however, was abruptly curtailed byfinancial difficulties in 1874-75, a book-keeping crisis in the Butefortunes which temporarily threatened the whole operation.®In 1871 and 1873 there had been major coal strikes.

he twelve signs of the zodiac appear in proxy formas their respective precious stones

Bute came of age in 1868, and work began straight away

Some of these trips werein the nature of archaeological excursions; others were healthcures.

ritics were generallyimpressed by the integrity of his scholarship; Rosebery — forone — praised the nobility of his styl

is libraries were packedwith rare manuscripts and books. His list of writings is by anystandards prodigio

o celebrate his eventual confirmation in1869 — in the Sistine Chapel, no less — Pope Pius IX presentedhim with an image of the Sacred Heart.

By 1900 — the year the 3rd Marquess died — the total coalexports from Cardiff amounted to 7,500,000 t

ke the celebrated Duke of Bridgewater,he not only profited from but actually helped to create theindustrial revolution. An earnest, solitary, myopic, evangelicalLiberal Tory, he had all the confidence and resolution of anearly nineteenth-century industrialist, tempered by an inbornsense of paternalist responsibility.

Known in hisyouth as a profligate and dandy, he married not one heiress buttwo: firstly the ‘rich ugly Miss Windsor’, who later inheritedgreat estates in Cardiff and South Wales long owned by theHerberts, Earls of Pembroke;

nd his cautious advice atLlandaff Cathedral — against Prichard and Seddon’s re-roofing— was remarkably progressive for its date.

bout the middle of the nineteenth century two attitudestowards restoration were in conflict: the destructive and theconservative. Burges supported the conservative

urges made.no secret of his admiration for Viollet-le-Duc,at least as regards the Frenchman’s scholarship. He regarded theDictionnaire —‘that wonderful monument of human knowledgeand human industry’” — as quite invaluable.

rench Gothicwas nobler, cheaper and characteristic of the modern age.‘The distinguishing characteristics of the Englishmen of thenineteenth century’, Burges concludes, ‘are our immense railwayand engineering works, our line-of-battle ships, our good andstrong machinery .. . our free constitution, our unfettered press,and our trial by jury... . [No] style of architecture can be moreappropriate to such a people than that which . . . is characterisedby boldness, breadth, strength, sternness, and virility

hereas ‘the French architect of the same periodlooked more to the effect and less to the section; he left moreplain surfaces ... thus his mouldings, where he did use them, havea more telling effect’..

Early French, however, ‘is a style which verynearly answers our conditions, and if we go a little further backand examine what is called the Transition style, as developed inEngland and France, but especially the latter, we shall find almosteverything we want.

In the eyes of ecclesiologists their greatest achievementhad been to rescue the Gothic Revival from the smear of Popery.Pugin — that ‘wonderful man’, as Burges always thought of him— had tainted the movement with a whiff of incense. Ruskinsupplied an anti-papal deodorant.

The repeal of the brick tax in 1850 gave the new fashiona flying sta

Burges’s approach to religion was aesthetic rather thantheological. He was not christened until he was thirteen.

t it is Burges’s collection of medieval MSS which wouldnow be deemed a veritable treasure-hoard.

‘Money,’ he noted firmly, ‘is onlya secondary concern in the production of first-rate works. . . .There are no bargains in art.

y his mid-thirties Burges was — in architectural circles atleast — an international figure. He had travelled more widelythan any of his contemporaries. His learning was incontestable.His eclecticism was more broadly based than any of hisrivals; Romanesque, Gothic, Islamic, Greek, Japanese — evenFlorentine and Francois Premier — were all grist to his mill.His Gothic dreams were images of geniu

e had realised that what wasneeded was a collection of measured medieval details: ‘a sort ofgrammar of thirteenth-century architecture.’

Gothic ‘architecture was (and it always must be) eminently anarchitecture of figures and subjects ... part .. . [of] the greatpoem of Christian art’

urges looked about Victoria’s London, and looked in vainfor colour. Exterior polychromy seemed almost a lost art.’

In other words, the Pre-Raphaelite reaction againstacademicism, and the reaction of Puginian Gothic against thePicturesque, stemmed from a similar — if dog-eared — aestheticimpulse: the pursuit of truth

urges accepted Pre-Raphaelite principles implicitly. Thesehe defined — rather naively — as ‘to copy nature carefully, to usepleasant bright colours, and to give sentiment to the figures’.

The magic of the Orient was certainly part of the HighVictorian Dream.

