We're back in England now, and we're looking at a phenomenon that we touched on last time, and that's the whole shift in interest away from individual buildings and toward the idea of landscape. The idea of landscape as a communicator of ideas about nature that come from the enlightenment, the notion that there is something about nature that represents a purer state, a more primal state, a more original state, and there's something about nature that represents something that can create strong aesthetic experiences when you contemplate it. We looked at, very briefly, a couple of terms. One was the whole rise of the branch of philosophy called aesthetics in the 18th century. Aesthetics having to do with judgments about beauty, and we discussed that the range of topics had expanded beyond simply what constitutes the beautiful to how other strong feelings can be stimulated. Beautiful according to Edmund Burke, who wrote philosophical inquiry into the sublime and the beautiful, Burke suggests that the beautiful has to do with something that's rational and understandable and balanced in its proportion, symmetrical, small, clear, smooth. The kinds of things that Burke associates with beauty are the kinds of things valorized in, say, Renaissance treatises on architecture, where it's all about proportion, it's all about platonic solids, it's all about somehow allowing people to feel that they have a rational understanding of the things they're beholding, and it's that grasp, that reasonable grasp on things that decodes the mystery of the object and makes the aesthetic experience pleasurable. But by the 18th century, the notion of the sublime had become part of the field of discussion in aesthetics, and the sublime is quite a different feeling. The sublime is this feeling of being overwhelmed by nature, of being blown away. This is a fabulous ravaging of a woman by monsters, by Fuseli, a English painter.  Apollo Belvedere wins, by the way, in my vote here. It's the strong emotional feeling where you feel like you're about to lose control, and by the 18th century, it was understood that that kind of feeling is sometimes more powerful and more memorable than simply contemplating beauty. Hence, landscape becomes important from that point of view too. These are some 17th century landscapes that we looked at briefly last time. A couple of paintings by Claude Lorraine, the French painter, and by the time Claude is painting these landscapes, really the historical or mythological or allegorical subject matter has almost completely disappeared. We have a couple of figures down here like pastoral, which means shepherds and shepherdesses frolicking in the meadow in a period before history began, before culture took hold, before cities were established, when life was really easy, when you were living the same kind of unmediated connection with nature that say animals have, or even in a painting like the one below, the embarkation of Shiba, which speaks ostensibly about a historical theme. It seems to be much more about landscape, the power of light, particularly this backlighting, contra luce that Claude is interested in, and the ability of these kinds of landscapes to stir strong feelings. We saw also that Nicolas Poussin and a whole slew of other painters are interested in this new genre of the landscape painting and the idea that there is this thing called the picturesque, the arrangement of landscape forms and architecture and staffage, people and animals that become suggestive of strong feelings. Additionally, there's another impulse of landscape that's coming into play in the 18th century and these are prints, Chinese prints that are being brought back by missionaries and by traders who are going off to China. And the quality of the landscape in these Chinese landscapes is quite different than what we had seen in Italian gardens or French gardens, all of which were strongly dominated by an axis, all of which were strongly imprinted with the idea of geometry. That architecture somehow puts its mark on nature and controls it and organizes it and makes it systematized. Not so much happening here in these Chinese landscapes. It really has to do more with this architectural element almost as a kind of folly or a little eye-catching event inside of a landscape that is swirling beyond control. Instead of having your eye march axially down the center of the landscape, as it would do in France or Italy, in these Chinese landscapes you have this kind of meandering path. Your eye takes a journey to the top of the hill and a taste grew up for this sort of asymmetry for the kind of qualities of these landscapes and also for the political values represented by a Confucian society that made these landscapes. And by that I mean a society that's not so monarchical, that's not so top-down, but has more to do with valorizing the efforts of individuals within the society and having a meritocracy. This notion of meritocracy, the notion of individuals through learning, elevating their position and elevating the culture, fits very well with the kind of enlightenment ideals that we talked about last time. You achieve well in an examination and your social status goes forward. That knowledge is progressive. That the more you study and the more you