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Construction, destruction and reconstruction: the conservation of classical Clandon contrasted with Morris’ medievalism
25/06/25
Michael Bevington
Some objections to reconstructing Clandon’s interior make emotive assumptions about ‘falsifying the evidence’ instead of creating something ‘honest’ ( Christine Emerson, Head of Casework, SPAB, 19th December 2024, Planning Consent Application, p.270).
However, for their protection and conservation, ancient buildings require reconstruction after partial destruction by fire (Fig. 1).
This is a practical and intellectual process which creates a new, but equally honest, standard of evidence, without falsifying the old.
This is the natural life-cycle of all buildings, especially classical whose essence is symmetrical coherence.
Thus the Pantheon’s Latin inscription states that it was built by Agrippa in 27 BC.
However, what we now admire is reconstructed, apart from the portico, after its destruction by fire ( Orosius, 7.12: ‘fulmine concrematum’ (burnt by lightning), under Trajan).
The reconstructed Pantheon, rather than dishonestly falsifying the evidence, through our intellectual appreciation of its reconstruction enhances our physical experience of entering Agrippa’s Pantheon.
As the most complete building surviving from the ancient world, the Pantheon emphasises its architectural importance through the imperative of its restoration.
Ruskin allowed modern interventions to save ancient buildings: ‘better a crutch than a lost limb’ (Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (Orpington: George Allen, 6th ed., 1889) p.196).
Morris followed Ruskin in many ways, reading aloud Ruskin’s chapter on Gothic architecture to his fellow students at Oxford ( Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, The Stones of Venice (vol.2 1853, Oxford); McCarthy, Fiona, William Morris: A life for our time (1995) p.69).
Morris was devoted to all things medieval, especially architecture, sharing Gilbert Scott’s enthusiasm for reconstructing the medieval world through architecture, as in Gilbert Scott’s chapel at Exeter College, Oxford from 1853, a reconstruction of the medieval La Sante-Chapelle, Paris, completed in 1248. The reconstruction differs in some details and is contextualised by the adjacent medieval Palmer’s Tower.
Morris matriculated at Exeter College with Edward Burne-Jones in 1852, as, in fact, I did 120 years later.
In 1854, Scott also designed Exeter’s Library, again in medieval Gothic contextualised near the medieval Duke Humphrey’s Library (Tyack, Geoffrey, “Gilbert Scott and the Chapel of Exeter College, Oxford”, Architectural History, 50 (2007), pp.125-148, p.138).
After taking his degree, Morris spent two years training under Street, another leading Gothic architect, and later inspired the Arts and Crafts movement through his medievalism.
However, by 1877 Morris condemned both Scott and Street for inaccurate restoration and his manifesto led to the foundation of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings.
Morris’ developing socialist vision valued the accrued patina of medieval sculpture by individual craftsman over modern mass production.
Nevertheless, his objection to unfaithful reconstruction is irrelevant in the era of modern archaeological evidence and detailed photography, and should be understood within the context of his moral crusade.
Morris’ ‘narrow’ outburst against industrialisation or speculative Gothic restoration in the late 1870s cannot apply to accurate twenty-first-century reconstruction of, for instance, Clandon’s classical interior.
Indeed, the planners consented to the National Trust’s application for listed building consent to include Clandon’s ‘restoration’, in this case of ‘external façades’, so the principle of reconstructing Clandon through restoration has already been established and approved.
Moreover, the inherent holistic unity of Clandon’s classical architecture, with its frequent repetition of identical forms often identically manufactured through mouldings, is irrelevant to Morris’ medievalism and individual carving.
From the late 1720s Leoni reconstructed classical architecture and art at Clandon in a way which now demands its holistic, not partial, reconstruction.
The visual importance of reconstructing architectural and artistic details is evident in the restoration of copies of classical statues in the niches of the Marble Hall at Stowe House, Buckinghamshire, where the empty niches distort and falsify the intended vertical dimension.
Similarly, the intended visual experience of the State Dining Room is restored by replica tapestries, as also with the National Trust’ reconstructions of George II’s Column.
Similar principles apply to the visitor’s experience of Clandon’s giant Corinthian columns on the south front contrasted with the single-storey scale of columns originally decorating the Palladian Room immediately inside the doorway.
The same applied to moving from the astylar West Front (Fig. 9) into the great Marble Hall with its two storeys of attached Corinthian columns, and then progressing to view the same architectural space from the higher storey where the reduced scale of the order enhanced Leoni’s clever use of perspective.
John Cornforth, in the National Trust guidebook, described Clandon’s Marble Hall as ‘unquestionably among the grandest of all eighteenth-century interiors’.
Clandon is not simply Leoni’s masterpiece but also of much wider significance architecturally, especially in the light of his unique scholarly expertise on both Alberti and Palladio.
Reconstruction has authentic provenance from the Pantheon onwards. Morris was concerned with the patina from pre-industrial individual medieval craftsmen, not repetitive identical classical mouldings, or precise reconstructions based on detailed archaeology and photography.
Morris’ warnings against inauthentic nineteenth-century medieval interventions are, in fact, equally opposed to twenty-first-century interventions or ‘tampering’ through modern walkways and falsified ceilings, incompatible with an eighteenth-century classical context.
The National Trust has already applied for, and been granted, listed building consent to restore Clandon’s ‘external façades’;
this now needs to be extended to the much more significant interior.
Only interior reconstruction can protect Clandon’s unique architectural role in its holistic interplay of exterior and interior forms and allow visitors to experience fully Leoni’s groundbreaking construction.
Picture captions:
The Pantheon in Rome bearing the name of Marcus Agrippa, but mostly reconstructed under Trajan La Sante-Chapelle, Paris, completed in 1248
The chapel of Exeter College, Oxford by George Gilbert Scott
Exeter College Library by George Gilbert Scott
(Three pictures) The Marble Hall at Stowe House: a drawing of 1805 and post-restoration photographs from 2009 showing the plinths without and with statues
(Two pictures) The restored State Dining Room at Stowe House before and after replica tapestries were hung
(Two pictures) The Prince’s Column of George II, reconstructed by the National Trust
Giant Corinthian columns on the south front of Clandon House
The National Trust’s proposed treatment of the Marble Hall
The upper gallery in the Marble Hall of Clandon House with its smaller Corinthian columns