Alan Powers

Lines of beauty | 17 November 2007

The Beauty of Holiness: G.F. Bodley (1827-1907) and his circle

The date of George Frederick Bodley’s death (1907) offers a partial explanation for a commemorative exhibition, but ‘comes the hour, comes the man’ also applies, and in this case the man is Michael Hall, the editor of Apollo magazine, who for some years has studied Bodley’s work and succeeded in presenting it as a key to understanding many aspects of the late-Victorian mind, rather than simply as the oeuvre of a skilled but possibly rather conventional designer whose successors followed him into a dead end of style. He is the instigator and curator of this small exhibition in the V&A + RIBA Architecture gallery at the V&A. There is a book coming, but for that we shall have to wait a little longer.

The publication earlier this year of Rosemary Hill’s biography of Pugin has reminded the reading public that architectural ideas in Victorian Britain were primarily played out in the ecclesiastical sphere. Bodley’s career began in 1852, the year of Pugin’s death, and in the 1860s he bucked the trend of French- and Italian-based ‘vigorous’ Gothic when he redesigned All Saints, Jesus Lane, Cambridge, in a more consciously English style that looked back in some ways to Pugin. In contrast to the anxious busyness of his contemporaries, speculating about the true path to architectural righteousness, Bodley let his eyes do the work, making judgments that, while informed by precedent, were ultimately based on his own sense of beauty, hence the exhibition’s title. He set beauty against progress, believing that you must choose one or the other. He was noted for his method of studying old buildings, which in his mature years employed cigars rather than sketchbooks, as he sat contemplating on a tombstone. In this laconic conviction, he resembles another aesthete among ideologues, Mies van der Rohe, in the 20th century.

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