"The very principle of religious architecture has its origins in the notion that where we are critically determines what we are able to believe in. To defenders of religious architecture, however convinced we are at an intellectual level of our commitments to a creed, we will remain reliably devoted to it only when it is continually affirmed by our buildings. In danger of being corrupted by our passions and led astray by the commerce and chatter of our societies, we require places where the values outside of us encourage and enforce the aspirations within us. We may be nearer or further away from God on account of what is represented on the walls or the ceilings. We need panels of gold and lapis, windows of coloured glass and gardens of immaculately raked gravel in order to stay true to the sincerest parts of ourselves."

"I took shelter in a smoked glass and granite block on London’s Victoria Street, home to the Westminster branch of McDonald’s. The mood inside the restaurant was solemn and concentrated. Customers were eating alone, reading papers or staring at the brown tiles, masticating with a sternness and brusqueness beside which the atmosphere of a feeding shed would have appeared convivial and mannered.

The setting served to render all kinds of ideas absurd: that human beings might sometimes be generous to one another without hope of reward; that relationships can on occasion be sincere; that life may be worth enduring … The restaurant’s true talent lay in the generation of anxiety. The harsh lighting, the intermittent sounds of frozen fries being sunk into vats of oil and the frenzied behaviour of the counter staff invited thoughts of the loneliness and meaninglessness of existence in a random and violent universe. The only solution was to continue to eat in an attempt to compensate for the discomfort brought on by the location in which one was doing so."

"The first attempts to create specifically Christian spaces, buildings intended to help their occupants to draw closer to the truths of the Gospels, date from some 200 years after the birth of Christ. On plaster walls in low-ceilinged, candlelit rooms, beneath the heathen streets of Rome, untrained artists painted crude renditions of incidents in Jesus’s life, in a primitive style which might have done justice to the less gifted students of an art school.

These Christian catacombs are only the more touching, however, for their inarticulacy. They show the architectural and artistic impulses in their purest forms, without the elaboration supplied by talent or money. They reveal how in the absence of great patrons or craftsmen, with no skills or resources to speak of, the faithful will feel a need to daub the symbols of their heavens on damp cellar walls – to ensure that what is around them will fortify the truths within them."

"In the eyes of medieval man, a cathedral was God’s house on earth. Adam’s fall might have obscured the true order of the cosmos, rendering most of the world sinful and irregular, but within the bounds of a cathedral, the original, geometric beauty of the Garden of Eden had been resurrected. The light shining through the stained-glass windows prefigured that which would radiate in the next life. Inside the holy cavern, the claims of the Book of Revelation ceased to seem remote and bizarre, and became instead both palpable and immediate."

"Touring the cathedrals today with cameras and guidebooks in hand, we may experience something at odds with our practical secularism: a peculiar and embarrassing desire to fall to our knees and worship a being as mighty and sublime as we ourselves are small and inadequate. Such a reaction would not, of course, have surprised the cathedral builders, for it was precisely towards such a surrender of our self-sufficiency that their efforts were directed, the purpose of their ethereal walls and lace-like ceilings being to make metaphysical stirrings not only plausible but irresistible within even the soberest of hearts."

"We might even, the early theologians suggested, come better to understand God through beauty, for it was He who had created every beautiful thing in the world: the eastern sky at dawn, the forests, the animals, and even more domestic items like a graceful armchair, a bowl of lemons and a ray of afternoon sun shining through a cotton window blind onto the kitchen table. In contact with attractive buildings, we could intimate some of the refinement, intelligence, kindness and harmony of their ultimate maker."

"In the thirteenth century, from across a divide of faith, Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, asked us to picture ‘a beautiful house, this beautiful universe. Think of this or that beautiful object. But then, omitting “this” and “that”, think of what makes “this” and “that” beautiful. Try to see what Beauty is in itself … If you succeed, you will see God Himself, the Beauty which dwells in all beautiful things.’"

