St. Luke’s is a staunchly built rectangular brick structure with a steep pitched roof and a heavy, square tower, of three stages, at the western end. The coping of the eastern gable is curiously stepped in a way that suggests Dutch or Flemish influence. The general appearance is that of a rural English village church that might have been transplanted to its new environment. There is little in its contour, proportions or detail that savours of Renaissance inspiration, then dominant in England, but rather does it smack of the old English Gothic feeling that characterised many of the sixteenth century structures, when the Gothic spirit was really decadent but still strong enough to retain certain well defined traditional features. The side walls are strengthened and divided into bays by buttresses and the pointed arch is retained above the twin lancet windows. The mullions of these windows and of the east window, with its unusual combination of round arch and pointed arch sections, are substantially constructed of bricks. The one particular in which Renaissance influence is visible is the use of quoins instead of buttresses to stiffen the tower corners. The round arched door is almost Norman in character. Within, the walls are plastered above the wainscot and the ceiling is a single barrel vault.
St. Peter’s, New Kent County, presents the same general contour so that a family resemblance is unmistakable but it is less felicitous in all its details. The tower is pierced by such large arched openings in front and at the sides that it appears to stand on legs and to have no particular connexion with the ground. There are no buttresses to support the walls, the windows are rectangular with flat-arched lintels and are filled with sashes. While venerable and interesting, St. Peter’s can scarcely be regarded as in any way architecturally so satisfying as St. Luke’s is. How much of this lack of charm is due to so-called “restoration” and “improvements,” it would be hard to say, for want of sufficiently specific data.
One of the earliest structures to show a distinctly Renaissance feeling, a suggestive precursor of the Georgian buildings that soon followed, was Bruton Parish Church at Williamsburg, completed in 1715. Here for the first time may be seen the cruciform plan, often met with in other Virginia churches, sometimes of Latin, sometimes of Greek outline. It is curious that this feature, which belongs peculiarly to edifices of Gothic provenance, should make its first appearance in a structure of Renaissance inspiration. The pitch of the roof is steep and this fact, along with the cruciform plan, gives the contour a partly Gothic character. All else is of Renaissance affinities.
ST. LUKE’S CHURCH, SMITHFIELD, VA. 1632.
