nearly all, before it. Mr Scott quite rightly points out that this care for appearances only, and this craving for something startling and dramatic, were at the back of Baroque architecture, and he had here the material for a very interesting psychological study. Instead of this he arrives at the conclusion, remarkable in an architect, that the Baroque designers were right in taking this play-acting instinct as the dominant motive of their design, and indeed as the justification of architecture in general. If this were really the case, it would exclude some of the greatest masterpieces in the whole range of the art. Architecture is a very complex art, and cannot be treated on a single issue. It is, after all, the art of building under definite conditions and with a definite purpose, and that implies the adaptation of means to ends, the skilful ordering of materials in the endeavour to realise 'commodity' and 'firmness' as well as 'delight.' Mr Scott's classification and his theory of architecture are attractive in their daring and simplicity, but they are unhappily wide of the facts and do not cover the ground.

Nor can one accept Mr Scott's reading of Italian Renaissance architecture. Sometimes he seems to be applying his peculiar view to the entire movement from its start in the 15th century till its end in the 18th. At other times he seems to limit it to the 17th-century men, such as Bernini and Borromini. Moreover, he repudiates the idea of advance. Each famous master was, he maintains, complete in himself. Bramante, for example, did not advance on Brunelleschi, but deliberately followed a line of his own, and we must regard them as separate constellations, each pursuing its appointed course. But in point of fact this is not how architecture, or any other art, develops. Each of us in our generation, whether moving backward or forward, does so in full consciousness of the work of our predecessors, and in the architecture of the Renaissance the various stages are clearly marked. The new movement began with scholars and men of letters. The spirit of adventure which led them to explore the Greek and Latin manuscripts of their patrons spread outwards to the artists and the craftsmen. In all cases, in Italy, as later in France and England, the ornamentalist leads the way Vol. 246.-No. 487.

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with his transcripts from antiquity ill-understood, and too often misapplied, and we get the interminable ornament, the friezes, orders, and arabesques which are not architecture at all, though they are commonly mistaken for it. The real movement in architecture begins with the advent of men of intellectual distinction: Alberti, for example, in Italy; De l'Orme in France; Inigo Jones in England. Their successors advanced on their labours. Bramante, for example, and still more Baldassone Peruzzi, were finer masters of their art than Alberti, though their debt to him was great, and it must be obvious to any student of Italian 16th- and 17th-century architecture that the range of its technique was steadily extending, so that when we come to the violent revolt of the Baroque architects against the formalism of Palladio and Vignola, whatever one may think of their buildings, there can be no question that they knew perfectly well what they were about so far as mere technique was concerned. Longhena, for example, had a wider range of technique than Palladio.

On the other hand, if the Renaissance is regarded, as I think it must be, as one vast comprehensive movement begun in Italy, but spreading far beyond it, it is impossible to regard the Baroque manner as typical of the Renaissance, still less as the peculiar architecture of Humanism. It is not quite clear what Mr Scott intends by Humanism. Sometimes he seems to mean the point of view of the finer minds of the Renaissance; sometimes simply human nature. Humanism, as I understand it, means the open tolerant mind, unfettered by dogmatic authority, that finds its interest in all the finer realisations of man. The true Humanist does not limit his outlook to one school or one manner. He would not set up one style against another, but in a way stands apart from them all, with preferences, it may be, yet not shutting the. door on any. Mr Scott rightly insists that to reprobate the Baroque on moral grounds is irrelevant. One does not reprobate the clown in a circus. Indeed, one may be very much amused, but one would hardly regard him as a serious actor. Architects are concerned with bigger things and with graver appeals than are possible to the scene painter and the puppet-show man, and though one may derive pleasure and amusement from the antics of

the Baroque architects, one really cannot take them quite seriously. Indeed, I doubt if Mr Scott does himself; at any rate in his epilogue he shows signs of hedging.