learn, the more you advance. These forms that derive from Chinese gardens are not simply charming and they are that, but they also have a political meaning. Now we come to England. We're back in England again. How does England respond to this condition of the Enlightenment? How does England respond to this new interest in the picturesque? And the answer is loves it, loves it very much. And strangely enough, the architecture that was embraced by these progressive Enlightenment figures was the architecture of Neopolitanism. And that seems kind of bizarro, right? You think these Enlightenment guys love nature. And so that they would obviously love something like Rococo that's got all these little curly cues that look like vines. Not so much. Things like Rococo, things like Baroque even were associated with certain social and political groups of people. Baroque is certainly the architecture of the state. Baroque is so strongly associated with Louis XIV and other potentates who wanted to be like Louis XIV that no one with a progressive mind frame would ever think twice about Baroque. Baroque architecture is also strongly associated with the church, specifically with the Catholic church. Palladian architecture, at least the architecture of Palladio's villas, was distinctly secular for secular gentlemen farmers, people with whom English wigs could identify very strongly. Palladian architecture kind of rational. It's kind of knowable. It's kind of progressive. We saw Wittkauer's diagram, which of course wasn't available to people in the 18th century, but they're not dopes. They could see that these are plans based on proportion. This is a typology that's extensible and learnable and teachable. Neopalladian architecture emerged in a reactionary way against royalist Tory Baroque excesses or the frivolousness of royalist Rococo excesses. Although Rococo never hit big in England. This is a book that was published early in the 18th century by Colin Campbell. This is a reprint available today. And the title of the book is Vitruvius Britannicus. And Colin Campbell's task here is to look at Vitruvius and to make it specific to England. The kinds of buildings that are illustrated in Vitruvius Britannicus are buildings like this. And you see things that look a heck of a lot like Palladio could have done them. He's looking very specifically at Palladian examples. And that kind of makes sense. Inigo Jones a century before loved Palladio. So why wouldn't Colin Campbell be looking at Palladio? What we're looking at here looks nothing like Versailles. Looks nothing like Volodicombe. Looks nothing like the Villalante. It is looking more like a Claude Lorraine or Nicholas Poussin painting. An image of Arcadia. Beautiful green meadows. Little follies looking a lot like a pantheonic temple. One of the great promoters of this new sensibility was Richard Boyle also called Lord Burlington. Said to be the richest man in England at the time. And if you get to be the richest man in England you have special privileges. Like you can go to Europe for years and years and years. When he was just 10 years old Burlington inherited the title and the wealth of his father and began to use that money to sponsor the arts. For example he was a great lover of music, a member of the Royal Musical Society and Handel dedicated two operas to him. Operas that he wrote well a guest in Burlington's house in London, Burlington House. Starting in his teens Burlington engaged in three grand tours trying to take advantage of his experience to cultivate his taste and to elevate his mind. So he looked carefully not so much firsthand at the ruins but rather he studied the books the books of Palladio in particular which was very important to him for his subsequent developments as as an architect and a patron of the arts. And of course you would want to sketch when you're in Europe but sketching is hard so he hired an artist to do his sketching for him so that he would have a really good sketchbook by the end of the day. But just compare Lord Burlington the third with Lord Burlington the second his father. His father is dressed like Louis XIV and he is dressed well he's dressed ridiculously in a little velvet cap and a velvet coat but he's more or less wearing pants at least give him credit for that.  This is Burlington House in London. It was worked on by the great Baroque architect James Gibbs when Lord Burlington was still a small child but as soon as Burlington was really old enough to put in his two cents he fired Gibbs and replaced him with Colin Campbell author of Vitruvius Britannicus and had the house built in a much more severe style in this rational Neapolitan style and this was just the first of Lord Burlington's many architectural undertakings. William Kent is the artist the landscape painter Burlington hired to be his companion and to keep a record of the things he saw while in Europe. This is a little sketch of Kent by Burlington's wife which is kind of interesting Lady Burlington. Some of these are sketches by Kent. This is a view by Claude Lorraine. This is another Kent view. He's really working within that tradition of the picturesque landscape. To a large extent you want these landscape paintings as souvenirs and the word souvenir means remembrance. You