The Radcliffe Camera stands in central Oxford, a large domed building in the neoclassical style: all columns and squared masonry and decorative swags. Its lead-clad cupola provides a distinctive piece of punctuation in the city’s spire-pinnacled skyline, and the tawny ashlar facade makes a lovely visual centrepiece in a little pedestrianized square.
It’s especially useful as a backdrop for the ITV detective dramas and quirky Holywood movies that like to film in the city. It’s one of the great buildings of England.
The students, of course, know that the "Rad Cam" is a library - although it’s a slightly impractical one, often regarded with a faint sense of irony, as if its ostensible role isn’t quite to be taken seriously.
They’re right about this, with the instinctive awareness that smart young people so often have. The Radcliffe Camera contains the requisite panoply of books, student desks and Bodleian staff, but it isn’t really a library at all; that’s simply what it’s used as, not what it truly is.
It’s actually a Jacobite sight-gag, a massive, bizarrely inappropriate statement of sympathy for a Scottish political movement of the eighteenth century.
No, really. Trust me?
The Jacobites, in case you need a reminder, were those subjects of the British crown who refused to accept the exile of the Stuart royal dynasty in 1688. Many went into exile with their kings, many more involved themselves in repeated civil wars to try and oust the Dutch and German rulers who they saw as usurpers.
Now, there were Irish, English and Welsh Jacobites, but as you would expect for the uncompromising supporters of a Scottish dynasty, Jacobitism was primarily a Scottish movement, with its "heart in the Highlands": when an English regiment was added to the Jacobite army in 1745, they were expected to wear tartan like all the rest.
Unfortunately, by the time the Radcliffe Camera was inaugurated in 1749, the Jacobites were effectively out of business: their last chance of ousting the Hanoverian dynasty had ended three yeers earlier when Bonnie Prince Charlie ran away after Culloden; but Oxford is probably the only place in England that would have built a massive visual homage to a defunct Scottish political movement.
And so they did.
The first key to unlock the true meaning of this Jacobite monument is the unusual architecture: built on a monumental scale, a tall vertical volume beneath a dome, symmetrical in plan and without any flanking ranges or exedrae to disrupt the monolithic form.
Small rotunda buildings of similar design are found in the baroque architecture of Italy, derived from Roman mausoleums: the most famous is Bramante’s Tempietto, a tiny chapel in the courtyard of a monastery’s cloister; and James Gibbs, the architect of the Rad Cam, was certainly a disciple of the Italian baroque school; but the Rad Cam is, as far as I can tell, unique in its scale and non-religious role.
Large secular buildings with a dome over a tall block with a strict radial symmetry and no flanking wings existed only in one place: the Jacobite imagination, particularly in the work of Gibbs’ friend, collaborator and patron the Earl of Mar.
Now, let’s look at the Radcliffe Camera again: a bulky, vertical tower, with no flanking ranges to distract from its impact, and sculptural detail firmly subordinated to the geometry of the volume: defined by the “Streight Line without any breaking”, as in Mar’’s language of Jacobite architecture and in the disciplined facades of Scottish castle keeps.
Inside, the ground floor is a brooding, heavily vaulted undercroft that seems almost like an arsenal; it was accessed originally through heavy gates of gridded iron bars: an unconventional sort of doorway for any sort of building in England, but the traditional prestige entrance in Scotland, where they’re known as yetts.
A winding stair takes the visitor up into the main interior space, a huge room lit by windows set in deep embrasures, connected by passages in the massive depth between the inner and outer walls, and covered by a plasterwork vault: a Scottish great hall, deconstructed into the architectural language of Vitruvius in the form of an annular collonade around a circular central space. The white stucco decoration on the vault evokes the flamboyant interiors of seventeenth-century Scottish exemplars (though in a bizarre twist, much of the Rad Cam’s “stucco” was actually carved stone disguised as plasterwork).
The mezzanine galleries also have a place in the Jacobites’ castle-derived classicism, but I suspect their true meaning is more complicated and more sophisticated than an over-extended homage to the late-medieval entresol: the circular open space between the gallery balustrades, and indeed the circular opening that unites the main space with the vaulted dome above, represent an adaption of the oubliette, the central lightwell that Mar introduced into the Jacobite architectural grammar, derived from the thirteenth century via his ancestral donjon at Kildrummy.
The abstract monumentality of the building and the baroque guise of the detailing have transformed this gothic detail beyond all sense of practicality, but the architectural language is all the more distinctively Jacobite for that.
And, surmounting the whole composition: an encircling battlement, and a caphouse, originally intended to be stone-flagged, but eventually finished in an equally appropriate covering of lead sheeting. These baroque battlements are accessed from indoors by a separate stair, firmly disconnected from the main entrance flight, and modestly concealed behind a doorway.
It may be circular. It may be neoclassical in every detail of its architecture. It may be pretending to be a library, and located in central Oxford.
But the Radcliffe Camera is actually a Scottish castle.
And having commissioned a Jacobite architect to build this Jacobite building, the University proceeded to top it out with a ceremony that proves they knew exactly what they were doing. The centrepiece of the inauguration was an extended double entendre in Latin, delivered to a packed audience in the Sheldonian Theatre: ostensibly a conventional oration about how the new library symbolized a restoration of ancient virtue and wisdom at the expense of corrupt modern values; but really a political speech calling for the return of the Stuart dynasty.
It was, by all accounts, very well received.
It’s hard to know how serious this Jacobite statement was meant to be three years after Culloden; how much the funerary aesthetic of the rotunda model was a tacit acknowledgment that the Stuarts were a lost cause, or if the contrasting emphases of mourning and hope were intended as part of a paradoxical but coherent statement.
Regardless, we shouldn’t underestimate the intellectual and political sophistication of early modern Oxford - in 1683, they had impounded a new edition of Hobbes’ Leviathan, and made a bonfire of it in the Bodleain Library quad; the idea of a book-burning might have unpleasant connotations from more recent history, but this was one where everyone stood around singing cheerfully, warming themselves and (I think, though I can’t find a source for it right now) roasting chestnuts. It was, in short, an elegant disproval of Hobbes’ cynical ideology: a statement of the ability of ordinary human beings to organize themselves as a community and have some innocent fun, with no need for a powerful, controlling state to tell them what to do.
Of course, like many of the best jokes (such as Belgium), part of the fun of the Radcliffe Camera is that its architects don’t explain what they’re doing.
The building stands as an emphatically impressive public monument, a sculptural form and a statement on the skyline; but the underlying meaning is only visible to the cognoscenti, those who possess the deeper cultural perspectives that enable them to understand what’s going on -- or those who, in later ages, stumble piece by piece upon details that reveal a glimpse of the true story: Oxford’s silent tribute (and majestic statement) in honour of the Jacobite cause.
The images used in this piece are sourced from Wikipedia, where they were authored by User:Supergolden and Newton2 respectively, and made available for reproduction under the Gnu Free Documentation License, which by my understanding governs their use here and all other reproduction, right?