"A second compelling claim was made for the visual when the early theologians speculated that it might be easier to become a faithful servant of God by looking than by reading They argued that mankind could more effectively be shaped by architecture than by Scripture. Because we were creatures of sense, spiritual principles stood a better chance of fortifying our souls if we took them in via our eyes rather than via our intellect. We might learn more about humility by gazing at an arrangement of tiles than by studying the Gospels, and more about the nature of kindness in a stained-glass window than in a holy book. Spending time in beautiful spaces, far from a self-indulgent luxury, was deemed to lie at the core of the quest to become an honorable person."

"Imagine being able to return at the close of each day to a house like that in Rö, north of Stockholm. Our working routines may be frantic and compromised, dense with meetings, insincere handshakes, small-talk and bureaucracy. We may say things we don’t believe in to win over our colleagues and feel ourselves becoming envious and excited in relation to goals we don’t essentially care for.

But, finally, on our own, looking out of the hall window onto the garden and the gathering darkness, we can slowly resume contact with a more authentic self, who was there waiting in the wings for us to end our performance. Our submerged playful sides will derive encouragement from the painted flowers on either side of the door. The value of gentleness will be confirmed by the delicate folds of the curtains. Our interest in a modest, tender-hearted kind of happiness will be fostered by the unpretentious raw wooden floorboards. The materials around us will speak to us of the highest hopes we have for ourselves. In this setting, we can come close to a state of mind marked by integrity and vitality. We can feel inwardly liberated. We can, in a profound sense, return home."

"Take William Nicholson’s closely observed painting of a bowl, a white tablecloth and some unshelled peas. On first seeing it, we might experience a measure of sadness, as we recognise how far we have drifted from its meditative, observant spirit, from its modesty and appreciation of the beauty and nobility of ordinary life.

Behind wanting to own the painting and hang it where we could regularly study it might be the hope that through continued exposure to it, its qualities would come to assume a greater hold on us. Passing it on the stairs last thing at night or in the morning on our way to work would have the effect of a magnet which could pull to the surface submerged filaments of our characters. The painting would act as the guardian of a mood."

"Feelings of competitiveness, envy and aggression hardly need elaboration, but feelings of humility amid an immense and sublime universe, of a desire for calm at the onset of evening or of an aspiration for gravity and kindness – these form no correspondingly reliable part of our inner landscape, a rueful absence which may explain our wish to bind such emotions to the fabric of our homes.

Architecture can arrest transient and timid inclinations, amplify and solidify them, and thereby grant us more permanent access to a range of emotional textures which we might otherwise have experienced only accidentally and occasionally."

"There is no necessary connection between the concepts of home and of prettiness; what we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistently available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves have trouble holding on to. As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us."

"Some 4,000 years ago, on a hillside in western Pembrokeshire, a group of our Neolithic ancestors lifted up a series of gigantic stones with their bare hands and covered them with earth to mark the spot where one of their kinsmen lay buried. The chamber has been lost to time, as have the body and even the identity of the man whose name must once have been spoken with awe in the communities along this damp edge of the British Isles. But what remains to these stones is their eloquent ability to deliver the message common to all funerary architecture, from marble tomb to rough wooden roadside shrine – namely, ‘Remember’. The poignancy of the roughly chiselled family of mossy orthostats, keeping their lonely watch over a landscape around which none save sheep and the occasional rain-proofed hiker now roam, is heightened only by the awareness that we recall nothing whatsoever about the one they memorialise – aside, that is, from this leader’s evident desire, strong enough to inspire his clan to raise a forty-tonne capstone in his honour, that he not be forgotten."

"We may occasionally and guiltily experience the desire to create a home as a wish to vaunt ourselves in front of others. But only if the truest parts of ourselves were egomaniacal would the urge to build be dominated by the need to boast. Instead, at its most genuine, the architectural impulse seems connected to a longing for communication and commemoration, a longing to declare ourselves to the world through a register other than words, through the language of objects, colours and bricks: an ambition to let others know who we are – and, in the process, to remind ourselves."

