xxiv INTRODUCTION. 



that of Italy. France frequently attracted craftsmen and designers from 

 northern and Teutonic countries, especially Flanders, but this was often 

 but an indirect way of absorbing Italian influence, though it reached 

 France tinged by the medium through which it had passed, and thus 

 tended as a rule to reinforce the freer and more naturalistic tendencies 

 at home. Thus the growth of Barocco and Rococo schools was largely 

 assisted by Belgian, Dutch, and German artists, while in garden design 

 English influence was the chief factor in the revolution against the classical 

 tradition in the eighteenth century. But, in architecture at this time, 

 English and Dutch influence, if not very powerful, contributed something 

 to the puristic reaction. 



The metaphor contained in the word Renaissance is very applicable 

 to the architecture of France, re-born of the marriage of Gothic and 

 Italian art at the close of the Middle Ages. But it was a blending 

 continued and repeated through three centuries, and producing ever 

 changing results. The first and greatest fusion took place in the late 

 fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The elements in this case 

 were the Flamboyant Gothic of France and the almost equally florid 

 Early Renaissance style of northern Italy introduced with the colony of 

 Amboise. The result, after a period of transition whose work is known by 

 the name of the Louis XII. Style, was the Early Renaissance of France, 

 or Francis I. Style. It is to these first thirty or forty years that Walter 

 Pater refers when he says:* "What is called the Renaissance in France 

 is not so much the introduction of a wholly new taste ready-made from 

 Italy, but rather the finest and subtlest phase of the Middle Age itself, 

 its last fleeting splendour and temperate Saint Martin's summer"; 

 and again : " The old Gothic manner had still one chance more, in 

 borrowing something from the rival which was about to supplant it. 

 In this way there was produced ... a new and peculiar phase of 

 taste with qualities and a charm of its own, blending the somewhat 

 attenuated grace of Italian ornament with the general lines of northern 

 design." 



In the middle of the sixteenth century the break with the Middle 

 Ages became more pronounced. A second fusion took place, this 

 time between the Francis I. Style on the one side, and on the other 

 the mature or Roman Renaissance of Italy introduced by the colony 

 of Fontainebleau, and by Frenchmen who had visited Italy, produc- 

 ing the mature Renaissance of France, or Henry II. Style. By this 

 time the Renaissance was flowing in two parallel streams. On the 

 one hand a French school of free Classic grew out of the school of 

 Fontainebleau under the later Valois and developed in the early 

 seventeenth century under the influence of Flemish Barocco into the 

 rather coarse forms of the Style of Louis XIII. Compelled into 



* "The Renaissance : Studies in Art and Poetry," and edition, 1877, P- '4 1 - 



