Joseph Gandy and the Mythography of Architecture

Abstract

During the 1830s, the English architect and perspectivist Joseph Gandy (1771-1843) produced a manuscript entitled "The Art, Philosophy, and Science of Architecture" and also exhibited a series of pictures at the Royal Academy under the running title of Comparative Architecture. These interrelated projects sought to present a world history of architecture in which theoretical issues concerning the origins, development, and advancement of architectural meaning could be explored. Bringing architectural theory into conjunction with the mythographic study of ancient art and religion in French and English scholarship of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Gandy's writings and pictures postulated that all architectural forms originally possessed "emblematical" significance relating to the formation of language and mythology. His treatise and architectural imagery delved not only into the origins and recovery of architecture as a religious semiotic system, but also into the status of architecture as a subject of natural history. By extending the cultural and intellectual concerns of late-Enlightenment antiquarianism and syncretic mythography into early Victorian debates about architectural eclecticism and the crisis of meaning and style in nineteenth-century design, Gandy contended with wideranging arguments about the historical evolution and signifying capacity of architecture that had also engaged his contemporaries, from John Soane and Richard Payne Knight to George Wightwick and A. W. N. Pugin.