"A Window into the Making of Architectural History in Great Britain (1800-1850)"
Courtney Skipton Long, PhD Candidate, History of Art and Architecture, University of Pittsburgh
Constellation: Visual Knowledge
Plate III from John Ruskin's The Seven Lamps of Architecture, 1849
This presentation is offered as an introduction to Courtney Long’s dissertation, “Re-Categorizing Great Britain's Medieval Architecture: A Lesson in Nineteenth-Century Visual Taxonomy.” Courtney’s project seeks to investigate the ways in which architectural historians and natural scientists conveyed the process of change over time in textual and graphic observations published between 1800 and 1850. In her talk, Courtney will focus on the numerous attempts made by nineteenth-century British architects, historians, and theorists to systematically describe and illustrate the history of medieval ecclesiastical architecture in Great Britain. Examining pictures and diagrams found in a select work of published books by Thomas Rickman, John Britton, Edmund Sharpe, and John Ruskin, this presentation seeks to analyze the nineteenth-century attempts to codify British Architectural History and to structure knowledge graphically.