In his concluding chapter Mr Scott deals with 'Humanist Values.' 'The whole of architecture,' he says, 'is in fact unconsciously invested by us with human movement or human moods.' We transcribe architecture into terms of ourselves.' This, he says, is the basis of creative design and of critical appreciation, and it amounts to this, that our aesthetic enjoyment of architecture is derived from our imagining ourselves as performing its actual static and dynamic functions. This theory, introduced by Signor Croce, has been fashionable for some time past, but all that is true in it was stated by Goethe when he said that man never knows how anthropomorphic he is; and it was better put by Plotinus, who held that the pleasure we derive from beautiful things is due to the soul's recognition of something in them akin to its own nature; and though this theory may have some slight relevance to critical appreciation it has none whatever to creative design. In architecture it is almost absurdly inappropriate. By an effort of imagination one might imagine oneself to be a column, or as leaning up against a wall as buttress, or if one's abdominal muscles were sufficiently developed, a very short beam, but architecture is not an agglomeration of unrelated details. Its quality lies in the composition as a whole, the embodiment of an organic idea, and by no stretch of imagination can any one imagine himself as discharging the functions of the Colosseum, the Pantheon, or S. Peter's at Rome. Still less can this theory explain the value of graphic art, which is not in the round but in the flat unless one can think oneself into terms of a pancake. Nor is it in accord with actual experience. The pleasure that an educated person derives from a work of art is the result of appeals from many different elements, and depends largely on the range of imagination and sympathy of the spectator on the one hand, and on the extent of his knowledge on the other. A Red Indian, for instance, would be a competent judge of a wigwam, but if he was suddenly transplanted to St

Paul's Cathedral, the probability is that he would be simply bewildered. Mr Scott makes the fantastic assertion that architectural art is the transcription of the body's states into terms of building,' and he produces as evidence of this the fact that certain of the Renaissance architects amused themselves by endeavouring to construct a system of design on the basis of the human figure. Villars de Honecourt had tried the same experiment long before, but this is no evidence at all. These men were not endeavouring to translate the functions of the body into terms of building, but were hoping to establish a canon of proportions based on the proportions of the human figure. This was the intention of Albert Durer's treatise on the symmetry of the human figure.

Mr Scott's or Signor Croce's theory of æsthetic seems to me meaningless for any practical purpose; moreover, it leaves wholly untouched a very critical problem, namely, what goes on in the mind of the creative artist himself. Even Mr Scott admits that architects do not imagine themselves to be arches and buttresses when they set about designing—that is, before they translate their conceptions into terms or building-but he is misled by his own eloquence, and gives an actual objective existence to what is after all only metaphor and description. The valuable part of Mr Scott's book is his lucid and convincing exposure of the fallacies that made so much of 19th-century criticism of architecture worthless. He breaks boldly with the conventions and establishes architecture in its rightful place as an art sovereign and complete in itself. It is, he says, 'above all an art of synthesis, it controls the beauty of painting and sculpture and the minor arts. Its austerity orders even the beauty which is its own.' That is a description which all architects would endorse. Where we differ is in applying it to the Baroque, the very essence of which is to throw away all rule, reticence, and restraint.

Till comparatively recently the Baroque was dismissed with contumely as merely decadent art. Now it is the fashion, and our enthusiastic young writers cast themselves for the rôle of fairy Godmother to the Baroque and aspire to rescue this Cinderella from the scullery sink. The difficulty is that they are rather uncertain who she really is. Sometimes she is the dashing young

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thing, Borromini in Italy, Churriguera in Spain, Pozzo at Venice, Fischer von Erlach at Vienna. Sometimes she is the sober housekeeper, even such an entirely respectable person as Vignola. Mr Scott, for example, classes together the Colonnade of S. Peter's, S. Andrea del Quirinale at Rome, and the Salute at Venice, but these buildings have little or nothing in common. The Colonnade is a straightforward piece of solid and unimpeachable classic, and in a wholly different category from either S. Andrea or Longhena's fine design at Venice. The guide-books label all buildings later than the middle of the 17th century as Baroque. The remarkable Church of the Jesuits, for example (1728), at Venice, is described in a popular handbook as built in the base style of the age.' As a matter of fact, except for its superabundance of figures, the actual design of the façade, and of that of San Lazaro dei Mendicanti (1673), is no more Baroque than that of San Giorgio or the Redentore. There is any quantity of Baroque design in the altar pieces of the Venetian churches, but it must be obvious that the calculated eccentricity of these designs is a thing apart, and has nothing in common with sober vernacular Classic.

Mr Sitwell seems ready to sweep into the net of the Baroque any and every important building that existed in Italy in the 17th and 18th centuries, and his principle seems to be that any old thing will do. He jumps from China to Peru and one never quite knows where he is. In the preface to his book on 'Southern Baroque Art' he announces that he has taken it as his subject with the definite object of establishing 'a short circuit,' and by showing that one art is as good as another, to leave our generation free to follow out its own ideas.' There can be no doubt that 17th- and 18th-century art in Italy, and indeed elsewhere, was seriously under-rated by popular writers of the last century, but this complete indifference to any standard of values is something new. It enables Mr Sitwell to praise second- and third-rate artists and merely competent tradesmen such as Solimena, and to wax enthusiastic over some of the most deplorable efforts in architecture that have been perpetrated in modern Europe. Mr Sitwell seems to regard 'Baroque as a general term for any effort of man that is at once