Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

Willis became the first academic and ‘probably the greatest’ architectural
historian England produced. 197 With him the study of Gothic architecture reached an
unprecedented level of scholarship. His success, which combined erudition with a
reputation as a popular lecturer, was based on his analysis of buildings. ‘He treated a
building as he treated a machine’ his nephew later wrote in the introduction to Willis’s
history of Winchester cathedral, ‘he took it to pieces; he pointed out what was structural
and what was decorative, what was imitated and what was original; and how the most
complex forms of mediaeval invention might be reduced to simple elements’. 198 The
moral, religious or emotional implications of the buildings he analysed should not, he
believed, be any of his concern. In 1841 he resigned his vice-presidency of the
Cambridge Camden Society in protest against the tendency ‘in some quarters… to
convert the Society into an engine of polemical theology, instead of an instrument for
promoting the study and the practice of Ecclesiastical Architecture’. 199 He was by no
means indifferent to aesthetics or religion but for Willis subjective engagement was
inimical to scholarly integrity. The distinction between ‘the aesthetic character,
mechanical arrangement & the symbolism of a building should be very clearly
understood’ he wrote, in notes left unfinished at his death, ‘for the want of this
classification has been the source of an error unhappily too prevalent in the present day
and which leads to the most fatal consequences’. 200 As Buchanan observes, ‘what Willis
meant by history was pure chronology’. 201
He was not the first architectural antiquary to think in this way. Neither Thomas
Rickman (1776-1841), who established the chronology and the terminology still
generally used to describe Gothic architecture, nor George Whittington (1781-1807) who
successfully traced the elusive origins of the pointed arch to the Abbé Suger’s St Denis,
had apparently much involved themselves in those emotional and spiritual experiences of
the Gothic that Milner, Britton, Losh and Willson, entertained. Willis, however, was
197
Watkin, The Rise of Architectural History, p.65.
198
Willis, The Architectural History of Winchester Cathedral, p. ii.
199
The Ecclesiologist, 1, (1841), p.25.
200
Mss notes left unfinished at Willis’s death, quoted in Buchanan, ‘Robert Willis and the Rise of
Architectural History’, Appendix A, p. iv.
201
Buchanan, ‘Robert Willis and the Rise of Architectural History’, p.368.
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