remember. He wants to recall the qualities of these landscapes so you bring back all these grand tours as souvenirs. Some of them are landscape paintings. Some of them are piranesi prints of views of Rome. Some of them are cork models, giant cork models of things like the Colosseum. These are some examples of cork models. Cork is a perfect material for this kind of souvenir because not only is it light but the porosity of the cork begins to suggest some of the particular material qualities that ruin marble might have. This is a phalloplastic or a cork model of the Temple of Concord in Agrigento, Sicily and this is a reconstruction in cork of the Temple of Zeus in Segesta, Sicily. In Germany it was even popular to have these as centerpieces in tables so that people could, while eating dinner, have learned discussions about architecture. If you ever have a chance to go to John Sone's house in England, in London, it's full of these grand tours of souvenirs and these cork models and stuff. It's really riveting. There's a room completely dedicated to the storage of cork models. Unfortunately this room is not typically on the tourist course through the museum and you have to get special permission to visit. But anyhow, in collaboration with Kent, Burlington gets the idea that you could go beyond simply having the painting of the landscape that reminds you of the landscape in the area around Rome. You could actually build the landscape. You could build in real space the view that you get in the painting. The project of Chiswick Park initiates. This is the original house. This is like this big Jacobian sprawling mansion with plenty of space for Lord Burlington to live in and this is Chiswick House and Chiswick House is a Palladian villa. This is Villa Rotonda but this is Chiswick House. You can see that there is a real attempt on the part of Burlington to give himself something similar to what Palladio would have done. Not to copy it directly but to appropriate the spirit of a Palladian architecture and build it. But beyond that he's also building this garden and this garden is strange. It's got certain things that we might say look sort of French like this trident but the terrain that the trident comes through is an irregular terrain and in fact the forms that he's using in this garden don't come so much through the French model but through literary descriptions of Pliny's villas, the great Roman who wrote about his country houses. Burlington because he's so rich paid a guy to read Pliny and to do drawings of what Pliny's villas might look like and so some of the things that are described are these great lawns for walking and conversing but also these more irregular kinds of gardens that surround them. Little mazes, little thickets. We have all these kind of irregular areas and we also have the idea of the picturesque going on. At the margin of this drawing are various follies. This is Chiswick House, views of Chiswick House, but up around here we have things like a rustic bridge or a little pantheon or an obelisk. We'll see them in detail in a moment. Let's look at Chiswick House for a minute. So on first glance it looks just like Palladio but not exactly because Palladio is really good and Lord Burlington I think is too rational to behave like Palladio. A lot of what Palladio does breaks the rules. You know we spoke about things like the modern like Claude Perrault getting rid of the emphasis because it's too crazy and you look at the columns here and these are these enlightenment modern columns. They don't have that bulging muscularity that Palladio does and even the idea of the wall seems more like a stretched membrane than this this heavy blocky thing here. The plan is different too. Both plans are square, both plans have a center. The Palladian plan has porches on four sides. Here really we just have a porch on one side coming forward and the rest of it seems like a wrapper wrapping around and this idea of the wrapper is communicated by the fact that there's this strange entry into the space which is not this kind of grand series of places but like a little tube that you walk through to get into the center. Very strange space and the language is just way thinner and way more brittle than the language of Palladio. Let's look at some of the views in the garden that you get. We saw that trident like a series of postcards of best things I saw when I was in Italy. I like a trident. I saw one at Piazza del Popolo. I'm going to put one in my garden. Those tridents at Piazza del Popolo have obelisks at the end. I'm going to put one in my garden. Not only that but I saw a pantheon when I was in Rome. I'm going to put one in my garden and this is like crazy, crazy small. I mean really this is the richest man in England could have built himself a better pantheon than this one. But it's the view of the pantheon. It's not the inhabitation of the space. It's that your picturesque view of the landscape gets organized around these follies, these objects in the space. There are some other things that are pretty interesting. This is a rustic bridge and by rustic I mean it deliberately looks like nature has taken over. It is made of boulders, it's rough, moss is growing on it and that's opposed to the Palladian bridge