VISUAL ARTS 85

dred years after the Feringi Brunelleschi's day, when his successors had
run through all the resources of a resuscitated Hellenic technique, and
had gone on to apply them to the revolutionizing of domestic as well
as public architecture, the ultimate effect of their technical ingenuity
was to make an aesthetic desert, since they had quenched both a native
Romanesque and an exotic 'Gothic' vein long before they had emptied
an Hellenic Amalthea's imported cornucopia.

The sterility with which the Western genius had been afflicted by a
renaissance of Hellenism in the domain of Architecture was proclaimed
in the West's surprising failure to reap any architectural harvest from
the birth-pangs of the Industrial Revolution. In Great Britain at the
turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in the Western
World as a whole before the nineteenth century reached its close, a
mutation in industrial technique that had begotten the iron girder had
suddenly thrust into the Western architect's hands an incomparably
versatile new building-material; and this gift of the grimy gods might
have been expected to inspire the favoured Western human recipient to
break even the toughest cake of inherited architectural custom in an
eager exploration of the potentialities of a hitherto untried instrument.
As it happened, no great effort was required of a Western architect of
that generation to break a Hellenizing architectural tradition that was
then already crumbling between his fingers; yet the architect who had
been presented by a blacksmith with the iron girder, and by Providence
with a clean slate, could think of no better ways of filling an opportune
vacuum than to cap an Hellenic Renaissance with 'a Gothic Revival' and
to recoil from the 'Gothic* ironmongery of Ruskin's Science Museum
at Oxford and the Woolworth Building in New York into a 'Colonial*
brickwork1 reproducing the Hellenizing Western style of architecture as
this had been practised during an eighteenth-century North American
'Indian Summer'.

The first Westerner to think of frankly turning the iron girder to
account as a building material without bashfully drawing a 'Gothic' veil
over his Volcanic vulgarity was not a professional architect but an
imaginative amateur; and, though he was a citizen of the United States,
the site on which he erected his historic structure overlooked the shores
of the Bosphorus, not the banks of the Hudson. The nucleus of Robert
College—Hamlin Hall, dominating Mehmed the Conqueror's Castle of
Europe—was built by Cyrus Hamlin in A.D. 1869-71 ;z yet it was only
within the life-time of the writer of this Study, who was born in A.D.
1889 and was writing these lines in A.D. 1950, that the seed sown by

the work was completed in A.D. 1423 (see Konstantinopel und das Westliche Kleinasien
(Leipzig X9o«;, Baedeker), p. 144). * See V. vi. 60.

* 'The building is xi j feet by 103. . . . The stone is the same as that of the fortress

built in A.D. 1453-3-----It is fire-proof, the floors being of iron beams with brick arches'

(Hamlin, Cyrus: Among the Turks (London 1878, Sampson Low), p. 297).

'While the work of construction was going on, Dr. Hamlin . . , might be in the water
at the bottom of the well mending the force pump, or at the top of the building standing
on an iron girder with forty feet of empty space below him.... He — was never daunted
by any new and unthought-of problem which presented itself in the building. . . , The

public opening was postponed to the 4th July [J 1871], just two years from thejaying of
the corner stone' (wa?k,burn» D.: Fifty "' •-..-•.»'

______________ N________, ,____Jty Years in Constantinople (Boston and New York

1909, Houghton MifHin), pp. 38-39 and 47).