As for De l'Orme's façade for the Tuileries, as an architectural composition, little in the way of praise can, I think, be said. The basement arcade (Fig. 120, p. 202) is but an adaptation of the wearisome Roman scheme of pier and arch overlaid with an order in which the Roman form of column gives place to the peculiar one just described and called his own invention. This deformed column has an Ionic capital, and De l'Orme tells us that he employed the Ionic order here because it had been as yet little used, and "because it is feminine, having been invented after the proportions of women and goddesses,"[1] and is therefore suitable for the palace of a queen. In this façade the monotony of the long range of arches with their orders is partly relieved by a ressaut in the entablature over every fourth bay, and this ressaut only is supported by columns, pilasters of similar character being used in the intervening bays. The attic story reproduces with variations some of the architectural vagaries of Vignola and his followers. Tall, rectangular dormers alternate with oblong panels crowned with broken pediments, and flanked with coupled hermæ. In this composition the native French characteristics of design survive in hardly anything more than the broken outline of the attic, and the steep roof behind it.[2] That such architecture is shaped on mathematical proportions, and has an orderly and rhythmical distribution of parts, does not make it good architecture. Proportion and rhythm of this mechanical kind cannot, as I have before said, make a fine work of art.[3]
What we know of other important works by De l'Orme, as the châteaux of Anet and Saint Maur, shows the same lack of a fine artistic sense. The lay-out of these vast pleasure-houses may be well adapted to the requirements of the courtly life of
- ↑ Op. cit., p. 155. The fanciful notion that the Ionic order was designed after female proportions is derived from Vitruvius, bk. 3.
- ↑ The roof is not shown in Du Cerceau's print.
- ↑ Viollet le Duc, I may say again, appears to me greatly to overestimate De l'Orme's artistic powers when he says, "Dans les œuvres de Philibert De l'Orme on constate une étude attentive et soigneuse des proportions, des rapports harmonieux qui semblent les plus simples, mais qui cependent sont le résultat d'une connaissance parfaite de son art et des moyens mis à sa disposition," and when he speaks of the Tuileries as follows: "C'était bien là une architecture de palais grande et noble par ses masses, précieuse par ses détails." Entretiens sur l'Architecture, vol. i, p. 363.