which is further down the road which is pure and clear in its geometry and modeled after Palladio. Let's get some Sphinxes going. Let's get some philosophers and so forth. The garden is set up not as a singular axial unfolding of space directed by the imposition of architecture on a landscape but rather the qualities of the landscape and your view through space. These dramatic vistas reveal the architecture to you as singular moments within a continuum of experiences that can be rehearsed in many different ways not simply along one path. Here's another project that Kent did in England and this is Holcomb Hall. I'm just showing this because to me it looks like Palladian villa on steroids or that has been super radiated at the nuclear power plant so that instead of simply being one tartan grid it's a tartan grid that's spawning little tartan grids in a horrible fashion. Oh actually it's a great house. This is Holcomb Hall and you might say well how is it that Kent who was hired as the landscape painter of Burlington how did he get this commission and the answer was if you were doing the grand tour into the 18th century and you were an architect that was the place to be because all the rich people were there too. You had artists architects and rich people and they all hung out together because they spoke English. You could get great commissions. Hoke who was the client for Holcomb Hall was another fabulously rich person. Look at this stair. This is a great space that we've got moving on up through here. Kent and Burlington were not the only people working in this style. This is a redo of an old castellated building. It's an interior by Robert Adam. Robert Adam was spent a lot of time in Rome on the grand tour. He was the son of a not too well off family but they understood that if he was to have an opportunity to be an important architect he had to do the grand tour. His sisters were sold into indentured servitude so they could get enough money to send Robert Adam on the grand tour. Be glad you live now ladies. However Adam did well and he got these big commissions and he even had one series of Piranesi plates dedicated to him as his great friend. This plan of Zion House never got constructed in this way. The idea was to have this round courtyard which probably came from something like the Villa Madama. The idea of the round courtyard at the Villa Madama which also never got constructed. The interior spaces are very much derived from Renaissance examples like the Villa Madama, the lulja of Villa Madama. And Adam takes the idea of that stuff and makes it monochromatic. He sort of gets the idea of the repeated motifs but makes it flat, flat, flat. So there's a kind of rococo sensibility of the flattening and the framing of the wall that strips away some of the robustness that we have here. I think Adam's sensibility toward flatness is even more extreme than the kind of flatness and brittleness that we got with Lord Burlington. This is another view of Zion House where there's a big exedra at the end of the room playing with the kinds of spaces at Villa Madama but really reducing the complexity. Another great garden designed by Kent is Rousham and Rousham is often considered to be one of the most perfect examples of his design because the property actually has been in the same family since the time that Kent did his work here. For that reason there hasn't been a lot of redoing and refurbishing of the garden. Most of Kent's interventions here remain more or less as he intended them to be. You see here two names assigned to Rousham's garden design. The first is Charles Bridgeman who worked on the property from 1717 to 1737 and he was replaced by William Kent in 1737. You can make a comparison between the two plans to get a sense of what Kent's interventions were. Bridgeman's plan over here proceeds from a bowling green with a series of axes that tried to negotiate the bumps and grinds of this irregular plot of land around the serpentine infolding of the Churwell River. What Kent does is he capitalizes on a lot of the pieces that Bridgeman had already put in place like the bowling green, like the avenue, and so forth. But he softens the lines, he relaxes the lines, he gives things more space. While Bridgeman's plan has to do with the knotting together of very strong axial pieces with a few meandering paths in between, Kent gives way to larger swaths of irregular terrain and really plays with topography in interesting ways. Kent's idea of redesigning the gardens is not to slam some axes in but rather to soften the edges as much as possible to make things picture ask. And to make things picture ask, you have to scatter around a few eye catchers, these objects in the landscape around which the regularities of nature make a frame and create a strong suggestive image. We have this idea of Arcadia represented in the meadow where sheep could graze and who knows on a good day you would hire people to dress like shepherds and shepherdesses to run around out there so that while you're out here on the terrace, you can feel that you too are a part of Arcadia. Of course, a problem with the sheep grazing here is that what if the sheep just wander away? You don't want to see a fence that would ruin the the moment of originality, the pure authentic original moment before culture came in with boundaries.  