The Revival Styles and Time Regained

The unkindest cut that hatred can deliver is ridicule. Once a thing has been made laughable, it has little chance of reappraisal. Something that has only ever been hated does, in a sense, still enjoy a reputation. A baron’s stronghold induces fear, but the fake castle of some nineteenth-century dandy makes one giggle. Even a dignified neo-Classical exterior can be made a laughing stock for good, with just a few well-chosen words. The historian Gerard Brom was a master in this art. Neo-Classicism, which he liked to label a ‘public works style’, was nothing more than ‘a plaster-cast nincompoop …