"The resulting work was a sumptuous celebration, in allegorical form, of Venetian government. In a central panel Veronese depicted the city as a sober, beautiful queen of the seas, attended by two ladies-in-waiting, one of whom symbolised justice (she was carrying a pair of scales) and the other peace (she had a sleepy but not unferocious-seeming lion on a leash – just in case). Smaller panels around the edges portrayed supplementary Venetian virtues. Meekness showed a young blonde with an obedient sheep resting its front feet on her lap. Next to her, in Fidelity, a melancholic brunette stroked the neck of a St Bernard. Across from these was Prosperity, represented by a ruddy-cheeked, slightly chubby woman in a low-cut dress, holding a cornucopia overflowing with apples, grapes and oranges. And opposite her was Moderation, in which a sturdy maiden with braided hair and one exposed breast smiled impassively as she plucked out the feathers of a vicious-looking eagle (most likely standing in for the Turks or the Spanish). To judge from Veronese’s ceiling, there was little that was not just and peaceful, meek and faithful, about the Venetian Republic."

"Palladio was impressed by how well Ancient Roman buildings had managed to embody the ideals of their society – orderliness, courage, self-sacrifice and dignity – and he wanted his own designs to promote a comparable Renaissance conception of nobility. The title page of his 1570 work The Four Books of Architecture would make this didactic ambition explicit, through an allegorical engraving which featured two maidens of architecture saluting the queen of virtue. The balanced façades of the Villa Rotonda, the grand house which Palladio conceived for Almerico, seemed to imply that in this one place on earth, amid the sunlit flatlands of the Veneto, the struggles and compromises of ordinary life had been overcome and supplanted by equilibrium and lucidity. Along the villa’s pediments and stairways, a sequence of life-sized statues by the sculptors Lorenzo Rubini and Giambattista Albanese gave human form to figures from classical mythology. Stepping out onto the terrace for a breath of air after reading a few chapters of Seneca or reviewing a contract from the Levant, the villa’s owner could raise his eyes to take in Mercury, the protector of commerce, Jupiter, the god of wisdom, or Vesta, the goddess of the hearth – and feel that, in his country dwelling, at least, the values closest to his heart had found lasting expression and glorification in stone."

"Under Adam’s direction, the library became an opulent consecration of the character of the most senior legal authority in the land. Its shelves were filled with volumes of Greek and Roman philosophy and history, and its ornate ceiling was inset with an allegorical oval. Entitled Hercules between Glory and the Passions, the vignette showed a young Hellenic hero, clearly a version of Mansfield himself, trying to decide whether to devote his life to pleasure (in the shape of three comely girls, one of whom was baring a plump thigh) or to follow the path of sacrifice to a worthy civic cause (personified by a soldier who pointed towards a Classical temple). The viewer was given to understand that civic virtue would win the tussle – though the painting, with its masterly Italianate command of flesh tones, seemed covertly to be making a more compelling case for the alternative."

"Some sixty years later, just a few miles to the south, the members of London’s Athenaeum Club, an institution catering (as its rulebook stated) to ‘persons of distinguished eminence in science, literature, the arts or public life’, commissioned a new building for themselves on Pall Mall. Classical figures, modelled after those in the Elgin Marbles and executed by the sculptor John Henning, were arranged on an extended frieze some 260 feet long, which wrapped around three exterior sides of the clubhouse. The figures were engaged in the Athenian equivalents of the activities which interested the English gentlemen inside: singing, reading, writing and orating. Above the front door stood a towering gilded statue of Athena. The goddess of craft and wisdom looked defiantly down Pall Mall, intent on offering all who passed a foretaste of the personalities and interests of the membership within. By all appearances, only a few metres removed from the shallow commercialism of Piccadilly, an institution had been founded which harboured within its walls a group of men fully the equals of those who had lent glory to Athens in her golden age."

