xxii INTRODUCTION. 



spreading Renaissance principles in France was that of direct oral and 

 literary instruction. Among Italian architects who taught in France 

 were Fra Giocondo in the fifteenth, and Serlio in the sixteenth century. 

 The former was the first editor of Vitruvius, the influence of whose 

 works in their numerous editions and translations is only rivalled by 

 that of a long series of works by French architects, beginning with 

 du Cerceau and de 1'Orme and including technical treatises, original 

 or translated from the Italian, sketches, measured drawings and designs. 



The influence affecting French architecture from outside through 

 these various channels was, broadly speaking, that of classical antiquity. 

 But since direct study of ancient monuments was not the first nor 

 the only means of its introduction, the character of the results was 

 profoundly affected by the Italian interpretations through which it 

 reached France, and this varied not only from century to century, but 

 simultaneously in different parts of Italy. 



In Tuscany, the cradle of the Renaissance in the early quattro cento, 

 architecture proper maintained a certain austerity, and the delicate and 

 rather minute type of ornament, evolved by a race of architects of 

 goldsmith training, was confined in large measure to single features 

 such as doorways or tombs. But when, in the third quarter of the 

 century, the movement spread to Upper Italy, the style assumed a 

 richer, more fantastic, dress, and the forms of the local styles of 

 Lombardy and Venetia Gothic, Byzantine or Romanesque were 

 translated into the new language. This produced a style of exquisite 

 charm and delicacy, and prolific in the invention of new features, but 

 prone to seek its effects too exclusively in the profusion of ornament 

 and the beauty of its detail and of its individual parts. In the last 

 quarter of the century a third stage of development was reached, of 

 which Rome was the centre, and Bramante, with Raphael and his 

 other pupils, the chief exponent. It resulted from that more systematic 

 study of the ancient monuments which inspired the writings of Alberti ; 

 and received an impetus from the appearance of the first printed 

 edition of Vitruvius (c. 1486). This work, which is in the nature 

 of a handbook containing a code of formulae by means of which 

 engineers engaged on the public works of the Roman Empire might 

 clothe any structure in an architectural garb, was accepted by the 

 men of the Renaissance as giving a clue to the system they assumed 

 to underlie classical architecture and account for its beauty. 



In the mature, or Roman, phase the Renaissance was pruned 

 of its exuberances, and became bolder, surer, more balanced in its 

 composition, gaining in calm monumentality and masculine strength 

 what it lost in youthful vitality and variety of decorative motives. The 

 pontificates of Julius II. (1503-13) and Leo X. (1513-21) were the 

 "Golden Age of the Renaissance," in which the concourse of talent, 



