Character of Renaissance ArchitectureMoore, Charles Herbert
History
Character of Renaissance Architecture
Moore, Charles Herbert
Architecture, Renaissance
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.
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