So what you get is the thing called the Ha Ha. You know him, but do you know her? She's a fine you. This is basically what a Ha Ha is.  If you're over here at the house looking across the lawn, and here's where the Ha Ha is located at Rusham. If you're over here looking across the lawn, you simply see the expanse of the lawn. However, the sheep cannot run away. The sheep can in fact fall in the ditch, but after a while the sheep stops doing that too. There's a commensurate ground plane on either side of the ditch, which collapses perspectively to give you the sense that there's a pure expanse of space. It's a boundary that animals such as sheep or cows, the kinds of things that you want to have in your landscape painting as mood enhancing foreground elements.  And by the way, these are real Rousham cattle. The same lineage of longhorn cattle that were there placed there for their picturesque value by Kent several centuries ago. And Rusham has all of these different moments that have these really specific mythological associations like the veil of Venus. In part to revoke images of the countryside around Italy. Places that grand tourists would have known and loved. Certainly Kent would have known and loved these places. But also in part to make walking through this garden allow people to suggestively connect with Arcadian moment when Venus and Apollo inhabited the earth in a more transparent way. You can imagine that you are Anais, you know, trampling around the countryside and the outskirts of Rome, having these moments yourself. And this is an eye catcher. It's just called the eye catcher. What is it? It's well, it catches my eye. I have no idea what they were thinking. A couple of things are interesting about it. One, it seems deliberately fake, right? It seems like a billboard. It's thin and it's crenellated.  And those are two great things to have because castle is great because Gothic scary. But also ruin is great because ruin suggests the power of nature, the impossibility of controlling nature through architecture. And you're always getting these moments that that drive that point home. Like here we have a rustic bridge and the rustic bridge seems to be sinking into the mire. So here's the bowling green.  And these are some of the views set up. This is one of Bridgeman's axes, but made irregular and more picturesque by the softened edges placed there by Kent. Octagonal pond, fabulous. And notice how topography is being played out here. This is an area called Preneste, which is a strange name because the real Preneste, of course, is this hillside on the outskirts of Rome where the Temple of Fortuna Primigenia was located in Roman times. This too is a sectional moment where these arcaded edges reveal themselves. As you proceed through the garden, your path moving into the thicket takes you on the top level and you don't see this. But when you come back again, you discover new things about the space you had been. On top of the Preneste terrace, there's a statue of a dying gladiator. And this is this is perhaps a fitting kind of statue to have given the fact that the client at the time, Mr. Dormer Cottrell, same family that's still there, was a soldier and an old soldier. So dying gladiator exemplifies his militaristic achievements and and his aging years. Walpole says that Kent leapt the fence and saw that all of nature was a garden. And one thing that may have been in his mind was this play of topography, that leaping from one level to another masking boundary with topographical changes is a technique that Kent used to good effect. Kent's garden designs pull away from the notion of geometry and control and rather yield to the irregularity and the the kind of nature as a giver of form. And this goes way back to the very origins of what a garden is. You think of Eden. Eden is a Hortus conclusus, which means a walled garden. If the very definition of garden at the outset is something set apart from wilderness and in wilderness you have tigers and bears and uncontrollable forces of nature that you want to stay away from. You want that walled garden. The idea of the English romantic garden is quite radical in leaping the fence. And instead of seeing nature as something hostile with the enlightenment project saying, no, nature is something pure. Nature is something that in its wildest form gives us the clearest vision of what what we can become. It has been suggested that this statue of the horse and the lion, the battle between the horse and the lion, exemplifies the very aspirations being put into play by by Kent here. The horse representing domesticated nature and the lion representing wild nature. And at Rousham Garden, these two images of nature come into a tangle together, just as these two figures are tangled together in the statue. This is at Kew Gardens near London. And here is a eye catcher or folly in the garden, which is a pagoda. So the notion of Chinoiserie that we saw elsewhere, for example in Germany, we see also here, William Chambers brings to Chinoiserie a particular expertise because he spent some of his formative years in China. And I think in his work, there's a stronger understanding of this sensibility. It's not