# Character of Renaissance Architecture/Chapter 12

CHAPTER XII
LESCOT AND DE L'ORME
Among the architects of the later French Renaissance Pierre Lescot and Philibert De l'Orme were preeminent. The change which they effected gave the French architecture a more marked neo-classic dress, yet still without wholly eliminating its native character. This change was of course analogous to that which had been wrought in Italy by the later designers of that country, but the resulting forms in France were different from those of the Italian art, and were to the last peculiarly French, though, as before remarked (p. 179), not expressive of the French genius in its integrity. This was entirely natural. The architecture of a people inevitably retains much of its original character while yielding to foreign influences. It had been so with the Italian art of the Middle Ages when it was subjected to the Gothic influence, and it could not be otherwise with the French art of the sixteenth century when the later Renaissance wave swept over it.
Lescot and De I'Orme came strongly under the influence of Vignola and Palladio, their Italian contemporaries, and they fully accepted the Italian belief in the superiority of the neo-classic principles of design to those which had given rise to what they considered the architectural barbarisms of the Middle Ages. Lescot, says Berty, "was one of the first French architects to employ the ancient style in its purity," and De l'Orme, according to Milizia, "exerted all his industry to strip architecture of her Gothic dress and clothe her in that of ancient Greece."
Lescot is said to have designed the Fountain of the Nymphs, now known as the Fountain of the Innocents, in Paris, in collaboration with Goujon, the sculptor. In this work there is ​nothing whatever of mediæval character. In its present condition it is, indeed, very different from what it was originally. It first (1550) stood on the corner of two streets with a façade
Fig. 116.—Du Cerceau's engraving of the Fountain of the Nymphs.
of two bays on one street and a return of one bay on the other. In 1788 it was taken down and reerected in the square of the Innocents on a square plan, a fourth façade being then added. Figure 116, from an engraving by Du Cerceau, illustrates the ​original design, each bay of which is nothing more than a reproduction of the scheme of a Roman triumphal arch, with a short pediment over the attic. The whole structure is raised on a high basement of plain character with lions' heads for water-spouts. Such pure imitation of the antique does the architect little credit as a designer, and it is hard to understand how such works could have been regarded as monuments of a regenerating art. The sculptures by Goujon which adorn this structure have, in my judgment, no monumental qualities, nor any notable merits of design. Their movements are awkward, and their lines ill composed. The influence of the decadent Italian art is marked in them, without any new qualities that should entitle them to distinction.
Little is known of the early training of Lescot beyond what is told in a poem by Ronsard, from which we learn that in his youth he had occupied himself with painting and geometry, and that at the age of twenty he began the study of architecture. He does not appear to have visited Italy, and his knowledge of ancient art must, therefore, have been acquired at second hand; very likely in great part through Serlio's book which had been published in 1537. A woodcut (Fig. 117) on page 127 of this book, giving the design of an ancient Roman arch in Verona, might have served as a model for the Fountain of the Nymphs. He must also have come in contact with Serlio himself, who in 1541 had been called into the service of the French king.
The capital work of Lescot was the early part of the new Louvre, begun about 1546 on the site of the old castle of Phihppe Auguste which Francis I had demolished in order to rebuild in the new style. The new scheme was apparently intended to cover almost precisely the same area that had been occupied by the mediæval structure, and the old foundations were to be utilized in the new building. Thus in conformity with the older castle Lescot's design embraced a square court; but only a part of this project was actually carried out, namely, the wings on the south and west sides. And of these the south wing afterward suffered a damaging alteration by the architect Lemercier who enlarged the court to about four times the area ​that Lescot had intended. Thus the only part of Lescot's work which has survived substantially intact is that part of the existing west side which extends from the southwest angle to the great western pavilion. This portion is figured by Du Cerceau, and save for some alterations in the timber roof the existing fabric agrees with his print.
Fig. 117.—Roman arch, Serlio.
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 aesthetic effect in the external architectural
Fig. 118.—Part of Du Cerceau's print of Lescot's Louvre.
scheme. In the feudal castle the towers had of necessity to stand out beyond the curtain walls in order from their loop- holes 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. He was among those architects of his time who went to Rome to study the antique, and he tells us in his book 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.
Fig. 119.—Plan of the Tuileries, from Du Cerceau.
These features, survivals of the mediæval plan, distinguish the French Renaissance architecture from that of Italy to the last.
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 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. . . . 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
Fig. 120.—Tuileries, from Du Cerceau.
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
Fig. 121.—De l'Orme's column.