"Nevertheless, the sheer eccentricity and remoteness of the concept of artistic idealisation invites closer examination. We might ask why, for some three centuries in the early-modern period, artists were applauded chiefly insofar as they could produce landscapes, people and buildings that were free of ordinary blemishes. We might wonder why artists competed among themselves to paint gardens and glades that would be more bucolic than any actual park, why they sculpted marble lips and ankles more seductive than those through which real blood might flow, and made portraits of aristocrats and royalty which showed them to be wiser and more magnanimous than they ever were.

It was rarely naivety that lay behind these efforts, or indeed the desire to deceive. The creators of idealised works were worldly creatures and credited their audiences with being so too."

"To proponents of the idealising tradition, the notion that artists were being naive in suggesting anything other than this would itself have appeared naive. The purpose of their art and their buildings was not to remind us of what life was typically like, but rather to keep before our eyes how it might optimally be, so as to move us fractionally closer to fulfilment and virtue. Sculptures and buildings were to assist us in bringing the best of ourselves to the fore. They were to embalm our highest aspirations."

"In his On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794), Friedrich Schiller proposed that the perfections presented in idealised art could be sources of inspiration, to which we would be able to turn when we had lost confidence in ourselves and were in contact only with our flaws, a melancholic and self-destructive stance to which he felt his own age especially prone. ‘Humanity has lost its dignity,’ he observed, ‘but Art has rescued it and preserved it in significant stone. Truth lives on in the illusion of Art, and it is from this copy, or after-image, that the original image will once again be restored.’

Rather than confronting us with evocations of our darkest moments, works of art were to stand, in Schiller’s words, as an ‘absolute manifestation of potential’; they were to function like ‘an escort descended from the world of the ideal’."

"A great work of architecture will speak to us of a degree of serenity, strength, poise and grace to which we, both as creators and audiences, typically cannot do justice – and it will for this very reason beguile and move us. Architecture excites our respect to the extent that it surpasses us."

"When von Humboldt’s friend, the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, began to endow Berlin with Classical bridges, museums and palaces, he knew that Berliners would only ever be able to admire from a distance, rather than rekindle, the antiquity he revered, but he trusted that something of the period’s integrity and grandeur could through architecture still come to permeate the Prussian capital. As residents crossed the Schlossbrücke to attend a meeting or passed the New Pavilion at the Charlottenhof Palace on a Sunday walk, Schinkel’s architecture – his statue-laden bridges, his sober columns, his delicate frescos – could play a small but pivotal role in ushering in a renaissance of the spirit."

"However much it may seem as if we have lost all patience with idealisation, contemptuous as we are of decorated bridges and gilded statues, we are constitutionally incapable of abandoning the concept itself, for, freed of all its historical associations, the word ‘idealisation’ refers simply to an aspiration towards perfection, an objective with which no one, not even the most rational of beings, may ever be completely unacquainted.

It is in fact not ideals per se that we have forgone but the specific values once honoured by prominent works of idealisation. We have given up on antiquity, we have no reverence for mythology, and we condemn aristocratic confidence. Our ideals now revolve around themes of democracy, science and commerce. And yet we remain as committed as ever to the project of idealisation."

"Entire cities may even be born out of the wish to summon Schiller’s ‘escort descended from the world of the ideal’. When President Kubitschek of Brazil unveiled plans for the construction of Brasília, in 1956, he vowed that the new capital would become ‘the most original and precise expression of the creative intelligence of modern Brazil’. Deep and high in the country’s interior, it was to be a model of modern bureaucratic efficiency, an ideal to which the rest of Kubitschek’s sprawling, struggling country could pay only insecure and occasional homage. Brasília was intended not to symbolise an existing national reality but rather to bring a new reality into being. It was hoped that with its broad avenues and its undulating concrete and steel buildings, it would help erase Brazil’s legacy of colonialism, as well as the chaos and poverty of her coastal cities. Brasília would bring about the modernity it epitomised. It would create a country in its own image."

