l8o RENAISSANCE ARCHITECTURE IN FRANCE. 



form of covered galleries and grottoes decorated with shell work. He 

 seems to have schemed something of the same kind at St Germain, but 

 it was not carried out till a later date, and then on an even greater 

 scale. He also laid out a sunk garden surrounded by a rusticated 

 crypto-porticus at Anet, at the end of which was a concert hall with 

 baths below projecting into an artificial lake, and perhaps the walled 

 pleasaunce at Vallery, with its twin pavilions and a loggia between them 

 looking down a vista of canal. 



At Verneuil du Cerceau laid out, on a sloping site, a scheme of 

 gardens in terraces, and another at Charleval, on a flat site, intersected 

 by canals. At the former a great garden hall was so arranged that the 

 roof formed a terrace for the mansion, and its front was built en theatre, 

 i.e., concave, so as to form a stage for plays and pageants. At Charleval 

 an elliptical space surrounded by pleached alleys was the central feature 

 of the lay-out, and formed the theatre. Another probable work of 

 du Cerceau's, the Maison Blanche at Gaillon, was a banqueting and 

 festival hall, richly decorated within and without, and situated on an 

 island in a lake approached by bridges. Most gardens were divided 

 into enclosed rectangular pleasaunces, subdivided in turn into rect- 

 angular plots, each of which contained a maze, a plantation, or 

 parterre of a different geometrical pattern. Almost the only exception 

 is in the semicircular gardens of Montargis, planned by du Cerceau 

 in a radiating scheme, with the castle as centre, and trellis arbours 

 as rays. 



PALISSY. Bernard Palissy (born 1510, died 1590) is a notable 

 figure in the history of the laying-out and decoration of gardens, and 

 was one of the first French writers on garden design. In his " Jardin 

 Delectable," embodying many of the ideas underlying the " landscape 

 garden" of later times, he describes his ideal of a garden. It is a 

 sort of wild park, laid out, however, on a general rectangular plan, and 

 containing garden plots and arbours of clipped elm in which the trees 

 were tortured into the form of columns, architraves, and cornices. His 

 grottoes, one of which was at Ecouen and another at the Tuileries, but 

 which have all disappeared, seem to have been realistic representa- 

 tions in earthenware of natural rocks peopled with fish and reptiles, 

 "making several movements and pleasing contortions." The grotto 

 at the Tuileries, however, comprised certain architectural features 

 and "plaques" with busts of the Caesars. Both his theoretical and 

 executed works show a hesitation between the formality and obedience 

 to rule of classical art on the one hand and Gothic naturalism and 

 French revolt against Italian authority on the other. He declaims 

 against a servile attitude to the past, and seems to find his artistic 

 ideal in a literal reproduction of the works of God in nature. Yet he 

 is unsurpassed in his reverence for Vitruvius, and introduces the orders 



