ABSTRACT
The golden age of British Hellenomania, neatly bracketed by the arrival in Athens of James Stuart and Nicholas Revett in 1751 and publication of Francis Cranmer Penrose’s Investigation of the Principles of Athenian Architecture in 1851, was characterised by increasing scientific understanding of ancient Greek buildings on the one hand and an increasingly Romantic attitude to the Greek culture that had produced them on the other. Over the same period of time, architectural practice in Britain witnessed first a gradual incursion of Greek forms, then the rise and finally the decline of a full-blown Greek Revival that is often criticised as unimaginatively literal. Drawing on recent research, this chapter reconsiders the relationship between what might be termed the real and the ideal in the British response to ancient Greece, both in the comprehension of Greek architecture and in its modern application. It shows how the proto-archaeological quest to understand the reality of ancient Greek buildings was, in fact, compromised by idealism—and the limited extent to which the real, once established, impacted on the Greek Revival that has perhaps been too readily dismissed as emulative.