simply the look of the thing, but sometimes the qualities of the thing. This is Stourhead. And you can already see by looking at this plan, that it's a plan even looser in its attitude about how architecture engages landscape than the plan of Chiswick. Chiswick still had these residual axes and wrong plans and so forth. Here what we have is a lake, this irregularly shaped lake, which is an artificial lake. It was dammed up stream. The lake is deliberately set there as a ground against which the architecture can play. And the topography is very irregular. So the lake is in a declivity surrounded by hills on all sides. We see these dotted paths, hither and yawn. And what these represent are different possible ways to walk through the garden. And that too is a kind of big new idea. For example, if you go to Versailles, major way to walk through the garden is hit the axis, walk the axis. Same is true for Vélevique, same is true for Villalante. I mean, you can meander in a different direction, but you're always making reference to the axis as the dominant giver of form and organizer of path. When you come here, there are lots of different ways to go.  Some ways take you along the damp edge of the river.   And each experience gives you a pavilion, an architectural folly, particularized to that kind of landscape. So there's a kind of connection that places that are brightly lit and high up will have classical buildings. Places that are dark and forested will have gothic buildings. Places that are deep into the river's edge might seem rustic as if they were little caves, as if they were almost part of nature themselves. When we look at the Stourhead plan, we see over here Stourhead House. This was a project actually initiated by the client's father, and the client is Henry Hoare, who worked on this project for almost 50 years. He kept puttering around. Rich Guy loves architecture, putters around. He brought in various architects like Flitcroft to design the pavilions, but really the conception of this garden, this garden as a narrative, this garden as allowing people to take this mythological journey of discovery through these these enchanted moments in the landscape is Hoare's conception entirely. This is Stourhead House, and look, look who designed it. Colin Campbell, the author of Vitruvius Britannicus. And if we look at Stourhead House, it's not surprising that it's a Colin Campbell project because it's pretty straightforward in its Palladian impulses. It actually got expanded as you can see here, but the the core of the house is this little nugget of a Neopalladian thing. In addition to interesting himself with with the gardens, Hoare collected paintings and traveled, and in his collection of paintings, there are a lot of paintings by Claude Lorraine and Nicolas Poussin, and also paintings by by other important landscape painters like Abraham Duclos. And notice this painting. This painting represents the Temple of the Vesta in Tivoli. Tivoli is this place where Hadrian's Villa is located on the outskirts of Rome, extreme topography. And on top of a cliff, you have this Tholos, this round temple. Duclos representation of this shows water below, a cliff above, and this this temple, very suggestive. It stirs my emotions. I feel engaged with a sublime. And here's another view of a similar kind of thing, water below, Tholos above, the muses on Mount Parnassus enjoying themselves. And a lot of paintings that look like this are part of the collection that Hoare himself had. He had a vast art collection. This Poussin painting of Anais at Delos, 1642, once belonged in the collection of Henry Hoare. And it was used as a model for the temple and the bridge at Sauerhead. You see a little turf bridge cutting here toward a pantheonic temple. This is a Nicolas Poussin painting, important French painter. And this is a painting of Sauerhead where the architects deliberately tried to rebuild the views of these paintings. So when you use the word picture ask, in the case of Sauerhead it's deliberate. It's an attempt to make the architecture look as much like a picture as it possibly can. Picture ask. So here again is this strange plan of a really oddly shaped, I don't know what that thing is shaped like, some gut, this strangely shaped lake with all the pavilions scattered around it. This view I think shows you the topography and the possibility of things being high or low. As you move through, you begin to see that there's not just one kind of architecture going on, but lots of kinds of architecture. For example, this tower is a real gothic tower that Hoare bought and had moved to the site, the Bristol Cross. This is a reconstructed little gothic church. And all of these things are very suggestive. You associate the gothic with this moment. Historically, this is the same period of time that the gothic novel is coming into play. And the gothic novel is stuff like Frankenstein or stuff like the Castle of Toronto. These are topics that deal with the slightly irrational, with the kind of high-pitched emotional qualities. I mean, the whole theme of Frankenstein is the attempt of this enlightenment project, science, to create this new man, to go monstrously out of control because nature is so much more powerful than the ability of man to control it.  