caution could prevent such "slips" as Pasztory's assumption thatthe Mesoamericans, like us, distinguished between the "sacred"and the "secular," and her perception of that distinction asdenoting "rational thought" (p. 120). Perhaps one day we willeven bring ourselves to reexamine our cherished notion of "greatart. "

This is not to undermine the ultimate value of what, withrespect to its particular purpose, is a very important book. For,whether or not the concept of a Middle Classic subperiod isfinally accepted (even Sanders seems to prefer the term"horizon"; p. 35), steps have been made toward two other statedgoals. One is the long overdue, mutually supportive collabora­tion of Mesoamerican archaeology and art history as a means tosolving a historical problem. Whatever the book's failings in thisregard, the value of the intention, as we have seen, is definitelyestablished here. The second may be even more important. Thisconcerns the book's emphasis, defined in its preface, on a cross­cultural, comparative approach and the nature of interrelationsamong cultures and regions, as opposed to an emphasis on asingle local tradition. Mesoamericanists in recent years have in­creasingly tended to specialize in a particular group, culture, orregion and to stress its uniqueness over its relation to otherMesoamerican (and non-Mesoamerican) units. While one resulthas been the production of a w~alth of specific data from myriadpeoples and places, another has been a growing inability torecognize the tremendous interaction that characterizedMesoamerican prehistory. Specialists, moreover, at times are un­able to understand particular regional phenomena that concernthem because they are unaware of their existence and of possiblysimilar meanings in other areas. Such fragmentation of the datais, of course, highly detrimental to any historical reconstructionof the area as a whole. If Pasztory and her symposium partici­pants have not yet fully succeeded in integrating art witharchaeology and history, they have certainly gone farther thananyone in recent years in reintegrating the Maya with the Mex­icans.

CECELIA F. KLEIN

University of CaliforniaLos Angeles, CA 90024

LAUREL B.ANDREW, The Early Temples of the Mormons: TheArchitecture of the Millennial Kingdom in the AmericanWest, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1978.Pp. 218; 90 black-and-white ills. $16.50

Most non-Mormons, be they architectural historians or not,know little about the Mormons except that they werepolygamists, that they are concentrated in Utah and surroundingstates, and that they built an impressive but rather strange­looking temple in Salt Lake City. Up to now there has been noextended scholarly treatment of Mormon architecture. In herbibliography and notes, Laurel B. Andrew lists several un­published master's theses on individual temples, an article on theUtah temples by David S. Andrew and herself (then Laurel B.Blank; "The Four Mormon Temples in Utah," Journal of theSociety of Architectural Historians, xxx, 1971, 51-65), and herdissertation completed at the University of Michigan in 1973 ­the basis for her book. The need for a serious study has beenlargely satisfied by Andrew's insightful, richly textured, andmethodologically sound study of the six 19th-century Mormontemples.

In their book, The Architecture of America: A Social andCultural History (Boston/Toronto, 1961), John Burchard and

BOOK REVIEWS 677

Albert Bush-Brown comment that the buildings of Mormons(and of the Oneida Community) "are interesting more as an ex­pression of social objectives than because they have any ex­cellence as art or because they have really demonstrated arevolutionary style comparable to the life they house" (p. 65).Andrew's study supports this opinion; it is a convincing exposi­tion of the Mormon temple as a symbol of authority and as anexpression of the 19th-century Mormon theocracy. However, italso reveals a clear, step-by-step, temple-by-temple developmentof an identifiably Mormon style culminating in the four Utahtemples. This Utah style is not revolutionary since, as the authormakes perfectly clear, its details were largely adapted fromarchitectural books; but it is an original conflation of elementstaken from several styles and periods and applied to structuresdesigned to accommodate the ritual of the church and intendedto symbolize the Mormon hierarchy. No single Mormon templecan be considered a monument of American architecture in thesenses of either Jefferson's Richmond Capitol, at the forefront ofAmerican Neoclassicism and government architecture, orRichardson's Marshall Field Store, instantly acclaimed as amasterpiece and widely imitated. But the Utah templesdemonstrate a measure of accomplishment that at least ap­proaches "excellence in art," and the Manti temple may evenachieve that distinction. As a group, however, and for what theyrepresent, the temples are well worth the serious study that An­drew has given them.

The first of the book's six chapters is devoted to a discussionof the origins of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints(the Mormon Church), essential to explain the isolationist andutopian character of the religion as reflected by the temples. Thenext chapter reviews all the temples, summarizing their develop­ment, common characteristics, and function: eventually that of asacred place reserved for secret ritual ceremonies. The templewas considered the "replacement" of the Temple of Solomon inthe New World; but its function, more than its physical ap­pearance, as the author explains, was modeled after the biblicaltemple. Most of the 20th-century temples, several of which areillustrated, are summarily dismissed as "having drifted aimlesslyto an astylistic 'modern' conglomeration of abstract shapes andgeometric decoration. 00" (p. 24), a criticism that could also beapplied to the vast majority of modern churches built inAmerica.

