The Growth of the English House: A short history of its architectural development from 1100 to 1800Gotch, J. Alfred (John Alfred)
History
The Growth of the English House: A short history of its architectural development from 1100 to 1800
Gotch, J. Alfred (John Alfred)
Architecture -- England; Architecture, Domestic
The upper range has cusping formed by floriated dolphins, and mullions
ornamented with arabesques. The lower range is treated in the customary
manner of the Tudor period. There is a row of egg-and-tongue ornament
above the cusped corbels over the lower windows.]
The new fashion in ornament which came in with the Italian influence
led to quaint adaptations of ancient features. At Layer Marney, for
instance, the cusping is obtained not by bending out a portion of the
mullion, a growth springing naturally from its parent stem, but by the
introduction of little floriated dolphins “counter-hauriant”--to
use a heraldic term. The mullions, too, are not the splayed or
moulded shafts of English tradition, but rectangular shafts with
faces elaborately carved with arabesques (Fig. 95). The effect at a
distance, where the eye cannot detect the detail, is very like that of
a cusped window. So, too, in still later years, where traceried windows
were used, as in some of the college halls, the forms of the tracery
were ingeniously contrived to accord with the new Italianised detail
rather than the old Gothic. At Layer Marney the mixture of the ancient
and the modern is further exemplified by the presence of the classic
egg-and-tongue ornament above a cusped corbel table, below which are
windows with the flat pointed heads characteristic of the Tudor style.
At Sutton Place in Surrey, the mixture is again seen. The windows with
their pointed and cusped heads are thoroughly Gothic, while the amorini
over the door and in the parapet are equally Italian in feeling, though
not in delicacy of modelling. The diamond-shaped panels are likewise
of southern origin (Fig. 96). Both these houses were built about 1520
to 1525. East Barsham in Norfolk (Fig. 97), which preceded them by
about ten years, and resembles them in general style, just misses the
Italian detail, although at first sight some of its ornament appears
similar to that at Sutton Place. All three houses are of brick with
terra-cotta embellishments, and are fine specimens of the brickwork
which was used with such excellent effect during the first thirty years
of the sixteenth century. A very prevalent custom at this period was to
diversify the red brickwork with a diaper of darker bricks.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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