This is a nice moment. This is the turf bridge that cuts across one of the little spindly water channels of the lake and is half architecture and half landscape.  And you're getting these views that look like they're coming straight out of Claude Lorrain or Abraham du Clos pantheon. Not one of those puny little pantheons like we saw in Chiswick, but a fairly well fleshed out pantheon designed by the architect Flitcroft. Turf bridge with the pantheon in the distance. So we're looking at kind of classical moments here. Classical moments are one path you can take. You can take one path around the lake and you have this reaffirmation of the ability of reason and light and order to hold true. But there is another way of moving around and that's let's say the low ground. This is a grotto down by the water's edge. Here's the water and this is all dug into the side of the hill. One thing that's interesting about the grotto is that the pieces of it are the same as the pieces of the pantheon. We have a rotunda. We have a little portico. But now things have become wildly dismembered and pulled apart and organized along a path. And even the language has become grotesque. And by grotesque I mean encrusted with shells, encrusted with this kind of living fecundity of the earth and no longer able to hold the smoothness and the clarity of the forms. This is a view through the portico. To make the feelings that you get while moving through this even stronger it's populated by a series of sculptures. There is over here a sleeping maiden. Here she is. But over here you have crazy Neptune rushing out about to ravage the sleeping maiden. So when you're walking through this grotto space you think I better go fast because crazy Neptune is about to ravage someone. But look at this we have a oculus pouring light into this pantheonic space but it's the pantheonic space of the deep and the dark and the uncanny. Here's another one of the crazy moments on the opposite side of the leg. This is my favorite moment because this really gives you a sense of the efforts that people would go to to stir up emotion. It wasn't simply sufficient to have sculptures of Neptune or architecture that's very evocative of different moods but sometimes people would hire actors to be in the garden. Like you could often hire people to dress like monks and walk around with a cattle or a lantern and in this case there's a hermitage. And again this hermitage piece looks like a pantheon gone haywire with the ability of symmetry to hold true pulling apart and yielding to the landscape. And here Hor hired a hermit to mutter because it's a hermitage and in a hermitage historically you would have a hermit monk who would quietly pray and retreat from society.   This is the temple of Apollo. Thank God we made it to the top of the hill because the hermitage was pretty scary. Look at the view of the temple of Apollo. We have this solos this round temple on top of a cliff with water below. Here there's an attempt to rebuild that view of the temple of the Vesta in Tivoli. Moment after moment after moment through the garden conjure up these different images and are strongly aimed at stirring up different feelings. There's not so much about Stourhead that's aimed at architecture reaffirming your ability to reason things out to think your way through systems. It's much much more about provoking a series of associations and provoking a series of feelings as you move through the garden. And I'm just comparing this as though you couldn't tell the difference I think you probably could to the chateau of Versailles where we have axis hammering its way through and this is a little piece of Versailles partares geometry organizing every little planted form even things that move off the axis move off the axis in a fairly dictatorial geometric way. But look what we have here. This is a view from the grotto through this irregular opening looking off across the lake at the turf bridge. Stoke garden is worth examining briefly and one thing that makes it interesting is that here a number of important figures in 18th century architecture and landscape design all participated including John Van Bra who was engaged to work on the house from the period of 1720 to 1726 only to be replaced by James Gibbs another great baroque architect. Eventually these architects collaborated with a number of great landscape architects. 1711 to 35 Charles Bridgeman was there and as we noticed in Russian Bridgeman's technique was to lay out axes 1731 to 35 William Kent came in and began to disrupt the stiffness of those axes and in 1741 Lancelot nicknamed capability brown came in to even further soften the terrain and make the edges smoother and less rough. The client was Viscount Cobham and here he has himself portrayed as a Roman senator. I think the fact that he has himself portrayed as a Roman senator already is a indication of the fact that he shares a number of these historicist desires to recall old Rome old Arcadia and so forth. It has a curiosity when work began with Van Bra and with Bridgeman the family name was Temple. By the time Kent and Capability Brown came in the family name was Temple Grenville. By the late 18th century the family name was Temple Nugent Bridges Chandos Grenville