THE STYLE OF HENRY it. 115 



the advent, as Dauphiness, of a Medici princess, related to two popes 

 and to the rulers of Florence. 



It would be strange had architecture not been carried along by the 

 prevailing current. Before the end of the fifteenth century, French 

 architects and craftsmen seldom, if ever, went to Italy for instruction ; 

 in the early sixteenth, the practice was still rare, but gradually French 

 architects shook off the belief in the all-sufficiency of craft-guild training 

 and were fired with the wish to drink of the new art at its source. Since 

 the works at St Peter's had entered on a period of renewed activity under 

 Pope Julius II. (1503-13), Rome had become the central school of 

 architecture for Italy and the Mecca of architectural pilgrims from both 

 sides of the Alps. From the third decade of the century onwards, one 

 young Frenchman after another set forth thither to pursue his studies 

 before settling down to his career. Meanwhile the original Italian 

 colony in France, drawn mainly from the northern cities, was supple- 

 mented by a generation trained in the Roman school and therefore 

 animated by a new order of ideas. 



The results of the persistence of Italian influence were not merely 

 to continue the process of eliminating Gothic elements, but to imbue 

 architecture with the new colour it had assumed in Italy. Thus the 

 later phase was no mere intensification of the earlier, but different in 

 character. The break with the past was completer, and the French 

 architects were conscious of it. They regarded the style of Francis I. 

 as showing but little advance on the barbarism conceived to have 

 preceded it. Thus Goujon speaks of the works of "our modern 

 masters" as "disproportioned and out of all symmetry," and attributes 

 this to their ignorance of geometry, perspective, and Vitruvian teaching, 

 while de 1'Orme plumes himself on being the introducer of the new 

 manner of building at St Maur-les-Fosses. 



TRANSITION FROM EARLY TO ADVANCED RENAISSANCE. The 

 obsolescent style of Francis I. was being purified and perfected till, during 

 the decade 1535-45, it combined something of the dignity and simplicity 

 of the coming classical manner with the grace and playfulness of the 

 first Renaissance. Architecture was undergoing a second transition. 

 In the former one the early Renaissance penetrated into Gothic art. 

 The process was now being repeated and the classical Renaissance was 

 penetrating the first semi-Gothic Renaissance. 



There are thus two contemporary classes of work, one in which the 

 general design is of Francis I. type with more classical feeling in the 

 detail, and another in which the general design is beginning to be more 

 classical, but retains early Renaissance detail. The first class corre- 

 sponds to Bramante's second manner, and includes such buildings as 

 the destroyed Celestine cloister in Paris (1539-45), the Hotel d'Ecoville 

 at Caen, and the so-called house of Francis I. at Orleans (Figs. 73-76). 



