THE STYLE OF HENRY II. l6l 



tendency went hand in hand, as it had done in the last stage of Gothic, 

 with an excessive realism in the portrayal of nature. 



THE COURT AND ARCHITECTURE. The interest taken in art by 

 royal persons, which in the early Renaissance period had been so 

 stimulating an influence, was too much in accordance with the 

 tendencies of the age, for the taste of the last Valois kings, though 

 cultivated, leaned to the extravagant. Their mother has been 

 represented as the inspirer of the arts of her time, and, according to 

 the writer's bias, either as their good or evil genius. It is certain that 

 she gave employment to almost every important artist of the day, but 

 whether, as de 1'Orme would have us believe, she was a skilful planner 

 and suggested his best inventions, is a question which cannot now be 

 settled. 



EFFECTS OF THE ANARCHY ON ARCHITECTURE. The material effects 

 of the anarchy were as disastrous to the aits, as the moral. Few new 

 works could be undertaken, buildings in course of construction were 

 abandoned, existing ones frequently destroyed. So long as the great 

 courtiers of Francis I. and Henry II. lived, architectural activity did 

 not slacken, but the du Bellays had preceded Henry II. to the grave, 

 Diane de Poitiers followed him in 1566, and Montmorency a year later. 

 The death of Charles IX. in 1574 closes the great building era, for, 

 though his mother lived on till 1589, even her insatiable appetite for 

 stones and mortar met with an effectual check in lack of funds and the 

 general insecurity. 



If men had little leisure or opportunity for building perhaps they 

 had also little need. The architectural output of the last two generations 

 must have left the upper classes amply housed. Charles IX., it is true, 

 not satisfied with the endless residences of his grandfather and father, 

 undertook a vast new hunting seat of his own, but Charleval was little 

 more than begun when he died, and was soon abandoned. Catharine, 

 too, left the Tuileries in a fragmentary condition, partly perhaps on 

 account of its insecure position outside the walls, while Henry III. was 

 too poor to complete the court or galleries of the Louvre, the tomb of 

 his parents at St Denis, or a public work of such importance as the Pont 

 Neuf too poor even to pay his troops. Du Cerceau gives a dismal 

 picture of the destructive results of the anarchy in the dedication to 

 Catharine de' Medici of " Les Plus Excellents Bastiments de France," 

 written in 1576 during a temporary lull. "Madame," he says, "after 

 it hath pleased God to send us by your means a peace so needful and 

 desired of all, I thought I could do nought more appropriate than bring 

 to light this first book of the exquisite buildings of this kingdom ; hoping 

 that our poor Frenchmen (to whose eyes and understandings there is 

 now presented naught else but desolations, ruins, and havoc, which the 

 late wars have brought us) will perchance, while they breathe again, 