The remaining four chapters treat the 19th-century temples inchronological order, concentrating on the phenomenon of theUtah style, the relationship of the temples to other Americanarchitecture, and the meaning of the temples to the Mormons ­precisely the issues that need to be addressed. The temple ex­teriors are amply illustrated and discussed at length. The authorexplains that non-Mormons are not allowed to enter the temples(and that even Mormons must have the sanction of a bishopbefore they are permitted inside); hence, we learn less aboutsome of the interiors and their function than we might wish.However, original drawings, plans, and descriptions based onthose found in Mormon literature and archival materials sub­stitute for photographs. Whatever we miss of the inside story iscompensated by the objectivity and keen perception the authorbrings to her study. For example, she observes that thecurtained-off Celestial Room in the Salt Lake City temple, thefinest of the ritual rooms, "looks no more like a religioussanctuary than does an elegant reception hall or state sittingroomof the 18805" (p. 152). Basing her theory on the Mormon beliefin the coming of Christ in the millenium, Brigham Young's ex­pectation that Christ would actually dwell in the Salt Lake Citytemple, and the mystical function of the Veil (curtain) in

678 THE ART BULLETIN DECEMBER 1980 VOLUME LXII NUMBER 4

Solomon's temple, she hypothesizes that the room was originallyintended to serve as Christ's audience hall. She speculatesfurther that the most sacred room in the temple, whose purposeis kept an absolute secret, may be kept in waiting for Christ.

The Latter-day Saints (Mormons) began their westward trekin 1831. Independence, Missouri, believed by them to have beenthe site of the Garden of Eden, was to be their Zion; and JosephSmith, the founder of Mormonism, planned a mile-square, grid­patterned city with a group of temples at the center. Only one ofthese was designed, and it was never constructed because theMormons were eventually driven out of Missouri. However, itsplan served as the basis for the temple built in Kirtland, Ohio,from 1833 to 1836. Surviving drawings indicate that the In­dependence temple would have been a plain, house-like buildingwith a meeting room on each of two floors and Gothic windows- virtually the only concession to style. Temples were inspiredby divine revelations to the Mormon president; and so, evenwhen architects were employed, as was the case starting with theNauvoo temple of 1841-46, the president's role in the planningof the temple was critical. Smith's and later his successorBrigham Young's determination of the plan, function, sym­bolism, and even style in most cases, the author believes, set theauthoritarian character of these buildings.

The Kirtland temple looks like a New England meetinghouse.The author traces its Georgian-Gothic composition to a group ofextant New York churches built after the turn of the century thatSmith could have seen when he visited the city in 1832. Sheomits mentioning the second Trinity Church of 1788-1790,which though less like the Kirtland temple than the simpler Seaand Land Church illustrated, was in style prototypical for thelater New York churches; its combined Georgian and Gothicfeatures may also have impressed Smith. More interesting thanthe exterior is the arrangement of the meeting rooms and alsotheir finely-crafted "Late Colonial" woodwork. (The property ofthe Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, notthe Mormon Church, this temple is open to the public.) Its twoentrance doors, two stories, double-ended meeting rooms ­which have a pulpit at either end representing the two Mormonpriesthoods - and use of curtain dividers called "veils" influ­enced the design of the later temples. According to Andrew, " thefairly traditional appearance of the Kirtland temple is an accuratereflection of the uncomplicated Mormon theological tenets of the1830s" (p. 52).

At Nauvoo, Illinois, where the Mormons settled in 1839, boththeir religion and the temple they built there became more com­plex. In style and construction, attributable to the builder­architect, William Weeks, the Nauvoo temple was moresophisticated than that of Kirtland and also had distinctivecharacteristics setting it apart from the churches of other groups.Unfortunately, it burned in 1848 and was demolished in 1850;but its appearance has been reconstructed from archaeologicalevidence and surviving documents. Using the architect's originaldrawings, the author traces its main source to the illustration ofSt. Martin-in-the-Fields in James Gibbs's A Book ofArchitec­ture (London, 1728), a popular source in America from the mid­18th century. Greek Revival details and proportions were sub­stituted for those of Gibbs's design. Andrew's suggestion thatthe tower of the temple as built may have been influenced by thatof St. Pancras Church in London seems plausible in light of thepresence of English converts in Nauvoo who might have ownedbooks illustrating the church. The order of giant pilasters and thealternating rows of round-headed and round windows - the lat­ter expressing two mezzanine levels - were later transformedinto Gothic buttresses and alternate rows of round-headed and

