124 RENAISSANCE ARCHITECTURE IN FRANCE. 



the authority on the subject. Even Philibert de 1'Orme, more prone to 

 point out his own merits than other people's, gives him a generous 

 tribute. "It is he," he writes, "who first gave the French by his 

 books and drawings the knowledge of ancient buildings, and of 

 several very good inventions, being a worthy man, as I knew him, 

 and of a very good spirit, to publish and give of his own good- 

 will what he had measured, seen and taken from the works of 

 antiquity." There is, perhaps, the less reason to regret the lack of 

 specimens of his executed work since, though a capable designer, he was 

 not a great originator. His greatness lay in a compendious knowledge 

 of all subjects connected with architecture, more particularly of ancient 

 buildings, and a scholarly method of exposition. Grasping the fact that 

 the great designs of Bramante, of Raphael, of Peruzzi were based on 

 antiquity, he strove to perpetuate the methods of his masters by more 

 scholarly but less imaginative study of Roman work. Unfortunately, 

 with the bias of a literary man he exalted the written word over the 

 living work, and was one of the first to invest Vitruvius with the mantle 

 of infallibility, teaching that his authority was to be followed even when 

 Roman monuments were found to be at variance with it. 



RESULTS OF ITALIAN INFLUENCE. Apart from a better acquaintance 

 with Roman models, the chief lesson which the French had to learn 

 from the school of Fontainebleau was one of co-ordination, the lesson 

 that the whole is greater than the part, that elaboration of the part is 

 only effective when it subserves a well-considered whole. In the galleries 

 of Fontainebleau, France learnt how the arts of the painter and the 

 sculptor, to say nothing of the rest, could each be perfected to the limits 

 of its capacity and brought into a unity by one controlling mind. 



But, if the Italians thus carried French art a step forward, had they 

 any pernicious influence as well ? It cannot be denied that Italian art of 

 the second quarter of the sixteenth century had in it the seeds of decline. 

 The first force of the Renaissance was spent, and the promise of the 

 Julian era had been baulked of complete fulfilment by national disasters 

 and the Sack of Rome (1527). What in the work of the elder generation 

 had been the manner of a great personality or a style of impersonal 

 purity was degenerating in the hands of the lesser men who followed into 

 mannerism or pedantry. Their licence in the use of forms for decorative 

 purposes led to the vagaries of the late sixteenth and the coarseness of the 

 early seventeenth centuries, while the cult of Vitruvius imposed fetters 

 on later development which, while in some cases acting as a salutary 

 restraint, in others crushed out national and individual originality. 



FRENCH ARCHITECTS. The rise of a native school of architecture 

 was almost simultaneous with the beginning of the school of Fontaine- 

 bleau. Four at least of the five men whose names rank first in the 

 annals of French architecture of the sixteenth century were reaching, or 



