I take up my barely surviving Pelican copy of Nikolaus Pevsner’s Outline of European Architecture and wonder about the man and his observations.
The man was born in 1902 and was one of those who brought professional scholarship to England. A wider vision nourished among the broad expanses of a continent - though in the wartime years of the early 1940s German origins were played down. (After 1939 Germany was the ‘evil “them”’ against whom, as though crusaders from the Age of Chivalry, we were battling while the blood of our survival gently ebbed from our veins.)
The book is about architecture. Not Elizabethan Tudor Georgian Regency Victorian; but Romanesque Gothic Renaissance Baroque Romantic. My friend Francis G Grubb had introduced me to ‘Architecture’. He took me to Southwark Cathedral. Pointed out the columns of the nave. The stonework of the clerestory. It was my introduction. It has taken me far and wide ever since.
As I picked up my 1945 paperback a few minutes ago and drifted my mind across the table of contents and a few sentences and pictures here and there, I began to muse on the idea of Europe. I’d never really thought about it before. It was there on the maps in my schooldays. So far as I was concerned it had always been there. But this morning, after a peaceful night, I let my mind loose to explore.
The Greeks – of course – had a word for it. Evropé was one of those human women visited and mated by a god. All-Father Zeus. In ancient times.
In the year I taught second form European History, everything began with Carter & Mears in Rome on Christmas Day in the year 800. So convenient. So easy to remember. And before that? Rome, republic and empire, was the keynote. An origin, so they taught us, of our civilisation. Not so simple a question after all.
Pevsner’s Europe is only partly a geographical expression.
A shadow on the wall of Plato’s cave?
francis cameron, oxford, 28 september 2012
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