European countries including England (Banham 1984), France (Pomian
1996), and Spain (Dı ́ez 1992). In Ireland, also, the medieval period was key
in the writings (especially his 1845Ecclesiastical Architecture of Ireland) and
paintings of George Petrie (1790–1866), who emphasized the ‘Celtic’ medi-
eval landscape of Ireland (Cooney 1996: 150–1; Hutchinson 1987: 81–3;
Waddell 2005: 103–13). Somewhere in between the national histories and
historical paintings lay a series of publishing ventures of picture albums
depicting the main monuments of the nation. In the 1820s the production
of theVoyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne Francestarted, a
project only completed in the 1870s (Fritzsche 2004: 125). This and other
similar ventures were copied all over Europe. Thus, in Spain three diVerent
undertakings can be mentioned as its inheritors:Recuerdos y Bellezas de
Espan ̃a(1839–72),Espan ̃a Artı ́stica y Monumental(1842–50), andMonumen-
tos Arquitecto ́nicos de Espan ̃a(1859–81).
The importance of the medieval as a major constituent of the spirit of the
nation led to its style being copied in newly built ediWces that regulated the
civic and religious life of towns. Administrative buildings and churches were
erected in a neo-medieval style and furnished inside with furniture taking on
Gothic forms (De Maeyer & Verpoest 2000). This fashion would endure for
several decades throughout Europe. Architects, however, not only designed
new structures, they also dealt with buildings put up in the medieval period
that needed restorations and improvements. While in previous centuries this
would have been done in the style of the contemporary period, in the middle
years of the nineteenth century the aspiration was to restore medieval build-
ings following medieval rules. Yet, the description of what these were was a
task undertaken by architect-antiquarians. These organized a series of taxon-
omies inspired by systems of classiWcation in otherWelds as diverse as botany
and philology (Frew 1980; Miele 1998: 112). Once these schemes were in
place, they took precedence over the diversity of structures and forms that, as
a matter of fact, had been the norm built in the medieval period. In this way
restorations followed the new standards of what a medieval building of a
particular century were thought to have looked like, either by newly building
sections that had been ruined or even substituting original pieces that did not
Wt expectations (Miele 1998; Ordieres Dı ́ez 1995: 119). There are precedents
for this practice in countries such as England in the eighteenth century (Miele
1998: 112–19), which by the nineteenth century was utilized by architects
such as Gilbert Scott (1811–78). In France, the architect who would have a
huge inXuence all over Europe in spreading this architectural style was Euge`ne
Viollet-le-Duc (1814–79), who started to put these ideas into practice in the
mid 1830s in the Romanesque abbey of Ve ́zelay (Choay 2001: 102–6). In the
middle decades of the nineteenth century this way of doing things would
Liberal Revolutions (c. 1820–1860) 343