95. Layer Marney, Essex.
Windows (cir. 1520).
The upper range has cusping formed by floriated dolphins, and mullions ornamented with arabesques. The lower range is treated in the customary manner of the Tudor period. There is a row of egg-and-tongue ornament above the cusped corbels over the lower windows.]
The new fashion in ornament which came in with the Italian influence led to quaint adaptations of ancient features. At Layer Marney, for instance, the cusping is obtained not by bending out a portion of the mullion, a growth springing naturally from its parent stem, but by the introduction of little floriated dolphins “counter-hauriant”—to use a heraldic term. The mullions, too, are not the splayed or moulded shafts of English tradition, but rectangular shafts with faces elaborately carved with arabesques (Fig. 95). The effect at a distance, where the eye cannot detect the detail, is very like that of a cusped window. So, too, in still later years, where traceried windows were used, as in some of the college halls, the forms of the tracery were ingeniously contrived to accord with the new Italianised detail rather than the old Gothic. At Layer Marney the mixture of the ancient and the modern is further exemplified by the presence of the classic egg-and-tongue ornament above a cusped corbel table, below which are windows with the flat pointed heads characteristic of the Tudor style. At Sutton Place in Surrey, the mixture is again seen. The windows with their pointed and cusped heads are thoroughly Gothic, while the amorini over the door and in the parapet are equally Italian in feeling, though not in delicacy of modelling. The diamond-shaped panels are likewise of southern origin (Fig. 96). Both these houses were built about 1520 to 1525. East Barsham in Norfolk (Fig. 97), which preceded them by about ten years, and resembles them in general style, just misses the Italian detail, although at first sight some of its ornament appears similar to that at Sutton Place. All three houses are of brick with terra-cotta embellishments, and are fine specimens of the brickwork which was used with such excellent effect during the first thirty years of the sixteenth century. A very prevalent custom at this period was to diversify the red brickwork with a diaper of darker bricks.
But, as already said, the new Italian fashion, although it affected the embellishment of the house, was long before it affected the plan. In the reign of Henry VII., indeed, it is nowhere apparent, either in plan or ornament. A few prominent dates are useful in fixing on the mind important changes of style; and the advent of the Renaissance manner into England can be fixed by remembering that it made its first appearance in the tomb of Henry VII. in Westminster Abbey, which was erected by the order of Henry VIII. in the year 1516. Any work with Italian or Italianised detail, may safely be dated subsequent to that year. There is a considerable amount of work of this kind to be found up and down the country, but chiefly in the southern and eastern counties. The only building which it actually dominated appears to have been Henry VIII.’s house of Nonsuch in Surrey, now entirely destroyed; but in such isolated features as screens, panels, tombs, and doorways, it frequently occurs.
96. Sutton Place, Surrey.
Part of the Courtyard (1523–25).
97. East Barsham, Norfolk.