GILLY, Friedrich David

German architect, son of the architect David Gilly. He was known as a prodigy and the teacher of the young Karl Friedrich Schinkel. In 1788 he enrolled at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Berlin. His teachers there included Carl Gotthard Langhans and Johann Gottfried Schadow.

In 1797 he travelled extensively in France, England, and Austria. The drawings he made in France reveal his interests in architecture and reflect the intellectual climate of the Directoire. They include views of the Fountain of Regeneration, the Rue des Colonnes - an arcaded street of baseless Doric columns leading to the Théâtre Feydeau - the chamber of the Conseil des Anciens in the Tuileries and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's grotto in its landscaped setting at Ermenonville, Oise.

His 1797 design for the Frederick II monument reveals his debt to French NeoclassicismGLOSSARYA style in European art and architecture from the mid 18th century until the end of the 19th century. Based as it was on the use of ancient Greek and Roman models and motifs, its development was greatly influenced by the excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum, and by the theories of the German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768). Intellectually and politically it was closely linked to the Enlightenment's rejection of the aristocratic frivolity of Rococo, the style of the Ancien Régime. Among Neoclassicism's leading figures were the French painter Jacques-Louis David (1744-1825), the German painter Anton Raffael Mengs (1728-1729), and the Italian sculptor Antonio Canova (1757-1822)., in particular Etienne-Louis Boullée, his explanatory notes indicate he intended the building to be spiritually uplifting. Beginning in 1799 Schinkel lived in the Gilly household at Berlin and was taught by Friedrich and Friedrich's architect father David Gilly.

Gilly was appointed professor at the Berlin Bauakademie at the age of 26. Of his built designs, only one survives: the ruinous Greek RevivalGLOSSARYAn architectural movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, predominantly in Northern Europe and the United States. A product of Hellenism, it may be looked upon as the last phase in the development of Neoclassical architecture. mausoleum (1800-02; mostly destroyed after 1942) at Dyhernfurth near Breslau (now Brzeg Dolny near Wroc³aw, Poland), in the form of a prostyle Greek temple.

Gilly died from tuberculosis at the age of 28 in Karlsbad.

Friedrich Gilly built little, dying in 1800, but he left some remarkable designs that justify his central place in German Neoclassicism.