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) in which he employs a Tuscan order treated in this way.
It is hard to conclude what to think of De l'Orme's claim to this column as his own invention, and of his statement that he had never seen one of its kind in any building, or in any book of architecture; for such a column was not a new thing, though it may not before have been used in France. Several examples of practically the same column occur in Serlio's book, which was published in 1537 when De l'Orme was but twenty-two years of age, one of which, in a design for a doorway, is here (Fig. 123) reproduced.
Of this doorway Serlio says: "Although Doric doorways may be designed in other ways, yet most men are pleased with novelty, and with that which is not too common, and they have satisfaction especially from that which, though being mixed, still retains its character, as in this doorway where, although the column, the frieze, and other members are broken, and covered with rustic work, nevertheless the form is seen well defined in all its proportions." He does not affirm that this novelty was ​his own invention, but he seems to imply that it was. However this may be, he was writing long before De l'Orme could have produced such a column as his design shows. The château of Villers Cotterets built for Henry II, in which De l'Orme
Fig. 122.—De l'Orme's doorway.
remembered to have made columns somewhat like those of the Tuileries, could not have been begun before 1547, the year of Henry's accession, and ten years after Serlio's book was published.
​An ancient adumbration of this form of column occurs in the Porta Maggiore in Rome, where it has the appearance of an unfinished work, the drums being roughly shaped to be finished after they were set up, in the customary ancient manner.
Fig. 123.—Doorway, Serlio.
Such an example may well have suggested to the architects of the Renaissance the idea embodied in Serlio's cut. Sansovino made use of this form of column in the façade of the Zecca in Venice, which was commissioned by the Council of Ten in ​1535, and at Genoa, in the wall that was built to enlarge the circuit of the city, there is a portal bearing the date 1553, in which the scheme figured by Serlio is carried out. This peculiar column had therefore undoubtedly been in existence, both in a book of architecture and in actual monuments, before De l'Orme was writing. It is, of course, quite possible that he may have devised his scheme in ignorance of the Italian examples, but whether he did or not is for us a matter of little importance. It is, I think, an architectural monstrosity, and reflects little credit on its designer.
It may be further remarked concerning De l'Orme's claim to this column as his own invention, that it expresses an idea which was at the bottom of most of the architectural misconceptions and mistakes of the Renaissance, the idea that architectural excellence may result from independent personal effort to be original. I think it may be said that the artistic aberrations of the Renaissance arose largely from this false notion. The conscious effort to be original in architecture is inevitably disastrous. The personal contributions of individuals in architectural development consist of little more than small improvements on lines of endeavour common to large bodies of men. The aggregate of such improvements finally become conspicuous, and mark fundamental changes of architectural styles; but the part of any individual in such changes is hardly noticeable. Noble architecture has always been, and must, I think, always be, mainly a social, communal, and national, not a personal product. De l'Orme failed to consider that the ancient orders were not inventions of individual designers, but the outcome of a process of evolution toward which the ingenuity of large numbers of men through long periods of time had contributed. He thought that he might himself invent a new order, and call it French. He ought rather to have called it by his own name, for it was not French in the sense of being a product of the collective French genius. Had he and his contemporaries had more discernment, they might have realized that a true French order was already in existence in that very Gothic art which they vilified, that the shaft and its load of the twelfth-century national style was such an order, a true evolution out of the ancient orders superbly adapted to new conditions.
​As for De l'Orme's façade for the Tuileries, as an architectural composition, little in the way of praise can, I think, be said. The basement arcade (Fig. 120, p. 202) is but an adaptation of the wearisome Roman scheme of pier and arch overlaid with an order in which the Roman form of column gives place to the peculiar one just described and called his own invention. This deformed column has an Ionic capital, and De l'Orme tells us that he employed the Ionic order here because it had been as yet little used, and "because it is feminine, having been invented after the proportions of women and goddesses," and is therefore suitable for the palace of a queen. In this façade the monotony of the long range of arches with their orders is partly relieved by a ressaut in the entablature over every fourth bay, and this ressaut only is supported by columns, pilasters of similar character being used in the intervening bays. The attic story reproduces with variations some of the architectural vagaries of Vignola and his followers. Tall, rectangular dormers alternate with oblong panels crowned with broken pediments, and flanked with coupled hermæ. In this composition the native French characteristics of design survive in hardly anything more than the broken outline of the attic, and the steep roof behind it. That such architecture is shaped on mathematical proportions, and has an orderly and rhythmical distribution of parts, does not make it good architecture. Proportion and rhythm of this mechanical kind cannot, as I have before said, make a fine work of art.