elliptical windows in the Salt Lake City temple.The Nauvoo temple introduced a new order: curious sun faces

under pairs of hands holding trumpets adorned the pilastercapitals; crescent moon faces decorated the bases; and there werestars in the frieze. Andrew has discovered the meaning of this or­der in Smith's transcription of a revelation he experienced in1832. Heaven was revealed to him, much as it was to St. Paul, ashaving three descending levels of glory: the celestial, theterrestrial, and the telestial; and the symbols for each, respec­tively, were the sun, moon, and stars. Although there are severalpossible sources for these symbols as depicted in the new order,Andrew maintains that the most likely and most immediate wasFreemasonry. In 1842 Smith established a Masonic lodge inNauvoo, of which he was Grand Master; and soon afterward thecharacter of Mormon worship was altered. "It became ritualisticand also secret ..." and the temple "a place set apart, like aMasonic lodge, to be used only by those whom the churchauthorities had initiated into something great and mysterious"(p. 85). The sun, moon, and stars represent the "three lesserlights" of Freemasonry, and Andrew asserts that Smith "ap­propriated" these emblems from the Masons to represent thelevels of heavenly glory. The later addition of recognizablyMasonic symbols, e.g., the square and the compass, in the plansfor the Salt Lake City temple confirms this association. Andrew'scareful exegesis of the latter's and the Nauvoo temple's sym­bolism is a model of scholarly investigation.

The Mormons moved to Salt Lake City in 1847, and in 1853they began building an even larger temple than the one atNauvoo. It took forty years to complete. Breaking with pastMormon practice, the style of the Salt Lake City temple evokesthe Gothic more than the classical, but is in fact distinctly eclec­tic. Andrew argues that Brigham Young rather than the appoint­ed architect Truman Osborn Angell determined the peculiarstyle as well as the enlarged repertory of symbolic stonesoriginally planned, citing Young's knowledge of the buildingtrade and the fact that the style was preserved in the later Utahtemples built in the 1880's and worked on by other architects.Andrew believes that the style of the Salt Lake City temple isbased on the secular, castellated style of the early Gothic Revivaland she traces its more immediate source to Masonic temples inthe eastern United States. And she notes that the associations ofthe castellated - impermeability, exclusivity, dominance - wereappropriate to the role of the temple in Mormon life. All of this isgermane, but was there not also some desire to bring Mormontemples into line with contemporary church architecture? Earlier,in discussing the increased emphasis on ritual at Nauvoo, An­drew notes a curious correspondence to such reform movementsin traditional Christianity as the eastern ecclesiological move­ment; by the same token it seems entirely possible that Youngwanted~style that would bespeak an enduring, establishedreligion - iik~ those in the east - but which would not look toochurchy. The battlemented spires and Gothicized buttresses ofthe Salt Lake City temple, as well as its size and prominent situa­tion, summon memories of the medieval cathedral.

Andrew would confine Angell's contribution to drafting andconstruction. Like William Weeks he was more a builder than anarchitect. But he had worked on the temples at Kirtland andNauvoo, as Andrew informs us, and in 1851 was made officialarchitect of the church. In that year he designed a state capitol tobe built in Fillmore, Utah, which the author refers to only as"arather crude and certainly conventional Greek Revival building,only one wing of which was completed" (p. 132). But in Henry­Russell Hitchcock and William Seale's Temples of Democracy:The State Capitols of the U.S.A. (New York/London, 1976),

where Angell's watercolor perspective of the capitol is actuallyreproduced, it is described as "for its time in history, the mosteclectic of all capitols, a carpenter's fantasy, the likes of whichhad not been seen in state capitols since the Annapolis dome" (p.136). The mixture of elements is certainly unusual: Gothic pin­nacles sprouting from a Baroque balustrade carried on a Tuscancolonnade and Greek-inspired ornament on the enormous "Ot­toman" (Angell's word) dome. By comparison Angell's design of1854 for the temple seems more a whole and more carefullyproportioned. But he was more familiar with Mormon templesand presumably had the plans for the Nauvoo temple as a guide.There are certain telling likenesses between the two designs. Thetemple's complement of six rather than the usual one or twospires (three at each end, symbolic of the two priesthoods and thechurch hierarchy according to Andrew), its symmetry, mixtureof disparate styles, huge size, and dominance over its sur­roundings are analogous to the capitol's overscaled dome andother similar characteristics. The architect's role may have beenmore important than Andrew concedes.

