THE STYLE OF LOUIS XIV. 273 



ORIGINS AND CHARACTER OF THE STYLE OF 

 LOUIS XIV. 



FORMATIVE INFLUENCES ELEMENTS OF THE STYLE. No govern- 

 ment, however powerful, and no monarch, however good his taste 

 and within certain limits that of Louis XIV. was excellent can create 

 an art or a literature to order. Success was achieved in virtue of a 

 coincidence in aim with the artistic tendencies of the century and a 

 skilful choice of agents. In art, as in literature, the age of Louis XIV. 

 was characterised less by new ideas than by a reasoned co-ordination 

 of commonly accepted ones, and concentration of effort on perfecting 

 the form of their expression. 



The elements out of which the style of Louis XIV. was built 

 up were various. These were first, as an underlying substratum, the 

 rationalistic idea which had been a strong influence in the architecture 

 of Henry IV. In more monumental architecture there was a drift 

 towards pure classicism ; but classicism had hitherto been understood 

 in France purely as a code of forms combined with balance and 

 symmetry, without real grasp of the root idea of classical art that 

 a design should be a unit. Group effects in classical detail and 

 symmetrical complexity were aimed at rather than a single clearly 

 expressed idea. A symptom of this analytic bent is the preference for 

 small superposed orders. No important instance of the giant order 

 occurs in France for half a century after Henry IV.'s additions to the 

 Louvre and Tuileries, or of a logical use of it by a Frenchman at any 

 time before 166.5. I n tne preparatory period, however, some architects, 

 and among them Mansart, were feeling their way to the goal of unity, 

 and, pari passu, to purer classical detail. 



Meanwhile in decoration France turned alternately to Flanders and 

 Italy for inspiration, but the Flemish influence, with its naturalism or 

 its licence, declined, and the Italian increased. The influence of Italy 

 was composite. On the one hand the ancient monuments and the 

 Palladian school helped the puristic current. But on the other in 

 contemporary Italy the Roman barocco school was predominant. The 

 French under Louis XIV. did not follow this school in its contempt 

 for classical traditions, but borrowed first some of its fire and bigness 

 of conception, secondly a few decorative motives, and lastly that sense 

 of unity with which, like all Italian schools, it was animated. 



Both the strict and the free classic influences thus had in them 

 something congenial to the absolutist, centralising trend of the age and 

 something in opposition to it. On the one side was respect for law and 

 to some extent severity, combined with diversity; on the other was law- 

 lessness, but splendour, majesty, and unity. The third or rationalistic 