What we know of other important works by De l'Orme, as the châteaux of Anet and Saint Maur, shows the same lack of a fine artistic sense. The lay-out of these vast pleasure-houses may be well adapted to the requirements of the courtly life of ​the time. De l'Orme understood the needs of this life, and was ingenious in providing for them, but such ingenuity constitutes but a small part of an architect's equipment, and may exist
Fig. 124.—Doorway of De l'Orme.
without any artistic aptitude. It is only in so far as such ingenuity is accompanied by a genuine artistic sense that a fine work of art can be produced. De l'Orme undoubtedly worked with a steady regard for what he considered artistic design, but ​his works show, I think, that he was devoid of true artistic genius. If further illustration of this be desired, it may be abundantly found in the numerous architectural projects published in his book, of which the doorway (Fig. 124) is a fair example. Of this composition the author remarks as follows: "I give you here following another form of doorway being square and straight in its covering, and having pilasters at the sides, in which one sees only the plinths of their bases under the said pilasters, which are larger at the top than at the bottom; which is the contrary of the columns and pilasters made according to measure [i.e. according to neo-classic proportions?] which are narrower at the top than at the bottom. But such an invention is produced according to the suggestion and fancy that presents itself, like many others; which, provided the proportions are well observed, are always found to have a pleasing effect, which is an easy thing to do by those who have experience and skill in architecture. You see how in this design which I figure, in place of capitals mutules in the form of consoles carry the soffit of a tympanum or frontispiece, which is cut out, as is seen, and has its cornices above and ornaments on acroteria, as may be seen in the figure with all the other ornaments, and pieces cut out which make the covering of the doorway, and above a tablet with another tympanum and other ornaments. To describe all in detail would require too much time, but you can easily understand from the drawing, which is of a Doric doorway having three steps which are well shown, as in the other doorways, when they are raised above the ground." These remarks, like the drawing itself, show clearly that design with De l'Orme was a matter of purely capricious fancy, regulated only by a mechanical system of proportions. If the rules of proportion be "well observed," he thinks that such a crazy composition as this, with its foolishly deformed members, may have a "pleasing effect."
It is not worth while to follow this phase of the French Renaissance art much further, but Du Cerceau gives one other design that is worthy of a moment's attention for its freakish irrationality and, I will not hesitate to say, ugliness, the project for the château of Charleval, begun for Charles IX, but not far advanced in construction at the time of his death, and never ​completed. The exterior façade of the basse-court is divided into a long series of bays (Fig. 125) by colossal rusticated pilasters of two orders, embracing the two stories into which the elevation, above the basement, is divided. Each pilaster is crowned with a section of an architrave and frieze, in the form of a ressaut of
Fig. 125.—Façade of Charleval, Du Cerceau.
two orders, which interpenetrates the bed mouldings of the continuous cornice. Since the architrave and frieze are not carried along the intervening walls, the pilasters have no real entablature to support even in appearance. Another unmeaning freak of design in this façade is the kind of variation of the details of the several bays which it exhibits. The rectangular windows are in one bay surmounted with round archivolts, in the next with curved pediments, in another with angular ​pediments above and curved ones below, in another with curved pediments above and round archivolts below, in still another with curved pediments above and a single one embracing both windows below; and so on with continued change with no purpose but that of mere change. Viollet le Duc commends the architect of this façade for seeking what he calls a grand disposition without abandoning the logical principles of his predecessors. But the great French master appears to me to err in his reasoning here, as frequently elsewhere in his discourse on the architecture of the Renaissance. The great order of Doric pilasters used in this façade fills, he says, exactly the function of buttresses, and he then proceeds to defend the whole scheme by saying that, "Taking the order as a buttress it is possible, without violence to reason, to cut it by a floor" (i.e. to divide the space between the pilasters into two stories). But there is no sense in taking the order as a buttressing system, for there is nothing in the structure to require buttressing; and if there were, the pilasters of an order, even though doubled, as in this case, would not form an effective buttress system. It is in nothing but the general arrangement of the main lines that such a composition can be said to bear any resemblance to an organic mediæval system in which buttresses have a function, and are shaped so as to express it.