Three more temples, all smaller than the one in Salt Lake City,were built in Utah along the so-called "Mormon Corridor" toSan Diego. Conceived as outposts in the wilderness, all of themfollowed the style of the Salt Lake City temple, but each wasbuilt with individual variations. The earliest, begun at St. Georgein 1871, is particularly retardataire, reaching back to the templesat Kirtland and Nauvoo for inspiration. Not surprisingly, Angellwas the architect. The temples at Logan and Manti, drafted,respectively, by Truman O. Angell, [r., and William HarrisonFolsom and begun in 1877, are more literate versions of thecastellated than the Salt Lake City temple; and the mansard roofsand other Second Empire features of the Manti temple are com­paratively up-to-date. To Andrew, the manifestly secular charac­teristics of these later temples suggest" the merging of the churchand the state in the millennium" (p. 162). Visible from a long dis­tance and dramatically sited with mountain ranges behind, thetemples dominate their surroundings. Their relationship to theland, the author believes, reflects the early 19th-century Ameri­can and Mormon conceptions of nature - and the desert ­as an adversary to be conquered and a potential garden to becultivated.

The great appeal of The Early Temples of the Mormons is itsskillful integration of architectural and social history. And thereis something to be learned from the way the author has used thedocuments and historical accounts of the Mormons to serve herpurposes without losing sight of one of the chief goals ofscholarship: to discover and communicate what is most impor­tant about the subject. Too often when dealing with a reconditesubject or one that has been neglected, we drift into mere anti­quarianism or aimless historical commentary; or, on the otherhand, we direct our studies exclusively to narrow professionalconcerns. This is the rare scholarly book that almost anyone canread with enjoyment and profit.

SARAH BRADFORD LANDAU

New York University, Washington Square CollegeNew York, NY 10003

BOOK REVIEWS 679

ANNE DE COURSEY CLAPP, Wen Cheng-ming: The Ming Artistand Antiquity (Artibus Asiae Supplementum, XXXIV), As­cona, 1975. Pp. 114; 49 black-and-white ills. $30

In the last two decades Western studies of Chinese paintinghave proliferated at a rate that is astonishing in light of thesmall number of active specialists. In America this productiv­ity has been in some respects a response to an ever increasingcuriosity about Chinese art from the larger art-historicalcommunity as well as the general public. Some of this interestcan be traced to the magnificent exhibition of Chinese art sentto the United States in 1961-62 from the National PalaceMuseum and National Central Museum in Taiwan. The paint­ings, which formed by far the largest part of that exhibitionand were the cream of the Palace Museum collection, createdlasting impressions upon the groups of graduate studentswho camped on the steps of museums exhibiting the trea­sures. From one of those groups of fledgling Chinese paint­ing specialists has emerged the author of this splendid studyof one of China's great painters, Wen Cheng-ming (1470­1559).

Clapp's book is a distillation of her Harvard UniversityPh.D. dissertation, but unlike many doctoral theses, WenCheng-ming: The Ming Artist and Antiquity is a work of matur­ity and vision as well as scholarship. Her task was not easy.Although Wen Cheng-ming is considered a seminal figure inlater Chinese painting, very little groundwork had been laidfor the type of monograph undertaken by Clapp. Fortunatelythe raw materials were there for an astute and sensitive arthistorian to sort and examine and evaluate. First andforemost, a sufficient number of Wen's paintings were avail­able to the persevering, globe-trotting historian to permit anoverview of Wen's long and varied career. Moreover, sinceWen was a prolific writer, there is a record of his thoughtsabout painting. Clapp has used these materials as the core ofher study in order to build a cohesive portrayal of a painterwhose life and attitudes could serve as a paradigm for allscholar painters in China since the Sung Dynasty (A.D. 960­1279).

To a certain extent, Wen Cheng-ming may have viewed thefirst part of his life as a failure. To understand such an assess­ment properly, one must remember that in Wen's time (if notin all periods of pre-revolutionary Chinese history) successwas equivalent to some kind of career in government service,a goal toward which Wen, the descendant of a long line ofConfucian officials, struggled mightily. (Between the years1495 and 1522 Wen took and failed the examinations for pro­spective officials ten times.) It was a goal that he attainedfinally (ironically his appointment as tai-chao in the Han-linAcademy came as the result of his previous refusal to supporta rebellion against the ruling Ming house and not because ofscholarly merit). And it was service that he then abruptlyterminated either out of disillusionment with bureaucracyand its attendant cruelties and stupidities or out of a belatedrealization that he was born to be a painter. Painting and anofficial career were, of course, not incompatible in ConfucianChina. Training in calligraphy and painting was as much apart of the official's preparation as were studies in statecraft,and Wen luckily began his painting studies around 1489under his father's close friend, the eminent Shen Chou(1427-1509). Shen Chou, founder of the Wu school in Suchou,pointed Wen's painting in the eclectic direction it would takeand hold for the rest of his life.

Wen was the ideal student. By diligently studying andcopying prescribed classical models, he was fulfilling the