Character of Renaissance ArchitectureMoore, Charles Herbert
History
Character of Renaissance Architecture
Moore, Charles Herbert
Architecture, Renaissance
On the garden side this wing of Blois has a different design, and shows
a survival of the Flamboyant depressed arch in the window openings
necessitated by the form of the earlier façade, which is incased
in that of Francis I.[118] The windows of this earlier façade were
spaced and proportioned so as to make wide and narrow voids and solids
alternate in a very irregular manner. In the work of the sixteenth
century, which overlays this, superimposed pilasters are set in pairs
on the wider solids, and single ones adorn the narrow piers. The
pilasters of the lower order rest on tall pedestals supported on spurs
rising out of the batter wall of the basement, while the upper order
is set on plinths resting on the entablature of the order beneath.
This upper order has a plain corbel-table in place of an entablature,
with a simple cornice, and gargoyles over the pilasters. Over this is
the novel feature of an open gallery covered by an extension of the
main roof which is held up by columns of no distinct order, with a
balustrade in each interval. Similar galleries were afterward in some
instances produced by extending the roofs over originally uncovered
terraces below the eaves, supporting the extension on wooden posts--as
at La Rochefoucauld.
The walls of Chambord, the next vast château of the early French
Renaissance, are adorned with pilasters as at Blois, though the design
below the cornice is much simpler. Above the cornice, however, it is
the richest of all the great French châteaux, and with its steep roofs
and manifold dormers, chimneys, and central lantern, it presents an
aspect which for multiplicity of soaring features resembles a late
Gothic building. It is not worth while to give an extended analysis
of its redundant details which, with its vast chimneys adorned with
free-standing orders, niches, panelled surfaces, and pinnacles; its
dormers with overlaid orders of pilasters, pediments, scrolls, and
endless filigree ornaments; and its great lantern with inverted
consoles on entablatures forming flying-buttresses (where there is
nothing to be buttressed), make up a bewildering complex without
structural meaning or artistic merit. Viollet le Duc has well remarked
that “Chambord est au château féodal des XIII^e et XIV^e siècles ce que
l’abbaye de Thélème est aux abbayes du XII^e siècle: c’est une parodie.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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