Preface

Summary

Charles Robert Cockerell was a trained architect and one of the most significant and perceptive of British travellers in Greece and Greater Greece in the two decades after 1800. His time in the Mediterranean from 1810 to 1817 was at the heart of his life, and this book is intended to shine light on what he was doing, and thinking and feeling, while he was away, in order to strengthen understanding of the major figure he was to become.

The book sets out the letters he wrote home at this time, elucidating the people and places involved as much as possible, and making use of additional material to fill out the story. The accompanying chapters unravel the detail of Cockerell's travels, and discuss his methods of working on temples and their significance, the emergence of his crucial historical perspective, and the development of his aesthetic and conceptual sense, particularly his important part in the changing vision of Greek sculpture and architecture. It will discuss his significance in the wider cultural scene of the 1820s and later, especially in the shift either side of 1800 to new ways of understanding the past.

It must be emphasised that in no sense is this a book about Cockerell's career after his return to London in 1817, or the history of Greek Revival architecture, or the archaeology of the temples and other buildings that Cockerell studied, or the detailed history of the sculptures, especially those of Aegina and Bassae, after their resurrection. Its focus is Cockerell's experiences while he was abroad.

We have worked on this book together. Pearce has prepared the transcripts of the letters and edited them for publication, and written the chapters; Ormrod has translated the relevant letters in the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities (British Museum) from the French, prepared and written the footnotes, and prepared the biographies and the bibliography.

Cockerell's drawings showing the entasis of columns on the back of his letter to Smirke of December 23, 1814, published by Frank Salmon in 2008, have not been illustrated here, nor have any of his drawings in the British Museum, because of their poor reproduction quality. Brief biographies of the principal characters have been gathered in a separate section.