FIG. 189.—ST. MARTIN’S-IN-THE-FIELDS, LONDON.
Sir William Chambers (1726–96) was the greatest of the later 18th-century architects. His fame rests chiefly on his Treatise on Civil Architecture, and the extension and remodelling of Somerset House, in which he retained the general ordonnance of Inigo Jones’s design, adapting it to a frontage of some 600 feet. Robert Adams, the designer of Keddlestone Hall, Robert Taylor (1714–88), the architect of the Bank of England, and George Dance, who designed the Mansion House and Newgate Prison, at London—the latter a vigorous and appropriate composition without the orders—close the list of noted architects of the eighteenth century. It was a period singularly wanting in artistic creativeness and spontaneity; its productions were nearly all dull and respectable, or at best dignified, but without charm.
BELGIUM. As in all other countries where the late Gothic style had been highly developed, Belgium was slow to accept the principles of the Renaissance in art. Long after the dawn of the sixteenth century the Flemish architects continued to employ their highly florid Gothic alike for churches and town-halls, with which they chiefly had to do. The earliest Renaissance buildings date from 1530–40, among them being the Hôtel du Saumon, at Malines, at Bruges the Ancien Greffe, by Jean Wallot, and at Liège the Archbishop’s Palace, by Borset. The last named, in the singular and capricious form of the arches and baluster-like columns of its court, reveals the taste of the age for what was outré and odd; a taste partly due, no doubt, to Spanish influences, as Belgium was in reality from 1506 to 1712 a Spanish province, and there was more or less interchange of artists between the two countries. The Hôtel de Ville, at Antwerp, by Cornelius de Vriendt or Floris (1518–75), erected in 1565, is the most important monument of the Renaissance in Belgium. Its façade, 305 feet long and 102 feet high, in four stories, is an impressive creation in spite of its somewhat monotonous fenestration and the inartistic repetition in the third story of the composition and proportions of the second. The basement story forms an open arcade, and an open colonnade or loggia runs along under the roof, thus imparting to the composition a considerable play of light and shade, enhanced by the picturesque central pavilion which rises to a height of six stories in diminishing stages. The style is almost Palladian in its severity, but in general the Flemish architects disdained the restrictions of classic canons, preferring a more florid and fanciful effect than could be obtained by mere combinations of Roman columns, arches, and entablatures. De Vriendt’s other works were mostly designs for altars, tabernacles and the like; among them the rood screen in Tournay Cathedral. His influence may be traced in the Hôtel
de Ville at Flushing (1594).
FIG. 190.—RENAISSANCE HOUSES, BRUSSELS.
The ecclesiastical architecture of the Flemish Renaissance is almost as destitute of important monuments as is the secular. Ste. Anne, at Bruges, fairly illustrates the type, which is characterized in general by heaviness of detail and a cold and bare aspect internally. The Renaissance in Belgium is best exemplified, after all, by minor works and ordinary dwellings, many of which have considerable artistic grace, though they are quaint rather than monumental (Fig. 190). Stepped gables, high dormers, and volutes flanking each diminishing stage of the design, give a certain piquancy to the street architecture of the period.