This splendidly elaborate silver microscope was made for George III at the beginning of his reign. Signed by the king’s instrument maker George Adams, it has a fluted Corinthian column as its main support and the architectural programme is enhanced by the two flanking bases ornamented with miniature vases. Although the decorative extravagance might seem to interfere with its function, this was in fact a working device, incorporating both a compound and a simple microscope. It was not only used for the private instruction and entertainment of the king and his children but was also accessible to visitors and widely reported as a symbol of the king’s enlightened tastes.
75: Museum of the History of Science

George was instructed in architecture before he came to the throne and remained keenly interested in and appreciative of the art. His principal advisor was John Stuart, Earl of Bute, who instilled in his royal pupil a sense of future responsibility for the encouragement and protection of learning and the arts.

On his accession in 1760, George immediately implemented a policy of significant cultural and artistic patronage. In deliberate contrast to George II, the new king began awarding pensions to literary and scientific figures, while undertaking a major programme of collecting, with particular enthusiasms for books, maps, paintings and drawings, medals, clocks, and scientific instruments.

The king’s instrument maker was George Adams, a former apprentice of Thomas Heath. His instruments show the king’s encouragement for the combination of architecture and mathematics. However these ingenious devices were divorced from professional practice: they do not seem to have been adopted outside courtly circles.

The drawings contain few virtuoso performances or extraordinarily imaginative designs. On the contrary, they are valuable precisely for their ordinary and sometimes pedestrian character. A beginner’s first steps in the art would have normally been recycled or discarded. Few prospective architects had the luxury of practising on large clean sheets of fine paper, which were then preserved as evidence of youthful attainments. The corpus is one of the most complete sets of records that we have of architectural tuition in the period.

This selection demonstrates the extent to which the careful command of compass and rule was seen as the foundation of architectural education. The drawings are the product of manual and instrumental work, of a kind considered appropriate – indeed essential – for a future monarch. In this respect, they represent the extraordinary success of Renaissance architects and theorists in promoting the idea of design as a socially and intellectually noble pursuit of both mind and hand.

Ottavio Revesi Bruti’s architectural sector, the ‘archisesto’, was published in 1627. It had no discernible impact in its native Italy but a century later the accompanying treatise was translated into English and dedicated to the ‘architect earl’ Lord Burlington. Though unsigned, this unique example can be attributed to Thomas Heath, who acted as publisher for the text. The design closely follows the Italian original in inscribing the proportions of the five orders onto the arc. In use, the two movable legs are set on the arc and dimensions determined and taken off with dividers. 59: Museum of the History of Science

Mathematics was proclaimed as a pleasurable recreation as well as a useful pursuit, and instruments were attractive to gentlemen virtuosi as well as active practitioners. In the fashionable West End of London the well-stocked shops of leading 18th-century makers lured customers with an aesthetic of ingenuity, novelty, rational entertainment, and polite accomplishment.

The early tradition of mathematical practice had demonstrated its value to the building trades through the improvement of quantity surveying. Beginning in the later 17th century, there was a new initiative to extend the scope of mathematics further by embodying the proportions of the five orders in instruments. The most vigorous efforts to instrumentalise architectural design were made by Thomas Heath in the 1720s and 1730s. Heath was a mathematical instrument maker based in the Strand, but he also acted as a publisher, orchestrating architectural interest by marketing instruments together with books explaining their use. Many of the instruments were variants of the sector, a popular all-purpose calculating device that was particularly useful for rescaling in proportion.

A classic example of William Hogarth’s wit, this 1761 social satire transfers the terminology and visual forms of the architectural treatise to a mock study of wigs. Hogarth’s five ‘orders’ range from the anatomically suggestive to parodies of architectural analysis, and he made fun of what he saw as a slavish devotion to antiquity. The advertisement beneath the image takes a well-aimed swipe at the recently published prospectus for James Stuart and Nicholas Revett’s The Antiquities of Athens, Measured and Delineated (1762). The wickedest humour is directed at ‘Athenian’ Stuart himself. He is shown at lower left as a blockhead – literally a wooden head for hats or wigs, but a term that had long carried the connotation of utter stupidity. 76: Collection of Howard Dawes

The final section of the exhibition explores other routes by which the connections between architecture and mathematics were developed, and also ultimately undermined.