Such catholicity was too much for most Victorian Goths

‘infinitely better than any eitherin Paris or in London.” And individual mosques were stillmagnificent. Particular houses were still occasionally deckedout in characteristic gold and r

Burges regarded travel as essential for any young architect. ‘Allarchitects should travel,’ he believed, ‘but more especially the art-architect; to him it is absolutely necessary to see how various artproblems have been resolved in different ages by different men.’

ith Clutton he travelled in France in the year of the GreatExhibition, making sketches for Clutton’s book on The Domes

In the early 1850s Burges was known less as an architectthan as an archaeologist.

s an articled pupil, Burges pored over books by JohnCarter and A. W. Pugin.

At the age of seventeenhe was already mixing with the vanguard of the Gothic Revival

sengineer to the Bute Docks at Cardiff, he was in a position tointroduce his son to the greatest patron in the history of theGothic Revival, the 3rd Marquess of Bute.

Alfred Burges was a rich man: he died worth £113,000, mostlyin railway stock. It was he who made possible his son’saesthetic lifestyl

lfred Burges presented hisson with a copy of Pugin’s Con¢rasts on his fourteenth birthday

ut he was not a political animal; hekept faith with that vision in his own studio. As early as 1856 hevowed to ‘work hard and paint visions and dreams and symbolsfor the understanding of people’.** More consciously than Rossetti,more subtly than Morris, he spent his life seeking the numinousin an alien world, groping for a symbolic language to express the _invisible, pursuing those ‘richly coloured images of a historical orlegendary past’ which might ‘serve also as metaphors for the life ofthe human spi

ike Pugin and Ruskin, however, Morris always cherishedGothic art and architecture, not just for its own sake, but as an agentof moral revolution.

WithBurne-Jones and Rossetti in London in 1856, Morris formedwhat was in effect the second Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. ‘Apartfrom the desire to produce beautiful things,’ he recalled in 1894,‘the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of moderncivilisation.’

To the young Burne-Jones, Ruskin’s writings were theauthentic voice of truth: ‘in prose what Tennyson is in poetry, andwhat the Pre-Raphaelites are in painting’.*

Captains of Industry musttake on the mantles of Arthurian heroes.

“That wonderful man, asBurges called him,” was the lodestar of a generation of Goths

outhey’s edition of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur (1817) was for thePre-Raphaelites a ‘precious book’; ‘we feasted on it’, Burne-Jonesrecalled.

ndeed itwas Burne-Jones who put the whole debate in a nutshell: ‘the morematerialistic Science becomes, the more angels shall I paint’.

t is, therefore, in the realm of political ratherthan artistic theory that we must first look for the origins of HighVictorian aesthetics

High Victorian art and architecture lasted little more thantwenty years: the customary dates are 1851 to 1870

t wasa dream born in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, in thehopelessness of the Hungry Forties

Theirs was a longing — far stronger than mere nostalgia— for a world of magic and fixed values; a yearning for stability inan age of change

the strange, nearly indecipherable Gothic script known as kurrentschrift, which Germans used until around 1900.

Among the more specialized examples were so-called “double-gothic” typefaces. They are characterized by including a set of uppercase letters while the corresponding small-caps take the place of the lowercase. “Double” refers to the two uppercase-shaped glyph sets while “gothic” is simply the American term for sans-serif.

These words were a sufficient explication of the scene. The nature of his phrenzy, as described by my uncle, was remembered. I who had sought death, was now thrilled with horror because it was near. Death in this form, death from the hand of a brother, was thought upon with undescribable repugnance. In a state thus verging upon madness, my eye glanced upon Carwin. His astonishment appeared to have struck him motionless and dumb. My life was in danger, and my brother’s hand was about to be embrued in my blood. I firmly believed that Carwin’s was the instigation. I could rescue me from this abhorred fate; I could dissipate this tremendous illusion; I could save my brother from the perpetration of new horrors, by pointing out the devil who seduced him; to hesitate a moment was to perish. These thoughts gave strength to my limbs, and energy to my accents: I started on my feet. “O brother! spare me, spare thyself: There is thy betrayer. He counterfeited the voice and face of an angel, for the purpose of destroying thee and me. He has this moment confessed it. He is able to speak where he is not. He is leagued with hell, but will not avow it; yet he confesses that the agency was his.”

Chapter XIX

o occult cont

German stories of ghosts,

lethargic, somnambulistic character

I shall soon leave you as far behind me as — what shall I say? — I want an appropriate simile. — as far as your friend Emily herself left poor Valancourt when she went with her aunt into Italy.