Is the National Museum of Ireland one of the most underrated buildings in the capital city? Are its architects Sir Thomas Newenham Deane and his son, Sir Thomas Manly Deane, amongst the most under-rated contributors to the building stock of the capital city? Certainly, visitors have been walking into the National Museum without a second glance at its exterior for decades, as if it were merely another wall with windows.
It is not. It is a truly beautiful building which only now is resurfacing from a clothing of grime which has hidden its many splendours for many, many years. Yet so under-rated had the National Museum become that a major relocation of so much of the vast treasury it contains could be undertaken almost without anybody seriously wondering about the building itself. The strange truth is that the casket was more beautiful than many of the jewels it contained - but the jewels were often more prized for ideological and political reasons.
Victorian neo-classicism
Of course it was easy not to see the true beauty of the Deanes' work, for more than politico-cultural considerations were at work; so too were the twin hands of lapidary frailty and human pollution. The stone dressing which is one of the glories of the National Museum was soon after the buildings' completion concealed within a garment of urban muck, beneath which sulphur toiled and corroded. The National Museum rapidly became just another large monument to cumbrous Victorian neo-classicism, sooty, unseen, unsung.
But other, and more subconscious forces seem to have been at work which caused this building to be neglected, for it was built during the climax of High Victorian times, when the British empire was spreading itself and the architectural expressions of its grandeur across the globe. For nationalist Ireland, there was little enough pleasure to be got from such expressions of dominion by another. And there could hardly have been a more inauspicious date for the beginning of the construction of the National Museum than 1884, the year of the defeat of the first Home Rule Bill.
Georgian Dublin has had its celebrants, and rightly. But it is more than an aesthetic issue, for within the nationalist canon that period of self-government can be seen to contain the seeds of separatism. The still underrated Victorian Dublin can have no claims to national correctness; the buildings erected at that time were statements of the Union, within a unionist culture, and reflecting the cultural values of a British identity.
It has never been quite politically correct to become enthusiastic about the fine buildings which Victorian Dublin, either through the Castle or the Vice-Regal Lodge, or some other agency of British governance, caused to be erected. Yet they constitute a continuity and a congruence in the governmental heart of Ireland - the Royal College of Surgeons, designed by William Murray, and the Royal College of Physicians, designed by his son; Francis Fowke's National Gallery, a truly majestic building; Deane and Woodward's splendid, and now bifurcated, Kildare Street Club, and the sundry lesser buildings which can be found as Victorian in-fill within otherwise Georgian Dublin.
Contents celebrated
It is hardly any wonder that the National Museum building itself, converted by bituminous pollution and weak stone into a large lump of boring coal, detained nobody as visitors hurried to see its contents. And those contents have been celebrated by guidebooks both for their beauty and their political significance - the pre-Christian Celtic artefacts, the torcs and lunulae and shields of the Bronze Age, the early Christian masterpieces of the Iron Age, and the round towers and croziers of somewhat later.
It is as if these creations were relics of a purer, more uncontaminated, unconquered Ireland. But that is not so. The most powerful artistic energies can often be released by bastardy, by cross-pollination, by the collisions of cultures and the meetings of ideas.
Who can say to what degree the torcs and lunulae were the creation of a single, self consciously Celtic culture? The ogham stone is merely a native adaptation of that foreign thing called writing. The Clonmacnoise crozier is certainly a triumph of Irish genius, but it is clearly influenced by the Ringerike motifs that derive from Hiberno-Norse culture. Even that visual cliche of Irishness, the round tower, betrays its mulatto roots in its name in Irish - cloigtheach, with the mixing of Roman and Gaelic words - theach from the Irish for house and cloig, from the medieval Latin for bell.
Artistic borrowings
The truth is there is seldom or ever any artistic renaissance of merit that does not result from artistic borrowings or even theft, and this is true of the art of Irish Victoriana. That so much of it is called neo-classical says it lacks purity. Good. It might equally be called the Pilferama or Larceniana school of architecture. That does not make it bad; just more interesting.
The Office of Public Works is responsible for the current renovation of the exterior of the National Museum, and according to the workman on the site, people assume that it is a mere cleaning project. It is not. Most of the decoration on the fragile old Portland stone and sandstone had been destroyed completely by chemical pollution, and vast numbers of replacement parts are being re-cast and mounted on the ornate decorative columns on the site. The OPW employees I spoke to are enormously proud of what they are doing. They are right to be. Under the guidance of the splendid David Byers, they are revealing and restoring one of the great buildings of Dublin.