10 RENAISSANCE ARCHITECTURE IN FRANCE. 



who eventually developed into the architect, and the expenditure to a 

 " comptroller." 



INFLUENCE OF ITALIANS ON FRENCH BUILDERS. Such conditions 

 abundantly account for incoherence in design in the early stages of the 

 French Renaissance and for the haphazard manner in which elements 

 old and new were jumbled together. The foreign ideas were making 

 their way from the top and from the bottom, from the inspiring 

 architect and the executing craftsman. When it became evident that 

 the new fashion had taken root, the obstructive attitude of the French 

 masters and men gave place to a desire to excel in the new manner, 

 and, while the former were studying the designs of Italian architects, the 

 latter were rubbing shoulders with their Italian mates on all the scaffolds 

 of France and picking up from them new types of profile and ornament. 

 Stone-carvers and other craftsmen were thus often as influential in the 

 spread of Renaissance ideas as architects. When once relations of 

 comradeship and solidarity had been established between workers of 

 the two nations, French builders gladly consulted the Italians on points 

 of design where their own knowledge was deficient. Such conditions 

 of collaboration appear to have obtained to some extent throughout 

 the sixteenth century, but more especially in its early years before the 

 rise, at the end of the reign of Francis I., of a generation of true 

 architects of French birth and Renaissance training. 



CHARACTER OF TRANSITIONAL STYLE. 



ITS COMPONENT ELEMENTS. All architecture in France showing 

 any trace of Renaissance influence, between the years 1495 an ^ I 5 I 5> 

 and even a little later, may be grouped under the name of Style of 

 Louis XII. In reality it does not exhibit the true characteristics of a 

 style, for it possesses no homogeneity, either in the principles of design 

 or in the character of its detail. It is in a special sense transitional, 

 forming, as it does, a link between two styles in many respects antago- 

 nistic, and not related by natural affiliation. They were thrown into the 

 melting-pot together, and the resulting amalgam was the style of Louis 

 XII. Its distinguishing trait is the mixture in its buildings in varying 

 proportions of the characters of both constituents. 



LATE GOTHIC IN FRANCE. The native style was the Flamboyant 

 Gothic of the late fifteenth century, such as is seen, for instance, in St 

 Maclou and the Palais de Justice at Rouen, the Hotel de Cluny, Paris, 

 the castle of Josselin in Brittany, and the timber houses of Lisieux. 



Its character is vertical and soaring, while a studied confusion and 

 intricacy often replaces ordered grouping of masses and definiteness of 

 outline. Lines aspire upward with the wavering of flames and flow with 