The interior façade of the same building (Fig. 126) presents a different scheme. The great order here has fluted pilasters, and the division of the building into two stories is not expressed on the outside. Viollet le Duc remarks on this façade as follows: "The architect wished here not only to accent the great order more clearly, but also to hide entirely the floor of the upper story; and in adopting this scheme, contrary to the logical principles of the architects of the Middle Ages, he has carried it out with remarkable skill. The line of the floor, naturally placed at the level A, is cut by arched niches, so that the eye does not suspect its existence, and ​is forced to embrace the whole front as if it were one stage." And he adds: "C'était 1à I'œuvre d'un artiste consommé." Thus in one case the architect is lauded for employing the order like a buttress system to justify its embracing two stories, while in the other he is praised for giving a deceptive
Fig. 126.—Interior façade of Charleval, Du Cerceau.
appearance of only one story; so that this part of the design may, as the writer says in another place, be in better scale with the order. But the distinguished author betrays embarrassment in dealing further with these architectural incongruities of ​Renaissance design, and after remarking that the architects of this time have resorted to various devices for overcoming the difficulties arising from the lack of harmony between design and construction ("entre la mode d'architecture et les convenances"), which, he says, have occasioned them much torment, he exclaims (p. 376): "Voilà cependant oú conduit l'oubli des principes vrais." It is indeed far into devious paths that the architect is led by departure from the true principles of design.
A few remarks on the church architecture of the French Renaissance may be added here. It was natural that in church architecture the mediæval structural forms should largely survive. The French people could not adopt those semi-classic basilican forms of building that were natural to Italy. Thus, while now professing to despise their own noble Gothic art, they still retained through the sixteenth century the later Gothic structural system with no essential modification. This is well illustrated in the church of St. Eustache in Paris, which was begun as late as 1532. It is a very large cruciform Gothic structure, with double aisles and a range of side chapels, overlaid with Renaissance details. Pilasters and entablatures, variously distorted in order to fit them to the Gothic proportions and functions, take the place of vaulting shafts and string courses in the interior of the nave, while on the outside similar members are used with less distortion because of a different division of the stories giving proportions more nearly agreeing with those of classic art. The chapels opening out of the outer aisles have only half the height of these aisles, and thus the exterior has two stories where there is but one inside. An entablature crowns each of these stories, and the upper one has a pseudo-Doric character. The buttresses above the chapels have two superimposed orders of pilasters, and are crowned with urns on pedestals. Thus was a frankly Gothic structure made agreeable to the French taste of the sixteenth century by a barbarous misapplication of mixed and distorted classic details.
The persistence of Gothic structural forms is shown further in the church of St. Etienne du Mont, begun in 1517. In the parts belonging to the original construction almost no classic details occur. It is Flamboyant Gothic of a peculiar type in which vaulting of almost true Gothic form is sustained by plain ​cylindrical columns of unusual height. The church has no triforium, but the columns are connected by arches at the usual triforium level, and these arches carry a balustraded passageway. The archivolts of this arcade have classic profiles and keystones, and the balustrade is of neo-classic form. In the west front, begun in 1620, neo-classic features are adjusted to Gothic outlines, and the central portal, in the form of a Roman triumphal arch, is furnished with columns modelled after those of De l'Orme which he claimed as his own invention.
The church of SS. Gervais and Protais at Gisors has a Flamboyant west front in parts of which Renaissance features have been inserted in different degrees of compromise with Gothic forms and adjustments. The north tower below the cornice has no such features, but the south tower has been completely masked by a late Renaissance covering in three stories of pseudo-classic orders of which the uppermost is incomplete. The main portal is flanked by pilasters, and has splayed jambs and a splayed archivolt, with an entablature at the impost. A segmental arch over this supports a ledge on which is set a tabernacle of three arches, faced by a Corinthian order having no continuous entablature but only entablature blocks, and an attic over the central arch crowned with a curved pediment. It is unnecessary to analyze this west front further; it presents one of the most confused jumbles of incongruous elements anywhere to be met with.
A different manifestation of Renaissance caprice is found in the florid exterior of the apse of St. Pierre of Caen, which is made up of details of a sixteenth-century Lombard character applied to a Flamboyant structural scheme. The round arch and the complete circle take here the place of the pointed forms, and pilasters against the angles have short Flamboyant buttresses set against them, the faces of these buttresses being treated like Lombard Renaissance pilasters.
