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258 The Mediterranean of Louis XV
Simultaneous to Wood’s work on Homer, the little-known
remains of Greek architecture were being revealed in the publications
of both French and British travellers. By the standard
of Roman architecture that had been the touchstone of classical
taste since the Renaissance, the Doric monuments of Greece
and southern Italy were impossible to inscribe into the classical
canon because they lacked the finesse and, most important, the
proportions that characterized the Roman orders. At the same
time that Wood subjected Homer to analysis based on principles
of scientific observation and navigation, a similar operation
was carried out on Greek architecture by the French
traveller and architect Julien-David Leroy (1724–1803). Leroy
rejected proportion as a criterion of aesthetic judgement and
established a new, dynamic relationship between the monument
and the observer in order to overcome Renaissance barriers to
understanding the full range of ancient architectural forms.
An admirer of Wood’s 1753 publication on the Roman ruins
at Palmyra, Leroy was uniquely equipped for his 1754–5 voyage
to Greece. Trained as an architect, he also benefited from a
complete immersion in the most advanced concepts in modern
science and technology at home. His brothers Jean-Baptiste
(1720–1800) and Charles (1726–79) both wrote for the Encyclopédie
and were members of the Académie des Sciences and the
Royal Society. In 1769 and 1773, his brother Pierre Leroy
(1717–85) won prizes offered by the Académie des Sciences
for the invention of a reliable marine chronometer. The Leroy
family was closely connected with several of the leading French
scientists and travellers who had worked for the Ministry of
Maritime Affairs. 46
One of the aims of Leroy’s voyage to Greece was cartographic.
He not only attempted to situate the ruins of Athens
46 On Leroy, see D. Wiebenson, Sources of Greek Revival Architecture
(London, 1969); A. Braham, The Architecture of the French Enlightenment
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1980), 64–6; B. Bergdoll, Léon Vaudoyer: Historicism
in the Age of Industry (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), 12–18; id., European
Architecture 1750–1890 (Oxford, 2000), 16–32; C. D. Armstrong, ‘Progress in
the Age of Navigation: The Voyage-Philosophique of Julien-David Leroy’
(Ph. D. thesis, Columbia University, 2003); id., ‘De la théorie des proportions
à l’expérience des sensations: l’Essai sur la Théorie de l’Architecture de Julien-
David Le Roy, 1770’, Annales du Centre Ledoux 5 (2003) (forthcoming); Julien-
David Leroy, The Ruins of the Most Beautiful Monuments of Greece (trans.
D. Britt) with an introduction by R. Middleton (Santa Monica, Calif., (2004)).