A philhellene who did not much like the Greeks; an apprentice architect who wanted to be a painter; a diplomatic courier who was actually on a lengthy gap year: Charles Robert Cockerell was a confused and ambiguous figure as he set off on his grand tour in 1810. Passing through the dangerous and disputed waters of the Mediterranean, he witnessed the bombardment of Cadiz and would lose some of his letters to French privateers as he headed towards Constantinople. Since the seventeenth century, British architects had been advised to travel through France into Italy to expose themselves to modern architecture. The Napoleonic wars had, however, closed off this opportunity and, with Western Europe inaccessible, Cockerell looked – like others – to the East. An expected three years pursuing fashionable Greek architecture turned into nearly a decade of discoveries. Cockerell would return in 1817 with his reputation made. He had uncovered fabulous new treasures, produced a series of glorious new drawings, and rediscovered the classical principle of entasis – the deliberate distortion of columns to achieve an impression of solidity and strength – which had been lost for centuries. This was only the start of a glittering career that would see him go on to design such major projects as Oxford's Ashmolean Museum and Cambridge's University Library, as well as becoming one of the grand old men of the architectural profession.
Cockerell is hardly a forgotten figure. He is the subject of a comprehensive biography by David Watkin, as well as important books by Anne Bordeleau and Peter Maxwell Kohane. His influence on architecture was explored by J. Mordaunt Crook as long ago as 1972 and his work on entasis re-evaluated by Frank Salmon as recently as 2008. In this volume, however, the museologist Susan Pearce and the archaeologist and editor Theresa Ormrod return to the 38 letters which Cockerell himself wrote or received on his tour through parts of Greece and Turkey, Albania and Asia Minor, and then – after Napoleon's abdication in 1814 – into Italy. Coupling a clear and helpful introduction with a full transcription of Cockerell's correspondence, this is the first complete edition of the architect's letters ever published.
For architectural historians, some elements of this correspondence will already be reasonably familiar. They reinforce the existing impression of Cockerell as an engaged and inquisitive student: keen to uncover the animating principles of Greek architecture in preparation for a career producing neo-classical buildings, and becoming increasingly aware that there were no wholly fixed or universal canons of design. The discovery of entasis confirmed that aesthetic appeal as much as abstract rules dictated architectural form. His dawning realization that ancient Greek sculpture was painted and highly coloured similarly helped him to escape an overly purist appreciation of these works. His artistic freedom – his willingness to integrate elements of Greek architecture with that of other cultures which we find in his works like the Ashmolean – owed much to his training and his father's example. But this approach was undoubtedly justified by the experience captured in this correspondence.
For historians of collecting and of the museum, Cockerell is likewise an interesting test case. Like some Georgian Indiana Jones, he risked ill-health, injury, and trouble with the law to uncover ancient relics. In 1811 he was amongst those who investigated the temple of Aphaia on the island of Aegina, discovering – not least – the sculpture which had fallen from the pediment, a collection of immense archaeological and artistic significance. Much of the book and many of his letters are taken up with this project: his fear that the Ottoman authorities would seek to claim this find; his hopes that these statues would be acquired by the British Museum; his disappointment when, after a series of contested sales, they were ultimately bought by the Bavarian state. It is a lengthy, disreputable, and marvellously revealing account of what really amounts to theft. The temple figures can still be seen in the Munich Glyptothek.
As an ethnographer, it is true, Cockerell is somewhat disappointing. His descriptions of local life are conventional and often slighting – and many are simply offensive. Greek women, when not abusive, are ‘enchanting and very troublesome’ (p. 168). Greek men, when not venal, are violent. The Turks are worse; the Albanians still more so. ‘The Graces’, he observes, ‘are no longer to be found here’ (p. 128). It is a country ‘where humanity is in the most wretched state perhaps to be found in any part of the world’ (p. 219). Cockerell confesses that his linguistic skills are far from perfect, and, apart from an intriguing description of the tendency for Turkish ladies to ‘make love to each other’ (p. 128), he notices little that other travellers of the time describe more fully.
As a sort of sociologist, however, Cockerell is much more effective. The historian Bernd Roeck has described the city of Florence in 1900 as a sort of Anglo-German spaceship, with a community of expats congregating to admire art that they believe the locals no longer deserved, and the same is surely true of Athens in the 1810s. Cockerell drinks with Byron, gossips with the Duchess of Devonshire, and celebrates the ‘complete English society’ he finds (p. 127). He also befriends a group of German scholars and adventurers, with whom he founded a brotherhood – the Xeineioni – and swapped jewellery to mark their connection. Although sometimes glancing, his references to this Anglo-German world help illuminate the transnational philhellenist culture of the time.
Well-produced, well-informed, and well-illustrated, only the baffling decision to annotate this edition with notes at the end of each letter lets it down. Charles Robert Cockerell in the Mediterranean will prove an important book for anyone interested in the architect and a useful guide to the expatriate culture of exploration and exploitation in which this dashingly handsome, energetic, and ambitious young man so enthusiastically participated two centuries ago.
