Review: Glorious Visions: John Soane’s Spectacular Theater, by Helene Furján

Abstract

Helene Furjan. Glorious Visions: John Soane’s Spectacular Theater . London and New York: Routledge, 2011, 198 pp., 38 color and 15 b/w illus. $54.95 (paper), ISBN 9780415781589. The intricately connected spaces of Sir John Soane’s house at 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields and the themes that lace together the varied objects in those rooms, along with the strict legal requirement that it all be maintained in perpetuity, muddle the presumptively distinct functions of a house, an office, a museum, and a memorial. Historical accounts of this complicated assemblage (including those written during Soane’s lifetime) have in response tended to employ clarifying genres—the catalogue raisonne , for example, or biography, with its evident priority of chronology, or a summary tour, leading from entry hall to bedchamber. Helen Furjan’s Glorious Visions: John Soane’s Spectacular Theatre adopts a different structure of explication, one that depends not upon the physical ordering of the house or upon the life of its architect, but that draws selectively from both those sources and, more decisively, from the culture within which they were immersed. The chapters of the book present what Furjan calls a “series of tropes,” which she uses to isolate particular characteristics and implications of the architecture of Soane’s house (6). There are eight in all—“Genius,” “Models,” “Scenes,” “Mirrors,” “Associations,” “Fictions,” “Shadows,” and “Mementos”—which collectively illuminate the composite quality of Soane’s own “poetry of architecture.” In these chapters, Furjan situates aspects of 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields within the cultural knowledge and the social conventions of Soane’s period in order to reveal how one or another register of the architectural interior resonated with the concerns and interests beyond its walls. Thus the chapter “Genius” discusses the prevailing concern for artistic invention, Coleridge’s distinction of imagination and fancy, and the value of individual style as a professional currency. The chapter called “Mirrors” explores the technology of the mirror and the changing fashion for different …