To omit architecture from cultural history would be absurd, but to integrate architecture, with its peculiar blend of abstraction, fantasy and technology, into a general history of culture is considerably more difficult than integrating images and texts. Where they are not obvious, utilitarian or problem-solving, the intentions of architects are remarkably hard to pin down. The limitations of Sir Nikolaus Pevsner's famous Outline of European Architecture (1943) illustrate the difficulty. So illuminating in other respects, the book is less than satisfactory in its treatment of buildings as expressions of 'Western Civilisation'. It communicates a diffuse sense of connection between Michelangelo's poetry, Ignatius's Spiritual Exercises and late 16th-century churches and palaces, but the nature of these connections remains vague. To be told that the Escorial, say, was 'more a monastery than a palace', or that 'Spanish etiquette stood for a discipline as rigid as that of the early Jesuits,' does not take us very far towards understanding either the Escorial or the court of Philip II.

LRB 2 April 1981 | PDF Download