Seaton Delaval House, Garden Front, detail

GOTTFRIED SEMPER is conventionally seen as representing the opposition in the mid-nineteenth century to the tradition of Hegel and Schnaase. In 1834, when Semper was beginning his career as an architect, he joined in an archaeological controversy; he argued for a much more extensive degree of polychromy on the surface of classical architecture and sculpture than had at the time been recognised. The other view widely attributed to him is that architecture is the product of material, technique and …