In the later 17th century there was an explosion of architectural publication. Based in London, the print trade produced a stream of vernacular texts for gentlemen and builders, endlessly recycling versions of the classical orders, while trumpeting their accessibility and ease of use.

Mathematics became both a foundation of this literary expansion as well as a potentially lucrative market, and London became the leading centre for the creation and manufacture of mathematical instruments for architecture. Nowhere else in Europe was there such a concentration of innovation and entrepreneurship.

Architecture represented culture as well as commerce. The success of classical architecture as a vehicle for gentlemanly self-fashioning reached all the way to the court. George III was not only an active patron of architecture and instruments, he was also a devoted and accomplished student of the art. This royal enthusiasm, however, had a downside. In the era of Hogarth and of party politics, it provided ammunition for satire, aimed at both the policies of the government as well as its cultural patronage. The tradition of architecture and mathematical practice ended not in a widening appreciation for practical instrumentation and polite accomplishment, but in the arena of artistic and political conflict.

This sketch of a triple-shell dome from c. 1690, represents a key moment in the design of St. Paul’s cathedral. The bottom inscription identifying the work as Wren’s is in the hand of Nicholas Hawksmoor. The design was influenced by Robert Hooke’s version of the insight that the curve formed by a hanging chain, when inverted, would provide the shape for a ‘perfect’ masonry arch. In each of the two matching sections, Wren based the shape of the middle dome on a parabola, determined numerically as the cube of its distance from the centre. The curve was plotted by aligning the four divisions of the base with the ordinals running down the side of the right-hand drawing in units of eight. Wren understood the curve to provide an ‘ideal’ masonry dome, shaped to follow and contain the line of thrust. 45: British Museum

After the destruction of old St Paul’s in the Great Fire of London, it took 50 years of design and construction to build a new cathedral. Wren was in charge of the project from beginning to end and the centrepiece of his creation was the first large masonry dome ever to be constructed in Britain.

This part of the exhibition explores the final sequence of drawings that determined the shape of the dome and, in particular, its sloping inner drum. The design was influenced by contemporary mechanical theory and represents a breakthrough in modern structural engineering – one of the first recorded instances in which mathematical science, in a form worked out prior to the design process, was ‘applied’ to an actual building.

Aside from their purely technical content, the dome drawings also reveal the nature of his working relationship with his draughtsmen and the way he dealt with mounting concerns over expenses. His status closely resembled our own notion of the head of an ‘office’. One of the innovations that he developed at St Paul’s was the use of working drawings for individual elements, decorative schemes, and even details. The great wealth of surviving drawings points not only to the project’s size and complexity but also to an unprecedented level of centralization in the design process.

This section of the exhibition explores the theme of visualization as it appears in in his work during the mid-1660s, both in his science and in his first steps towards architecture. For Wren, architecture was a new and fascinating challenge, but it must also have seemed familiar. His early efforts in the field relied on the same sensibility that he had honed through his work as a scientist and mathematician. As his friend and colleague Robert Hooke put it in 1665 ‘since the time of Archimedes, there scarce ever met in one man, in so great a perfection, such a Mechanical Hand, and so Philosophical a Mind’.

Like the engineers of the sixteenth century, Wren saw architecture as a form of mathematical practice. Indeed, his interest in the art is almost inconceivable without it. But his vision of the discipline was also supplemented by new developments in mechanical invention, antiquarian study, and natural philosophy. The next two sections of the exhibition concentrate on two key stages of his career: his introduction to the art at Oxford in the first half of the 1660s and his work on St Paul’s Cathedral at the end of the 17th and beginning of the 18th century.

