| PLATE XXXIII | "FARM HOUSE," PETIT TRIANON |
With the accession of James I. to the English throne a new influx of foreign influence made fresh havoc with such Gothic as remained. The shield, which, through a preference for the strap had been but sparsely used in the preceding reign, came now to be the centre of all decoration, and was lavished everywhere in a wild whirl of flourishing curves, together with the previously common straps and buckles and general tackle of war. Its universal use gave a somewhat less interesting air to the decoration than when the purer interlacing of the strap, with but here and there the convolutions of the shield, supplied its place.
| MANTELPIECE | WRAXHALL MANOR |
But the Jacobean by no means contented itself with this simpler form of the Renaissance. In other characteristics it tended more and more to the Classic, though never arriving at purity. In construction, the horizontal of the antique mingled with the vertical of the mediæval, and a volute upheld the pointed arch; in ornament, the Tudor leaf with a Grecian frieze, with other equally inappropriate arrangements. It was not for a hundred years thereafter that pure Classic came to be understood in England. The scallop shell seems, at this period, to have caught the fancy of the designers as a motive, and they used it at every turn. These shell forms and the shell in decoration disputed with cartouch and straps, with rosette and scroll, with the fabulous griffins, and with grotesque mermaids, whose tails, turning into scrolls, are seen dividing to the right and left in the ornamentation of Jacobean furniture and chimney-pieces.
| MANTELPIECE | WRAXHALL MANOR |
But the influence of the Italian form of the Renaissance, through the filter of the Flemish, made itself very distinctly felt in the Jacobean style; not so much in the effort of the Italian toward æsthetic perfection, as in the play of fancy, stimulated by the sight of new forms, but unacquainted with the laws that should control them.