Review: Tributes to Pierre du Prey: Architecture and the Classical Tradition, from Pliny to Posterity, edited by Matthew M. Reeve

Abstract

Matthew M. Reeve, ed. Tributes to Pierre du Prey: Architecture and the Classical Tradition, from Pliny to Posterity London: Harvey Miller, 2014, 288 pp., 129 b/w illus. €100, ISBN 9781909400122 “The classical tradition meanders in and out of the history of architecture, sometimes looping back upon itself as if to suggest that time has stood still,” Pierre de la Ruffiniere du Prey notes at the opening of Hawksmoor's London Churches: Architecture and Theology .1 In that book, du Prey explores how the buildings of the early Christians, although known to Nicholas Hawksmoor only through texts and drawings, inspired the idiosyncratic Anglican churches that Hawksmoor designed in the early eighteenth century. The question of renewed relevance that underpins du Prey's Hawksmoor study, as well as much of his other work, also ties together the sixteen essays of Tributes to Pierre du Prey , edited by Matthew M. Reeve. One of the strengths of this Festschrift is its coherence. An opening essay by Mark Wilson Jones lays out the stakes by posing a dual question: Why do the orders have the forms that they do, and why has that problem proven so intriguing for writers from Vitruvius to the present? He then surveys the various possible origins of three architectural elements—fluting, the Ionic capital, and the Doric frieze—to argue for a multivalent understanding of the orders. Although no single justification for the architectural form of the orders has been produced, Wilson Jones asserts that contradictory explanations can reinforce each other rather than cancel each other out. The title of Guy P. R. Metraux's essay, “Some Other Literary Villas of Roman Antiquity besides Pliny's,” recalls du Prey's book The Villas of Pliny from Antiquity to Posterity , a magisterial examination of the influence of Pliny the Younger's letters on country house design.2 Metraux supplies context for Pliny's letters, which describe Tuscan and Laurentine villas, by describing the letters of Seneca the Younger, written about forty years before Pliny's, and of Sidonius …