5 - The Spirit of the Time

Summary

Cockerell was a significant man in the Hellenistic tradition and some important tensions within it, as the previous chapter has shown. But he also participated in the broader cultural climate of his own generation, the ‘Spirit of the Time’. This, der Zeitgeist, was a notion conceived around 1790 at the University of Göttingen to express the idea that classical Greece in particular, and each age and place generally, had a special mentality derived from its context of history and culture. It was part of the developing Alternumwissenshaft, the ‘knowledge of Antiquity’, with its new historiographical rigour of exhaustive scholarship, which became the foundation of German education, and Cockerell must have been familiar with Göttingen's ideas, with their significant turn to historical understanding. This turn was itself a critical element in the Zeitgeist of Cockerell's own time. The period either side of 1800 experienced a crucial cultural shift, which changed how the past was understood, how material from the past was perceived, and how the various pasts could be integrated into an appropriate nostalgia for both individuals and communities. Cockerell was a part of this change.

It is important, first of all, to clarify Cockerell's own motives and intentions, when he went out to Greece in 1810. He meant to record ancient Greek buildings by making exact drawings of them, following the example of Stuart and Revett who were his personal heroes. He wanted to have the satisfaction of demonstrating how Greek architecture and art worked in the actual stone, and of harvesting information which could be used in an architectural practice in England. Although the Aegina and Bassae marbles were ‘collections’ in one sense, they are better seen as site material. Cockerell did not collect, if this activity is defined as the bringing together by conscious acquisition of selected objects which seem by their owner to be meaningfully related in a range of possible ways; he simply gathered up what appeared. He did not (usually) bring objects back from his travels for his personal use, nor did he buy them at home, and in fact most of his generation of travellers left collecting to men on the spot, like Fauvel.