Architecture, Landscape and Liberty: Richard Payne Knight and the Picturesque

Architectural Review, The, August, 1997 by David Watkin

Ballantyne's brilliant study, which should be read by all students of the Enlightenment, interprets Knight not in the context of 1950s modernism but in that of Post-Modernism, rich with fragmentation, directedness, and obsession with sexual, religious, and political liberation. Knight's belief in the perfection of ancient Greek morality and taste, until corrupted by the pernicious influence of Christianity, lay behind his Discourse on the Worship of Priapus (1786), an extraordinary study of the survival of phallic worship in the contemporary Catholic church.

Ballantyne convincingly reconciles the passionate paradoxes in Knight's intellectual career: though a great philhelline, Knight condemned the Elgin marbles as not Greek but Hadrianic, and even built the castellated Downton. Ballantyne rescues Knight from the charge of inconsistency by reminding us that, before nineteenth-century alterations, the facades of skyline Downton were totally plain, with, as their only adornment, a crenellated skyline reflecting Knight's belief that 'the military architecture of the Greeks and Romans ... consisted of walls and towers capped with battlements'. Its revolutionary asymmetry also recalled the spread-out forms of the villas and fortified towns of ancient Rome in its wild Hertfordshire landscape, Downton was in touch with nature as in Homeric Greece. Reflecting the freedom of the ancient Greeks from all systematic constraint, it represented the ideal of liberation which, according to Ballantyne, was the motivation behind Knight's whole career.