Before the Architecture of Humanism: Geoffrey Scott and the Hellenic Revival

Abstract

Geoffrey Scott is today best remembered for his book-length contribution to the field of architectural criticism: The Architecture of Humanism: A Study in the History of Taste (1914/1924). Six years before the publication of this book, however, Scott published the Oxford Chancellor’s Prize-winning essay, The National Character of English Architecture (1908). In this, Scott articulated his privileging of Hellenic and humanist cultural and aesthetic values and applied his understanding of these to the elucidation of the architectural subject. Whilst today this essay is seldom studied, this dissertation posits that it is an important record of Scott’s life and preoccupations during his formative years, evidencing the mode by which classical humanism underpinned his appreciation of art, architecture, and aesthetic and moral values more broadly.

Drawing on Scott’s written correspondence—and the correspondence of contemporaries including Mary Berenson and John Maynard Keynes—this dissertation identifies the formation of certain of Scott’s ideas not yet accounted for in the literature: his deference to classical Hellenism, and the concomitance of aesthetics, morality, and male homoeroticism for him between 1884 and 1908. This analysis is framed by the late nineteenth-century literary Hellenic revival at Oxford University; the Oscar Wilde trials of 1895; discourse on the “new persecution of peripheral sexualities” and constructions of “homosexuality” in Victorian era legal and medico-scientific frameworks; and, aestheticized and tacit understandings of homoeroticism encoded in newspaper reporting on homoerotically charged “scandals” of the time. Against this backdrop, the aesthetic-moral schema Scott encoded in his letters and in his essay, will be viewed as a call for “a new vision of life,” and understood as an attempt to reconcile the force of his aesthetic and homoerotic sensibilities with the strictures and prohibitions of the age in which he lived.