Henna School.—In Vienna the current of the architectural movement of the first half of our century was only slightly ruffled. Some little was accomplished in the pure antique, but in general the baldness of the spiritless " queue " style continued and worked itself gradually into a cer tain indefinite Renaissance direction which found expression in the edifices of Sprenger and his contemporaries, who were architecturally his depend ants. The best works executed in this manner are the Coburg Palace and the Statthalterei (government buildings) of Lower Austria, the last partly formed under the influence of the opposition of artists who, like Forster, Rossner, and Van der Null, had been drawn in by the current which swayed Germany. A late production of this manner, already entirely permeated by other influences, is Franz-Joseph's Gate, completed in the sixth decade.
Under the influence of the Romanesque school of Munich arose the opposition which was able after a long suppression to develop a school in Vienna in the middle of the present century. Influenced as this was by the official architectural censorship, it had not been able to demonstrate clearly its principles even in the church built by Rossner in the Jagerzeile, still less to create a genuine artistic work. On the other hand, the Altler chenfeld Church at Vienna, built by the Swiss architect Johann Georg Muller, a pupil of the Munich Academy during the revolutionary strug gles of IS4S, is one of the best examples of the pseudo-Romanesque school.
The magnificent new artillery arsenal at Vienna, in which Ri5ssner, Ludwig FOrster, Hansen, and the partners Van der Niill and Siccardsburg took part, belongs also to this Romanesque direction, and is in some parts, as suits the purposes of the buildings, simple without soberness, while in others it rises to a pitch bordering on exaggeration. The most important parts are the Commandantur, by Van der Mill and Siccardsburg (p1. 52, fig. 4), and the Musemn of Arms, by Hansen (fig. 5), in which this master attempted a soaring flight by introducing a series of Moorish elements without reaching that nobility of proportion and grandeur exhibited by his other works. We may mention the Karolinenthal Church at Prague by Rossner, the cathedral, together with the episcopal palace and sem inary, at Diakovar (Slavonia), by the same master, and some works of Hansen, as the church in the Protestant cemetery at Vienna, a few struc tures in the naval arsenal at Triest, etc.
Ferstel followed a similar direction in an ingenious manner in the new bank-building at Vienna, which he indeed conceived in the spirit of the earliest Italian Renaissance, but brought in so many medireyal elements that the structure may properly be reckoned among those of the Roman esque mixed style. But it indicates already the transition on one side to
the Renaissance and on the other to the archreological medireval. At the present time this Romanesque direction has been everywhere discon tinued; where it became strictly archreological it has blended with the Gothic, elsewhere it has leaned toward the Renaissance, while again it has resolved into that abortive " style of the future" whose only merit is its want of vitality.
entire Romanesque tendency, from its very beginning, expresses a completely free conception which proceeds from the consciousness that its task was to create works, not for the past, but for the precise requirements of the present. This movement, there fore, was not affected by the fact that the historico-artistic researches among the older monuments of Architecture proved more and more that the original Romanesque, even in its membering and ornamentation, was a very different thing from its modern reproduction. This conception, free from slavish imitation, bovine a watchword that played an essential role in the establishment and defence of the theory; so men were satisfied with a mixed style that contained all sorts of elements, and that deviated more and more from the historical basis. Hiibsch, one of its oldest advo cates, even dropped, in the fifth decade, the designation of Romanesque, and strove to obtain in the entire rendering a nearer approach to the clas sical Christian—to the style called by him " Old Christian"—and in details to the earlier Italian Renaissance; yet even here the paraphrase must be so free that the spirit of the new period may be clearly distin guished. Vet this mixture, freely conceived, manifested but slight rela tion to any of the historical styles, and thus could be considered as a style of the present or the future only when an entire great school adopted and fostered it.
Hiibsch's structures bear witness to a refined taste for pure and simple grouping of the masses and good proportions, and above all he is careful not to let the ensemble be overpowered by the details. Even a systematic mode of treatment verging on bald monotony did not result unfavorably, since it evinces a complete mastery of the subject; but more destructive of effect was the want of sentiment for real refinement of detail and for elegance and purity of ornament, which latter is often noticeably crude simply to show the freedom of conception even where the historical devel opment had already led to really beautiful and substantial results.