In the margin of the canon: Dutch architecture in the first architectural surveys of the nineteenth century

This article is about the troublesome relationship between the two book genres that shaped the rapidly developing discipline in the nineteenth century: the general surveys of architectural history and the monograph on a specific country or building style. With the nineteenth-century historiography of medieval and renaissance Dutch architecture as a case study, this article explores the interaction between both genres, paying attention to their respective terminology, descriptive methods, classification, and value judgements. Instead of a mutual exchange between the two genres, this article demonstrates that the architectural survey, with its grand narrative on architecture’s stylistic development, was at the top of a hierarchy of academic writing that defined the architectural canon. Judgements presented in surveys about the unimportance of the Dutch middle ages and renaissance scarcely changed over the years, despite new factual material, whereas the monographs were entirely determined by the surveys. Dutch authors devaluated themselves as the suppliers of ‘additional knowledge’ to the general surveys, taking over their terminology and assessment framework that lend themselves poorly to the appreciation of local architecture. The monographs on the Dutch architectural past demonstrate that national architectural history writing — mediating between local and geographical specificities and general stylistic categories — found itself at the intersection of two sweeping ideals of the nineteenth century: the ideal of romantic nationalism and that of the professionalisation of knowledge.