THE STYLE OF HENRY If. 



205 



207. ARQUES : ROOD SCREEN. 



and detail carried on stone corbels with a panelled wooden front 

 enriched with carved ornament and miniature Ionic columns, which is 

 still in situ (Fig. 126). Examples of screens are to be found in a splendid 

 series extending all round Laon Cathedral (Fig. 206), and that enclosing 

 the Baptistery in Troyes Cathedral; in the chapel of the Palais de Justice 

 at Dijon is a richly-wrought wooden screen made by Hugues Sambin 

 (1570). The rood-screen at St Germain 1'Auxerrois by Lescot and 

 Goujon has been destroyed, but a beautiful example of somewhat 

 similar design exists at Arques (Fig. 207); that of St Etienne, Toulouse, 

 belongs to the end of the period and verges on the style of Henry IV. 



Examples of stall work are found at St Saturnin, Toulouse, and 

 Bayeux Cathedral ; of a pulpit at St Thibaut, Joigny ; of organ cases at 

 Bernay and Chaource. 



That the style of Henry II. is distinguished by an increase of 

 accuracy in reproducing classical detail and a more logical and 

 systematic use of architectural members is obvious, but its services to 

 architecture cannot be measured by these facts. They include a keener 

 sense of proportion, a broader view of the grouping of masses and voids. 

 The old haphazard method of running up a wing here, a gallery there, 

 as utility or caprice might direct, gave place to balanced schemes of 

 planning, clearly thought out as a whole from the outset. Architecture, 

 like literature, scholarship, and religious thought, declined in imaginative 

 power, in freedom, in buoyancy. On the other hand it showed better 

 organisation and firmer grasp of the problems attacked. What it lost in 

 variety and daintiness, it gained in restraint and distinction. 