"In 1938, on a remote, rocky outcrop on the island of Capri, the Italian writer Curzio Malaparte conceived a home for himself which would be, as he wrote to a friend, ‘a self-portrait in stone’ (‘ritratto pietra’) and ‘a house like me’ (‘una casa come me’). With its proud isolation, its juxtapositioning of ruggedness and refinement, its unblinking, hardy defiance of the elements, and the aesthetic debt it owed to Ancient Rome on the one hand and Italian modernism on the other, the house did indeed pick up on key traits of Malaparte’s character. Fortunately for visitors, however, it turned out not to be a slavishly faithful portrait of its owner in all his facets – a difficult prospect for any house, certainly, but particularly so in Malaparte’s case, for that would have necessitated the inclusion of pretentious furnishings, dead-end corridors, perhaps a shooting range (he was a Fascist until 1943) and a few broken windows (he liked a drink and then a fight). Rather than reflecting the author’s many foibles, Casa Malaparte, like all effective works of idealisation, assisted its gifted yet flawed proprietor in orienting himself towards the noblest sides of his personality."

"The architecture produced under the influence of an idealising theory of the arts might be described as a form of propaganda. The word is an alarming one, for we are inclined to believe that high art should be free of ideology and admired purely for its own sake.

Yet the term ‘propaganda’ refers to the promotion of any doctrine or set of beliefs and in and of itself should carry no negative connotations. That the majority of such promotion has been in the service of odious political and commercial agendas is more an accident of history than any fault of the word. A work of art becomes a piece of propaganda whenever it uses its resources to direct us towards something, insofar as it attempts to enhance our sensitivity and our readiness to respond favourably to any end or idea."

"From this perspective, we would be wise not to pursue the impossible goal of extirpating propaganda altogether, but should instead endeavour to surround ourselves with its more honourable examples. There is nothing to lament in the idea that art can direct our actions, provided that the directions it points us in are valuable ones. The theorists of the idealising tradition were refreshingly frank in their insistence that art should try to make things happen – and, more importantly, that it should try to make us good."

"Our sadness won’t be of the searing kind but more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we see before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind. The flawless object throws into perspective the mediocrity that surrounds it. We are reminded of the way we would wish things always to be and of how incomplete our lives remain."

"‘When we admire the beauty of visible objects, we experience joy certainly,’ observed the medieval thinker Hugh of St Victor, ‘but at the same time, we experience a feeling of tremendous void.’ The religious explanation put forward for this sadness, as rationally implausible as it is psychologically intriguing, is that we recognise beautiful things as symbols of the unblemished life we once enjoyed in the Garden of Eden. While we may one day resume this sublime existence in Heaven, the sins of Adam and Eve have deprived us of that possibility on earth. Beauty, then, is a fragment of the divine, and the sight of it saddens us by evoking our sense of loss and our yearning for the life denied us. The qualities written into beautiful objects are those of a God from whom we live far removed, in a world mired in sin. But works of art are finite enough, and the care taken by those who create them great enough, that they can claim a measure of perfection ordinarily unattainable by human beings. These works are bitter-sweet tokens of a goodness to which we still aspire, however infrequently we may approach it in our actions or our thoughts."

