The Arts in the Middle Ages and at the Period of the RenaissanceJacob, P. L.
History
The Arts in the Middle Ages and at the Period of the Renaissance
Jacob, P. L.
Art, Medieval; Art, Renaissance; Middle Ages
Arnolfo, Giotto, Orcagna, Brunelleschi--does it not suffice to cite
these great names for us to form an idea of the movement going on at
this period? and which was soon to produce Alberti, Bramante, Michael
Angelo, Jacques della Porta, Baldassare Peruzzi, Antonio and Juliano de
Sangallo, Giocondo, Vignola, Serlio, and even Raphael, who, when he
liked, was as mighty an architect as he was a marvellous painter. It was
in Rome that these princes of the art congregated together, as the
splendours of St. Peter’s (Fig. 325), to mention only one of their grand
creations, still attest; so, it is from this city that henceforward
light and example are to come.
In the style which this masterly phalanx created, the Latin rounded arch
regained all its ancient favour, and united itself to the ancient
orders, which became intermingled, or, at any rate, superposed. The
ogive was abandoned, but the columns to decorate their capitals, and the
entablatures to give more grace to their projections, borrowed a certain
fantastical style which yielded in nothing to the ogival; the Grecian
pediment reappeared, changing sometimes the upper lines of its triangle
into a depressed semicircle; lastly the cupola, that striking object
which was the characteristic feature of the Byzantine style, became the
dome, whose ample curve defied, in the daring heights whereto it rose,
the wonders of the Perpendicular Gothic.
The Italian _Renaissance_ was now accomplished, the Gothic age at an
end. Rome and Florence sent in every direction their architects, who, as
they travelled far from these metropolises of the new style, were once
more subjected to certain territorial influences, but who knew how to
make the tradition of which they were the apostles triumphant. It was
then that France inaugurated in its turn a Renaissance peculiar to
herself; it was then that, under the reign of Charles VIII., after his
expedition into Italy, began, with the Château de Gaillon, a long
succession of edifices, which in many cases yielded neither in richness
nor in majesty to the works of the preceding period. Under Louis XII.
rose the Château de Blois, and the Hôtel de la Cour des Comptes, Paris,
a splendid building destroyed by fire in the eighteenth century. Under
Francis I., Chambord (Fig. 326), Fontainebleau, Madrid (near Paris),
magnificent royal “humours,” contended in
[Illustration: Fig. 326.--Château de Chambord, with its Ancient Moat.
(Seventeenth Century.)]
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