One of the most remarkable designs to be found in the Renaissance church architecture of France is that of the portal of the north transept of St. Maclou of Pontoise. It belongs to the early period, and is much like what we have seen in the portal of the château of Azay le Rideau (p. 182). The opening is round-arched and has a narrow splay. It is flanked by pilasters and crowned with an entablature surmounted with a ​fanciful pediment of broken outline, ornamented with a tablet and death's-head, and flanked by finials of nondescript design. This portal is again flanked by colossal pilasters, rising from pedestals almost as high as the arch impost, and reaching to the cornice at the level of the aisle roof. Against each of these pilasters a short, fluted column, with a capital of pseudo-composite form, rises from a pedestal engaged with the pilaster pedestal. The portion of the pilaster that rises above this column is treated like a niche, with a base resting on the capital of the column, and with an ornamental canopy above that rises through the capital of the pilaster.
It is unnecessary to extend further these tiresome descriptions. The foregoing examples are enough to show how irrational was the use made of neo-classic details in the church architecture of the French Renaissance, and how they were engrafted on a Gothic structural scheme. It was in this manner that the French architects of the time sought to "reform the Gothic and bastard styles."
* ↑ Adolphe Berty, Les Grands Architectes Français de la Renaissance, Paris, 1860, p. 70.
* ↑ Milizia, Memorie, vol. i, p. 404.
* ↑ Berty, op. cit., p. 71.
* ↑ Les Plus Excellents Bastiments de France, plate 69.
* ↑ The lines of this poem which relate to Lescot are quoted by M. Berty in op. cit., pp. 66–68.
* ↑ Regale Generale di Architettura di Sebastiano Serlio.
* ↑ Op. cit., plate 2.
* ↑ Viollet le Duc, in his Entretiens sur l'Architecture, p. 362, says, "Philibert De l'Orme était peut-être l'artiste dont le goût était le plus sûr, le sentiment le plus vrai, les principes les plus sévères." This estimate appears to me singularly short-sighted, but it is in keeping with the artistic limitations of its gifted author, whose great abilities did not, I think, include the finest powers of artistic judgment. Viollet le Duc's own architectural projects, as illustrated in the Entretiens, are enough to show this. A truer estimate is given by M. Berty, in his Life of De l'Orme, as follows: "Ayant absolument rompu avec la tradition Gothique, toujours plein du souvenir des monuments romains qu'il avait étudiés en Italie, et qui constituaient pour lui la vraie architecture, De l'Orme, visant sans cesse à la majesté, n'atteignit souvent que la lourdeur. D'un autre côté, trop préoccupé de la recherche d'une beauté rationnelle qu'il demandait plutôt au calcul qu'au sentiment, procédé pernicieux qui égare a coup sûr, il ne pent éviter les bizarreries et même les gaucheries dans ses conceptions. . . . C'est sur le terrain de la science qu'il a vraiment dominé tous ses rivaux, en acquérant des droits incontestables à la reconnaissance de la postérité." (Les Grands Architectes Français, etc., p. 36.) It was the scientific ability of De l'Orme that Viollet le Duc could best appreciate, his own genius being more scientific than artistic.
* ↑ Le Premier Tome de l'Architecture, etc., Paris, 1567.
* ↑ Op. cit., p. 156.
* ↑ The Tuileries was designed by De l'Orme for Catherine de Médicis.
* ↑ Op. cit., facing p. 240.
* ↑ Assuming that De l'Orme was born in the year 1515. Cf. Berty, op. cit., p. i.
* ↑ Op. cit., bk. 4, p. 26.
* ↑ Cf. my Development and Character of Gothic Architecture, p. 304 et seq.
* ↑ Op. cit., p. 155. The fanciful notion that the Ionic order was designed after female proportions is derived from Vitruvius, bk. 3.
* ↑ The roof is not shown in Du Cerceau's print.
* ↑ Viollet le Duc, I may say again, appears to me greatly to overestimate De l'Orme's artistic powers when he says, "Dans les œuvres de Philibert De l'Orme on constate une étude attentive et soigneuse des proportions, des rapports harmonieux qui semblent les plus simples, mais qui cependent sont le résultat d'une connaissance parfaite de son art et des moyens mis à sa disposition," and when he speaks of the Tuileries as follows: "C'était bien là une architecture de palais grande et noble par ses masses, précieuse par ses détails." Entretiens sur l'Architecture, vol. i, p. 363.
* ↑ Op. cit., bk. 8, chap. 9. The pages here are not numbered.
* ↑ It need hardly be said that such variety is very different from that which results from an active inventive spirit, as where in Gothic art some new constructive idea gives rise to change, or where in sculptured ornamentation a teeming fancy finds expression in varied forms.
* ↑ Entretiens, vol. 1, p. 374.
* ↑ But why should an architect wish to do any such thing? The fact that he did so shows again the factitious and unreasonable character of this Renaissance design.
* ↑ Op. cit., p. 375.