"Imagine a man in an especially tormented period, sitting in the waiting room of a Georgian townhouse before a meeting. Uninterested in the magazines on offer, he looks up at the ceiling and recognises that at some point in the eighteenth century, someone took the trouble to design a complicated but harmonious moulding made up of interlocking garlands of flowers and painted it a mixture of white, porcelain blue and yellow. The ceiling is a repository of the qualities the man would like to have more of in himself: it manages to be both playful and serious, subtle and clear, formal and unpretentious. Though it must have been commissioned by people no less practical than he, it has a profound unsentimental sweetness, like that of a smile breaking across a child’s face. At the same time, the man is aware that the ceiling contains everything that he does not. He is embroiled in professional complications which he cannot resolve, he is permanently tired, a sour expression is etched onto his face, and he has begun shouting intemperately at strangers – when all he wants to explain is that he is in pain. The ceiling is the man’s true home, to which he cannot find his way back. There are tears in his eyes when an assistant enters the room to usher him to his meeting."

"Owning such an object may help us realise our ambition of absorbing the virtues to which it alludes, but we ought not to presume that those virtues will automatically or effortlessly begin to rub off on us through tenure. Endeavouring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginative way of dealing with the longing it excites in us, just as trying to sleep with someone may be the bluntest response to a feeling of love.

What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty."

"The most compelling aspect of Worringer’s theory – a point as readily applicable to architecture as it is to painting – was his explanation of why a society might transfer its loyalty from the one aesthetic mode to the other. The determinant lay, he believed, in those values which the society in question was lacking, for it would love in art whatever it did not possess in sufficient supply within itself. Abstract art, infused as it was with harmony, stillness and rhythm, would appeal chiefly to societies yearning for calm – societies in which law and order were fraying, ideologies were shifting, and a sense of physical danger was compounded by moral and spiritual confusion. Against such a turbulent background (the sort of atmosphere to be found in many of the metropolises of twentieth-century America or in New Guinean villages enervated by generations of internecine strife), inhabitants would experience what Worringer termed ‘an immense need for tranquillity’, and so would turn to the abstract, to patterned baskets or the minimalist galleries of Lower Manhattan.

But in societies which had achieved high standards of internal and external order, so that life therein had come to seem predictable and overly secure, an opposing hunger would emerge: citizens would long to escape from the suffocating grasp of routine and predictability – and would turn to realistic art to quench their psychic thirst and reacquaint themselves with an elusive intensity of feeling."

"We respect a style which can move us away from what we fear and towards what we crave: a style which carries the correct dosage of our missing virtues. That we need art in the first place is a sign that we stand in almost permanent danger of imbalance, of failing to regulate our extremes, of losing our grip on the golden mean between life’s great opposites: boredom and excitement, reason and imagination, simplicity and complexity, safety and danger, austerity and luxury."

"Our innate imbalances are further aggravated by practical demands. Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored. Society ends up containing a range of unbalanced groups, each hungering to sate its particular psychological deficiency, forming the backdrop against which our frequently heated conflicts about what is beautiful play themselves out."

"We can understand a seventeenth-century elite’s taste for gilded walls by simultaneously remembering the context in which this form of decoration developed its appeal: one where violence and disease were constant threats, even for the wealthy – fertile soil from which to begin appreciating the corrective promises offered by angels holding aloft garlands of flowers and ribbons.

We shouldn’t believe that the modern age, which often prides itself on rejecting signs of gentility and leaves walls unplastered and bare, is any less deficient. It is merely lacking different things."

"Historians have often noted that the Western world in the late eighteenth century acquired a taste for the natural in all its major art forms. There was new enthusiasm for informal clothing, pastoral poetry, novels about ordinary people and unadorned architecture and interior decoration. But we shouldn’t be led by this aesthetic shift to conclude that the inhabitants of the West were at this time becoming any more natural in themselves. They were falling in love with the natural in their art precisely because they were losing touch with the natural in their own lives."

"‘Since the Greeks had not lost nature in themselves,’ he explained, ‘they had no great desire to create objects external to them in which they could recover it.’ And then, turning to his own day, Schiller drove home his message: ‘However, as nature begins gradually to vanish from human life as a direct experience, so we see it emerge in the world of the poet as an idea. We can expect that the nation which has gone the farthest towards unnaturalness would have to be touched most strongly by the phenomenon of the naive. This nation is France’"