Data, Documentation and Display in Eighteenth–Century Investigations of Exeter Cathedral

Sam Smiles is Professor of Art History at the University of Plymouth. His books include The Image of Antiquity: Ancient Britain and the Romantic Imagination (Yale University Press, 1994) and Eye Witness: Artists and Visual Documentation in Britain, 1770–1830 (Ashgate, 2000). He wrote J.M.W. Turner (2000) for the Tate Gallery’s British Artists series and is currently working on a re–evaluation of Turner and his critical legacy. Antiquarian inquiries into mediaeval architecture developed new approaches in the eighteenth century. In England, empirical observation, drawing inferences from the built structure and its embellishments, was championed as a corrective to the authority of earlier written accounts. Starting in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, medievalist research was put on a new footing, with careful surveys and accurate drawings promoted as the means to recuperate the development of mediaeval building techniques and architectural style. The work done on Exeter Cathedral is an early example of this turn in antiquarian research. With two nationally important antiquarians serving successively as Deans, Charles Lyttleton and Jeremiah Milles, work on restoring and researching the cathedral was undertaken from the 1740s onwards. The Cathedral was also one of the first to be published by the Society of Antiquaries (1797), with important engravings after John Carter’s drawings, and essays by Charles Lyttleton and Sir Henry Englefield. The success of Lyttleton, especially, in overturning the received understanding of the Cathedral’s development is notable, but his terminological looseness and his respect for textual authority were to be challenged in their turn by Englefield. The clarification of the history of Exeter Cathedral can thus stand as an epitome of wider changes in method in antiquarian scholarship in the second half of the eighteenth century.