CHARLES GARNIER'S PARIS OPERA AND THE RENAISSANCE OF CLASSICISM IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH ARCHITECTURE (BEAUX-ARTS)
Abstract
Charles Garnier's Paris Opera (1861-1875) is usually categorized as an example of Second Empire Baroque architecture whose stylistically eclectic revivalism combines motifs from Renaissance and Baroque architecture. This dissertation argues that such a categorization misapprehends nineteenth-century French architecture. Garnier's position as the leading representative of French classicism during the second half of the century was due to his successful restoration of coherence to a tradition which had been fragmented by the preceding fights between Neoclassicism and Romanticism. His renaissance of classicism depended upon an astylistic, form-generating principle of architecture which replaced formally taxonomic stylistic types with formally expressive stylistic values. Methodologically, this dissertation reconstructs Garnier's renaissance on two levels. First, his intellectual debts to Neoclassicism and Romanticism are defined by examining both the Neoclassical derivation of style from the imitation of an ideal natural order and the Romantic belief that style was the materially real product of history. Identifying the Neoclassical theoretician, Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremere de Quincy, and the Romantic architect, Felix Duban, as the principal contributors to Garnier's ideas, this examination explains his comprehension of style as the materially ideal product of historical reality. The archeological studies of classical art by the contemporary scholar, Charles-Ernest Beule, parallel Garnier's work, while the structurally rational theory of architecture formulated by his Gothicist opponent, Eugene-Emmanual Viollet-le-Duc, identifies the alternative to Garnier's solution. Second, the evolution of Garnier's classicism is integrated with a study of the social, economic, political, industrial and institutional conditions which affected his education, career and work. This study--particularly the case history of the Opera's construction--delineates the relationship between theory and practice in nineteenth-century architecture. Garnier's renaissance of classicism sought its historical analogy in the Renaissance because his principle was the culmination of an humanistic tradition which the Renaissance had revived. Originating in the principles of Beaux-Arts composition, arguing that architecture concretized a society's gestations into built forms, and resulting in the principle of empathy, his principle rethought style as those formal values which could express architecture's anthropomorphic nature and meaning.
Recommended Citation
CHRISTOPHER CURTIS MEAD,
"CHARLES GARNIER'S PARIS OPERA AND THE RENAISSANCE OF CLASSICISM IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH ARCHITECTURE (BEAUX-ARTS)"
(January 1, 1986).
Dissertations available from ProQuest.
Paper AAI8614837.
http://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/AAI8614837
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