344 



RENAISSANCE ARCHITECTURE IN FRANCE. 



the dome, pierced by sixteen windows and strengthened by sixteen bold 

 buttresses ; these support statues and reversed consoles leading the 

 eye agreeably upwards. The dome, which stands on a richly panelled 

 attic, and whose curve is one of the most gracious and majestic in 

 France, groups equally well with the fine facade in the western view 

 (Fig. 325), and with the lower dome of the Lady Chapel, if seen from 

 the east, and forms one of the chief ornaments of Paris. 



RADIATE TYPE OF PLAN : THE SALPETRIERE. Liberal Bruand, in 

 designing the chapel of the Salpetriere Hospice, provided for the needs 

 of the institution as regards the plan in a more coherent manner than 

 Mansart at the Val-de Grace (Fig. 330) An octagonal dome, 65 feet 

 in diameter, on a drum, rises above a space of like plan forming the 

 choir and enclosed in a wall of great thickness pierced on each side 



by an equal arch, which widens outwards 

 from the centre. In the main axes these 

 arches open into rectangular arms, and in 

 the diagonal axes into elongated octagonal 

 chapels. The church accommodates, it is 

 said, four thousand persons, to a great 

 majority of whom the ceremonial of the 

 mass under the dome is visible. The in- 

 genuity of this plan, which is the chief 

 feature of interest in the design, has, how- 

 ever, a utilitarian rather than an artistic 

 origin, and there is little attempt to give 

 artistic expression to it externally. 



DESIGNS BY J. MAROT. This was more 

 effectually done by J. Marot in an unexe- 

 cuted design based on F. Mansart's Ste 

 Marie. The vestibule and three semi- 

 elliptical apses form the four arms opening out of a circular dome- 

 space, and the four angles are occupied by elliptical chapels. The 

 site is regularised, and orders applied internally and externally. In the 

 church of Notre Dame des Ardilliers near Saumur (c. 1650), which was 

 partly carried out from his designs, and betrays the influence of the 

 Valois mausoleum, the circular dome-space is enclosed in a square of 

 the same diameter as itself, so that there is merely room in the angles 

 for apses little larger than niches. 



THE " ASSOMPTION." The church of the Nuns of the Assumption 

 (Rue St Honore), by Errard (1670-6), bears a superficial resemblance to 

 Notre Dame des Ardilliers in plan, but here the dome-space constitutes 

 the whole church, the remainder of the square being occupied merely 

 by subsidiary annexes, while the nuns' choir outside the square is only 

 connected with it in a haphazard manner. The inner and outer domes 



330. PARIS: CHURCH OF 

 THE SALPETRIERE, BY 

 L. BRUAND. PLAN. 



