Review - Book - Antiquity: Origins, Classicism and the New Rome

Tadgell’s ‘necklace of great buildings’ includes the Temple of Athena Nike in Athens...

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BOOK
By John McKean

Antiquity: Origins, Classicism and the New Rome.
By Christopher Tadgell. Phaidon, 2007. 840pp. £65

I must admit to an interest in the idea of an architectural history of everything. As I struggle with completely rewriting Banister Fletcher’s A History of Architecture, two other valiant attempts have already appeared this year.

First up was A Global History of Architecture, from Francis Ching, Mark Jarzombek and Vikramaditya Prakash, which brilliantly reworks Banister Fletcher’s formula. On to Ching’s well-known draughtsmanship are hung myriad short tales in a 700-page, non-Eurocentric, chronological gallery of key buildings. Imperial tombs of Qin China and Rome rub shoulders with the holy mountains of Sanchi in India and Teuchitlàn in Mexico, and original, clear texts inform these juxtapositions.

Now Christopher Tadgell presents his more ambitious scheme. He plans to divide the cake into five: the Ancients (this volume, up to Byzantium), Moderns (since the Enlightenment) and between them East, West and Islam. And academic publisher Routledge – whose fare is usually 250 pages with 50 grey images and a £75 price tag – has discovered design. With bright colour on all its many pages, the book is great value.

Of well over 1,000 images, only 19 are credited. Are the rest the author’s own, often very fine, shots – a reminder of Banister Fletcher’s claim that he visited every building he included? Here they add a real vitality, while the many snaps of models in museums are great.

and Machu Picchu, as his narrative jumps from Europe to South America and back

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The tale follows a traditional route (Fertile Crescent – Aegean – Assyria) until, at the death of the Persian king Darius, we jump the Atlantic to the Olmecs. Mesoamerica develops to Columbus, then back three millennia to Peru and on again to Machu Picchu before we’re whisked back to Classical Greece and set on the home straight to Byzantium (with a detour to Ethiopia).

Tadgell has his necklace of great buildings (in one typeface), stringing them together with a narrative enlarging their social/political context (in another). But this jumps between entries on the pantheons of gods and chronology of kings as well as on the architecture itself, where most of the sentences in his series of tiny books for Ellipsis (1998) reappear. Add another thread (and third typeface) of often long, valuable captions, and the overlaps can confuse.

One could grumble about many little things: the few, sparsely annotated maps are quite inadequate to locate the myriad places discussed; every drawing has a scale (great) but far too many are clearly out by an order of 10 at least (a pity). Yet no book of this size will get all of this right in its first edition. And here is a treasure chest of material, the enticing images complemented by a lengthy text.

Yet this text itself doesn’t have an easy charm. One paragraph, randomly chosen, begins: ‘If Olmec culture developed from a San Lorentian synthesis of forms and ideas derived from disparate sources, after the millennium of its evolution and dissemination throughout Mesoamerica the differentiation of regional development produced the array of disparate cultures from which the great classic traditions of the Mexican basin were to emerge dominant in the early centuries CE.’ Then a much longer sentence concludes the 18-line paragraph.

If there is a sense of the pre-Hispanic material not being entirely digested, that from Classical Greece and Rome has had perhaps too much rumination, and a rather traditional art-history tale echoes in its vocabulary.

Tadgell relaxes as ‘Athens entered the Classical age of the fifth century’ – almost as if civilisation’s gates were opened to a flourish of trumpets. Here ‘the stupendous chryselephantine statue’ is deep behind the ‘prostyle hexastyle’, and soon the Roman house has its peristyle round the compluvium over the impluvium. Half these words are never explained while the others are unnecessary – in English, the Roman house had a colonnaded court with a central pond.

So the contrast in tone of voice with, say, John Onians or Joseph Rykwert on the Classical orders is marked; but equally so is the content. Onians’ 1988 book was called The Bearers of Meaning. Tadgell, like many predecessors with less attractive books, can detail the development of the orders, but leaves us with little idea of what that language might actually have meant to the designers and their clients.

John McKean is a professor at the University of Brighton