 A Pointless Biography of Pugin
God's Architect: Rosemary Hill's Pointless Biography of Augustus Pugin, V.P.
God's Architect (Yale UP, 2009) is a monumental work of scholarship, but because it lacks a unifying thesis or central point, Rosemary Hill's sprawling 600-page, fifteen-years-in-the-making biography of the nineteenth century English architect Augustus Pugin (1812-1852) is, in the final analysis, unfortunately, a failure. The closest thing to a central thesis that she offers, the closest thing to an explanation of Pugin's extraordinary life and career, is her speculation that he contracted syphilis, possibly before he was out of his teens, and that it was that disease that underlay many of his physical and mental problems and that led finally to his insanity and death, at the age of forty.
Hill had the sense not to marry her biography to syphilis; at best, or at worst, God's Architecture only flirts with it. She does not mention syphilis until page 151, and not again until page 257, but she returns to the subject near the end, on page 492 and again on page 598, in the Epilogue, when she has no other explanation for Pugin's extraordinary life and work to fall back on.
If there is no point to Hill's biography, there was, quite literally, to Pugin's life and career. He was a practitioner and champion of what he preferred to call Pointed architecture. One of his most important books was The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture (1841). He said he converted to Catholicism as a result of his study of Pointed architecture. Hill's failure to take into account and adequately explain Pugin's lifelong commitment to and obsession with Pointed architecture is the Achilles' heel of God's Architect.
In making light of the titles and honors he never was awarded, in spite of his important contributions in architecture and the applied arts, Pugin once quipped that the only letters he was ever likely to have after his name were V.P., which he made clear stood for "very pointed." But Hill did not explain his "very pointed" quip, either in her biography or when she was asked directly about it in an interview with The Guardian.
Hill is good at showing Pugin's contributions to architecture and the applied arts, and conversely in showing how egotistical and obtuse he could be, but not why he was so crazy about Pointed architecture. Pugin believed Pointed architecture had been the means to his salvation by pointing , literally and figuratively, toward heaven and Catholicism. Syphilis may or may not have killed Pugin, but Pointed architecture is what he lived for.
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