It all began at Hardwick Hall. Imagine an impressionable and imaginative young boy staying with his relations, wandering about absorbing the atmosphere of that miraculous survivor of an Elizabethan house. Mark Girouard’s intellectual curiosity about English architectural history was ignited by his childhood experience of living in those extraordinary rooms. He was on the roof or climbing the worn stone stairs up to the High Great Chamber and experiencing the passion and artifice of Elizabethan architecture at first hand.
Girouard’s major new book is the fruit of years of intensive research following on from his first book, Robert Smythson and the Architecture of the Elizabethan Era (1966). This explored the life and work of the man who lived from 1534/5 to 1614, who built Hardwick and Wollaton, and worked at Wardour and Longleat. Girouard was the first to catalogue and explore the remarkable cache of 150 architectural drawings by Robert Smythson and his sons, which are almost certainly the earliest group of technical drawings to have survived in England.
Girouard pioneered the recognition of these drawings as indicators of how masons abstracted elevations from plans and, more importantly, how they revealed the influence of Continental treatises and pattern books, like those of the Dutch engineer and designer Hans Vredeman de Vries, and the Italian Mannerist Sebastiano Serlio. Girouard has the rare skill of making his knowledge and enthusiasm infectious and accessible. He is greatly helped in this large and heavy book by the hugely seductive photographs and the pleasing design of every page.
He points out that, although Elizabeth I herself built very little, her reign was the moment when building for solidity and convenience was abandoned for a style that emphasised festivity and richness. Elizabethan building takes on a court dress that is informed and lively, influenced by abroad but ultimately very original and very English.
The ‘prodigy’ houses that so fascinate Girouard are shown in this glorious book to be places where artifice and symmetry collaborate to produce settings for ritual, sovereignty and a sense of potent magic. The lively creation of houses like Holdenby, Burghley, Longleat, Kirby, Hardwick, Wollaton, Theobalds, Doddington and Montacute, is explored in such a way that transports the reader to the world of the courtiers and grandees who built them, above all, to impress.
They impress by their intricacy and by the way they borrow ideas from Italy and the Low Countries; but they especially impress by the way they are, as Girouard points out, ‘full of messages’. Their parapets often literally carry inscriptions. Their plasterwork is full of heraldic devices. He calls them, ‘speaking buildings’, and in one chapter there are 45 illustrations of monumental chimney pieces designed by craftsmen. All of them with their columns, alcoves, cartouches, roundels and entablatures are like models for palatial buildings.
Architects as we know them today did not exist in the Elizabethan and Jacobean period. These marvellous buildings are the creation of a special breed of ‘artificer-designers’, and three of them are described in some detail: Robert Smythson, John Thorpe and William Arnold. Girouard has undertaken painstaking research to establish the links between familiar buildings and their less familiar creators.
Smythson’s work is the best known, and recorded at Hardwick, Longleat and Wollaton, and this book adds several more houses to his name. Arnold is known to have designed Montacute, Cranborne Manor, Dunster Castle and the neat symmetry of Wadham College, Oxford. John Thorpe’s drawings provide a lot of clues to his authorship of double-pile houses as well as Aston Hall near Birmingham and Holland House in Kensington.
It was not until the 19th century that Girouard sees the high Elizabethan style as being acceptable to copy and build as an alternative to the Classical and Gothic styles. He points out rightly that Hawksmoor and Vanbrugh took some of their adventurousness in skyline and fantasy from the high point of Elizabethan architecture.
What replaced the high style after it petered out in the 1630s? Girouard is refreshing about Smythson’s significance, seeing him as more of a façade man who was, ‘laying a series of time bombs which were to explode in subsequent centuries’. It is the original way that the Elizabethans produced such adventurous English architecture that attracts this scholar, and his book is a prodigious, learned and highly readable celebration of an amazing period. Mark Girouard is our greatest architectural writer and historian and this is his best book — a sumptuous treat.
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