Character of Renaissance Architecture

by Charles Herbert Moore

Fig. 118.—Part of Du Cerceau’s print of Lescot’s Louvre.

In this design (Fig. [118]) there is no survival of the character of a mediæval stronghold, though the rectangular pavilions, which break the long façades, and the high pitched roofs are feeble echoes of the mediæval French traditional forms. It is worthy of notice that Lescot’s projecting bays have no meaning apart from their æsthetic effect in the external architectural scheme. In the feudal castle the towers had of necessity to stand out beyond the curtain walls in order from their loopholes and battlements to defend them. But the salient pavilions of the Louvre have no function; they do not even materially enlarge the interior, but are purely ornamental features. The scheme includes two stories and an attic, each of which is adorned with a classic order. In the basement and in the principal story the orders consist of fluted Corinthian pilasters on pedestals, while in the attic short pilasters, with their surfaces panelled in the Lombard Renaissance manner, are used. The principal orders only have complete entablatures, the order of the attic having only a cornice with a frieze which takes in the capitals, and this cornice is surmounted by a parapet with filigree ornamentation. In the intercolumniations of the basement order arches are sprung beneath the entablature in the Roman fashion, each arch embracing a narrow window with a segmental head concentric with the arch, while the window openings of the upper stories are rectangular, those of the principal floor having alternately round and angular pediments on consoles.

In the pavilions we have in each story a variation of the scheme of the Fountain of the Nymphs. The imitation of Serlio’s cut (Fig. [117] above) is closer, Corinthian columns being used instead of pilasters as in Serlio’s design. But in the basement the architect has made marked changes in the central bay, omitting the arch, and cutting out a portion of the entablature. This last device, of which, as we have seen, the later Renaissance architecture of Italy affords many instances, is not only a violation of the principles of classic design which these architects were professing to restore, but it is a barbarism, because it breaks the continuity of those lines which in such a composition should have the expression of binding the parts together. In the story above the entablature is not completely broken; the architrave and frieze only are cut in order to insert a tablet. In the attic, however, the cornice is cut out completely, and a segmental arch is sprung over the opening to form a pediment as a crowning feature of the pavilion. The traditional logic of French design is thus completely ignored by Lescot, and he abandons himself to capricious methods of composition as completely as the Italians had done. It is surprising not only to find the French people thus following the Italians in their irrational misuse of structural forms in ornamentation, but also to find them, after having produced in the Middle Ages the most living and beautiful forms of foliate sculpture that the world has ever seen, resorting to the heavy and formal festoons of decadent Roman art, as Lescot has done in these friezes of the Louvre.

Another noticeable characteristic of this phase of Renaissance design in France is its excessive profusion of ornament. The wall surfaces are embossed with reliefs, or set with niches, disks, or tablets until no broad plain surfaces remain. Such extravagance of ornament is characteristic of later Roman, and debased Gothic, but it is foreign to the finest classic, and the pure Gothic, art.

Of the architectural work of De l’Orme little is now extant, and the most of that which has survived has suffered such alterations that we can form from the monuments themselves but an imperfect idea of their original aspect. We have, however, in the fragments that remain, in Du Cerceau’s prints, and in the illustrations to his own writings, enough to show that he was a man with little artistic genius, though he had an ardent passion for architecture as he understood it.[129] He was among those architects of his time who went to Rome to study the antique, and he tells us in his book[130] that he dug about their foundations, and made drawings and measurements. His most important work was the palace of the Tuileries, begun in 1564. Of this gigantic scheme only a small part, the central part on the garden side, was completed by De l’Orme, and this was much altered by successive architects before the building was destroyed in 1871. The plan, as given by Du Cerceau (Fig. [119]), is symmetrical, but it is broken by projecting bays and angle pavilions more pronounced than those of the Louvre. These features, survivals of the mediæval plan, distinguish the French Renaissance architecture from that of Italy to the last.

Fig. 119.—Plan of the Tuileries, from Du Cerceau.

Fig. 120.—Tuileries, from Du Cerceau.

The external façade (Fig. [120]) has a single story with an attic of broken outline, and in it the architect made use of a peculiar form of Ionic column of which he speaks[131] as follows: “I make here a short digression to speak of the Ionic columns which I have employed in the above-mentioned palace of her Majesty the Queen Mother.[132] ... The said columns are sixty-four in number on the side facing the garden, and each one is two feet in diameter at the base. They are not all of one piece, since I could not find so large a number of such height as was necessary.... I have fashioned them as you see (Fig. [121]), and with suitable ornaments to hide the joints; which is an invention that I have never yet seen in any edifice either ancient or modern, and still less in our books of architecture. I remember to have made nearly the same in the time of his late Majesty Henry II, in his château of Villers Cotterets, in the doorway of a chapel which is in the park, and it was very graceful, as you may judge from the figure which I give.” Further on he proposes that this shall be called the French order, saying: “If it was allowable for the architects of antiquity, in different nations and countries, to invent new columns, as the Romans invented the Tuscan and the Composite, the Athenians the Athenian, and, long before the said Romans, those of Doris the Doric, of Ionia the Ionic and Corinthian, who shall forbid us Frenchmen from inventing some, and calling them French, as those might be called which I have invented and used in the porch of the chapel of Villers Cotterets?” Of this column De l’Orme, in his book, gives several variants, showing how the salient drums, or rings, may be variously ornamented or left plain, or may be varied in their proportions; and he gives also a design for a doorway (Fig. [122])[133] in which he employs a Tuscan order treated in this way.