and that indicates the fact that to keep this family going to keep this property alive which was terribly expensive the only possibility was to keep marrying heiresses and thereby expanding the family name. The house remained in the family for over 350 years but finally in 1922 after selling their extensive art collection with Rembrandts and Poussins and many other great works of art the family had to sell and they sold it to a boy's school public school called an England private school we would say and the school to this day is situated in the building Stowe School. In many ways the original plan of of Stowe reminds us of the plan of Chiswick that that Burlington and Kent did together where there are certain figures that are imported from Pliny's Villa there are certain ideas about axes used not so much to organize the space but to deploy eye catchers in a picturesque way. We can examine these plans to see a number of different interventions from the work of Bridgman which tends to be distinctly axial distinctly organized by radial schemes or en poise avenues and the softening first by Kent and then by Capability Brown regular figures of water get softened and made irregular and edges that might have been sharply cut into the terrain become increasingly looser and and more more natural looking. Kent already had a propensity to do this but Capability Brown even had a stronger propensity to do this so much so that he was criticized by some of his contemporaries in the 18th century people like Richard Payne Knight and Utevel Price was criticized for blandness for smoothing things out so much so that they could no longer conjure up the feeling of the sublime that from their point of view was the true and desired effect that one wished to have when confronting a landscape. For example Payne Knight one of the critics of Capability Brown did a series of illustrations showing you the beautiful and the sublime in landscape and for Payne Knight the beautiful was almost too trivial to consider when compared to the sublime. Here we see a house on a beautiful welded meadow with a few nice trees and here we see a sublime or let's say picturesque reevocation of the same theme where the planting is wilder when the house becomes less the centerpiece and more of an object that reveals itself behind the veil of foliage. You look at these meadows and you think wow this looks like a golf course more than anything else if you look at the plan it almost looks like a golf course and you know what it's a golf course you have English schoolboys golfing in this garden this sign says I believe beware of golf balls beware of the golfers and these are schoolboys carrying their bags of golf clubs around as they're they're moving through the garden certain items in the garden I think are interesting just because of what they begin to suggest about the kind of things that were valorized at the period. This is a curved wall called the British temple of Worthy. The thing that's being celebrated is not really antiquity but this progressive idea that we're constantly building our own history is as valuable as the history of antiquity and in among the British Worthies we have Inigo Town. We also have this wide range of eclectic temple types Chinese house why not Gothic temple why not grotto why not Corinthian Doric arch Palladian bridge and in fact in the garden over 40 temples were designed and this is funny of course because the client's name is temple haha. Here's an exaggerated topographical map of Stowe that begins to show you how the house up here still engages this big axis cut by Bridgeman but the landscape comes down to various meadows and various green swords and thickets with a scattering of pavilions all around. There's a record on one occasion of Capability Brown taking a lady called Hannah Moore through the gardens and explaining his technique explaining how he operated on the gardens and he used a grammatical analogy pointing to various clumpings of trees or curvilinear elements in the landscape he said he uses landscape features like punctuation here is a comma to make you pause here is a parentheses to introduce a different theme here is a colon to elaborate an existing theme and here is a full stop marking the end of one motif and the beginning of another it wasn't just in landscape design but a lot of art theory in the 18th century favored the irregular and the natural this is a play to the frontispiece from a book called the analysis of beauty by William Hogarth of 1753 and he is making an argument about how the serpentine line is the most beautiful line of all and he's finding the serpentine line not only in the beautiful curves of the human body but also in the sinews of muscles and in human physiognomy and in natural motifs from plants and flowers and so forth for Hogarth and for many of the artists and theorists in the 18th century the more one could allow the serpentine line to govern one's design the better off you would be architecture is becoming increasingly difficult at this time this is a painting from the early 19th century but it pretty much sums up the conundrum that architects are finding themselves in in the later half of the 18th century and that is wow there's a lot of stuff out there and how do you choose