"Glorious visions": The theatre of display and Sir John Soane's house-museum (England) [microform]
- Bib ID:
- 3284115
- Format:
- Book and Microform
- Author:
- Furjan, Helene Mary
- Description:
- 585 p.
- ISBN:
- 0493098658
- Summary:
-
This dissertation studies the house, museum and collections created by the architect, John Soane (1753-1837), examining the ways in which it manifests a concern with self-representation, legacy, taste and spectacular display. My analysis focuses on the theatrical moments relying on spectacular effects and theatrical devices--the "glorious visions." The house-museum operated in many different ways: as museum (evidencing a desire to collect and exhibit fragments of the past), gallery (displaying contemporary works), didactic space (fragments or works of art instructing young architects or artists), monument (commemorating aspects of his life, his architectural achievement, and that of others), archive, spectacular theatre, model (a proper gentlemanly abode, and a diversity of architectural invention), and connoisseurial collection (demonstrating Soane's taste and discernment).
The house is also an interdisciplinary locus, coalescing Soane's diverse interests and influences: antiquity, literature, poetics, art, the ruin, sepulchral spaces, melancholy, death, the picturesque, the sublime, "gloomth," and a preference for theatrical contrivances. Soane is a master of effects, taking a range of "effects" from non-architectural media and setting them into operation within architecture. The house is thus both the congealing of a moment of intense sensibility--of a required sympathy with his fears and his pain evoked by dramatic conceits, and an indulgence in the singularity of his creation, evidencing his creative genius, his mastery of architecture, and his ability to conjure and manipulate space and atmosphere through showmanship: as a monument, it is not a narrative of his life, but a concretization of his talent and his experience in a single object. This study examines the dependence of this "theater of display" on an interpretation of Gothic.
Soane distinguished between a "public" Gothic tied to questions of nation, civility, and monumentality, and a "private" Gothic tied to taste and sensibility: if he could reject Gothic as a style, in private terms it could be admitted through an affective aesthetic (borrowed from Richard Payne Knight), creating a private theatre of pleasure and fancy. Soane's house-museum is thus linked to a wider (and contemporaneous) culture of theatrical spectacle in London, and to a literary culture and aesthetic theory in which fantasy, imagination, affect and association were central. Soane's house interprets these connections in a particular way: it is at once totally aestheticized, a pure arena of pleasurable Taste; and a space where sensibility can vibrate.
- Notes:
-
- (UnM)AAI3001201
- Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 62-01, Section: A, page: 0002.
- Adviser: Georges Teyssot.
- Thesis (Ph.D.)--Princeton University, 2001.
- Reproduction:
- Microfiche. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms International.
- Subject:
- Architecture
- Other authors/contributors:
- Princeton University
- Copyright:
-
In Copyright
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Copyright status was determined using the following information:
- Material type:
- Literary Dramatic Musical
- Published status:
- Published
- Publication date:
- 2004
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