In 1620 Henry Savile began the lectures that inaugurated his new Oxford professorships of geometry and astronomy. The professors were based in the Bodleian Library’s Tower of the Five Orders. In the same year Clement Edmondes, a diplomat and municipal official of London, donated this ‘mathematical model’ to the library. The alabaster sculpture combines geometry and architecture. Each side of the central column contains a rusticated version of one of the five architectural orders, with the fragmentary remains of the five Euclidean regular solids around the base. The whole is surmounted by a large dodecahedron, to which Plato had ascribed cosmological significance as reflecting the structure of the heavens. The model acts as a sort of symbolic and pedagogical machine, with the correspondence between the five geometrical solids and the five architectural orders providing part of the work’s basic conceit. 32: Museum of the History of Science, Oxford; on loan from the Bodleian Library

As architecture was dignified by humanist and mathematical treatises, it began to find a place in the world of learning. Scholars had always needed the practical art of building to provide schools, colleges, and libraries, but the broader revival of classical culture also gave them a reason to engage with the art intellectually.

When Thomas Bodley refounded Oxford’s university library at the beginning of the 17th century he not only actively encouraged donations of books but initiated a programme of building. Together with his friend and principal advisor, the mathematician and classical scholar Henry Savile, Bodley used his own money to plan the extensions that today form the Bodleian’s Schools Quadrangle. Savile continued the library project after Bodley’s death. He commissioned and perhaps even designed the Bodleian’s Tower of the Five Orders, with its arrangement of the architectural orders superimposed one above the other. Just as architectural books had become a fit subject for a university library, so the library building itself demonstrated a commitment to learning in architectural form.

John Thorpe translated Hans Blum’s 1550 Latin text on the classical orders into English as The Booke of Five Collumnes of Architecture in 1601. Blum’s little book provided simple and flexible proportional rules in an easily understood graphic form. This title page comes from the fragmentary sole surviving copy of Thorpe’s first edition. Adopted as a workman’s pattern book, most copies must simply have been used to the point of destruction. 36: Worcester College, Oxford

Inigo Jones’s total immersion in Italian erudite and artistic culture was unique in early 17th-century England, but other architects also aspired to the literary and humanistic ideals of the time. John Thorpe (1564/5–1655) was a surveyor and architect who came from a long line of Northamptonshire masons. In 1583, he became a clerk of the Queen’s Works, where he was employed as an accounts-keeper and draughtsman, carrying out various small-scale improvements at the royal palaces. In 1601, he left the Crown’s service and established what would become a successful and long-lasting private practice as a surveyor of both estates and buildings.

Despite his practical background, Thorpe was not unlettered. He translated from both Latin and French and pursued an interest in continental architecture that went well beyond that of most craftsmen of the time. In many ways, Thorpe represents the impact of the Italian Renaissance not in the rarefied environment of the court but in the everyday world of the craft practitioner.

Andrea Palladio was one of Jones’s most important sources. This 1601 edition of Palladio’s Quattro libri di architettura shows Jones reconstructing the proportional design methods used in the domed temple of Minerva Medica in Rome, referred to by Palladio as ‘Le Galluce’. Jones was evidently attracted to the complexity and internal harmony of the plan, which is formed from concentric and interlocking circles. He used his dividers to seek out the principal ratios and then pricked the scored arcs with his pen, to create dotted outlines. 30: Worcester College, Oxford

Renaissance architecture spread not only through the construction of prominent buildings, but also through the publication of illustrated treatises. These books taught how to design in the ‘new’ classical style, particularly through the proportions and proper use of the five orders. The most widely-read texts included Vitruvius’s De architectura, the sole surviving ancient work on the subject, and those of the Renaissance Italian architect-theorists who followed in his wake. These works presented an elevated and ennobled image of the art, inspired by the humanist’s admiration for classical antiquity.

The first English architect to shape his work and professional persona in this mould was Inigo Jones (1573–1652). Jones travelled to Italy for two long periods of observation and study, but his approach to architecture was equally shaped by Italian treatises, which he collected and read with great care and attention. Worcester College, Oxford has the largest surviving remnant of his original library, with 46 of Jones’s own books, many laden with annotations in his hand. These notes show Jones not as a workman but an active intellectual, forming his own response to classical architecture through reading and writing.