414 RENAISSANCE ARCHITECTURE IN FRANCE. 



royal works, and received his training on the buildings carried out by 

 his father. Soufflot, the son of a provincial merchant, after studying 

 in Lyons and Rome, travelled widely in Italy and Asia Minor. 

 Gabriel was the depository of the old French tradition ; Soufflot had 

 little tradition behind him, and came early into direct contact with 

 antiquity. Both felt the new influences, but they were differently 

 affected by them. 



GABRIEL'S CONSERVATISM. Gabriel was no pioneer, but adopted 

 what Servandony and Soufflot had introduced. His style underwent 

 no change till he had reached the age of fifty, and then the change, 

 though drastic as regards the minor points which go to the making of 

 a style, involved no break in essentials with Louis XIV. and Louis XV. 

 traditions. He reformed on conservative lines, eliminating the bombast 

 and heaviness of the one, and the frivolity of the other. He allowed 

 classical study to tell in the tranquil nobility of his lines and masses, 

 the purity of his detail, and the good taste of his ornament. 



SOUFFLOT'S INNOVATIONS. Soufflot, on the other hand, developed 

 as early as 1737, in his additions to the Hotel-Dieu at Lyons, a style 

 indistinguishable from the most mature Louis XVI. Yet even after 

 this period he occasionally returned to the more fashionable rococo 

 methods, as in the decoration of the Archbishop's Palace. There are, 

 however, few traces of such hesitation after his final return to France, 

 and from this time onwards he shows a definitely latinising, and even 

 graecising. tendency. His profiles, his enrichments, sometimes entire 

 features or compositions, are modelled on ancient examples. His 

 detail is cast with an almost Greek sharpness. His work has all the 

 nobility of Gabriel's, perhaps more than Gabriel's ; it lacks his pondera- 

 tion and geniality. Gabriel's method was to purify an existing tradition 

 in the light of wider knowledge, while retaining its best elements and 

 enriching them with others derived from newly recovered portions of 

 antiquity. Soufflot's, being based on an individual reading of antiquity, 

 and especially of recent discoveries, tended to the formation of a new 

 style by the overthrow of national tradition. Thus, in a sense, Gabriel 

 is the last great figure in the long line of architects of the French 

 Renaissance, and Soufflot is the first of the Moderns, for by paving 

 the way for individual eclecticism he helped to cut architecture from 

 its old moorings and to plunge it into the anarchy from which it has 

 not as yet entirely emerged. 



THEIR INFLUENCE AND ITS RESULTS. To attempt with Soufflot to 

 wed Greek ideas with French architecture, or with Turgot, Louis XVI. 's 

 wisest minister, to inoculate the ancien regime with modern methods of 

 government, was perhaps to court failure. Yet under a more patriotic 

 king than Louis XV., or a wiser one than Louis XVI., the monarchy 

 might have been brought into harmony with the nation's aspirations 



