Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 1.djvu/358

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340
MEDIEVAL ECCLESIASTICAL ARCHITECTURE

of light and shade. On either side of the western doorway stood statues of the founder of the church and his consort, Charles V. of France and Queen Jehanne de Bourbon. The cloister of this convent was a remarkably beautiful and chaste specimen of the latest epoch of the Rénaissance.

The Church of St. Leu and St. Gilles in the Rue St. Denis is of the fourteenth century, although the western doorway may be of the end of the thirteenth, and would be designated in England as early pointed. The building consists of a nave and side aisles with chapels, an octagonal eastern end, and a small recent crypt serving as a chapel of the Holy Sepulchre. There is a clerestory, but no triforium: parts of the church are of the Flamboyant style.

The Tower of St. Genevieve (the old church) is partly of this century, but the foundations are of the Romane epoch and the crowning battlements of the Flamboyant. In its proportions this is an excellent example of the style, although rather plain. It is now incorporated in the buildings of the Collège Henri IV. A few windows of one of the conventual buildings of the great abbey of St. Geneviève still remain, but they serve only to fix the date of their erection within the fourteenth century.

The College de Montaigu was also of this century, and some windows of a building that probably formed the chapel were till lately extant on the side facing St. Geneviève. The building was not in other respects of much architectural, though of high academical, interest.

The havoc of the two revolutions and their consequent periods of Vandalism, was made principally upon buildings of the fourteenth century, most of the Parisian convents having been either founded or re-endowed and enlarged during that period; and this is another cause why the capital is poor in ecclesiastical edifices of the time in question. A splendid military structure of that epoch still exists close to Paris,—we allude to the chateau of Vincennes,—and this, with the chapel of the chateau of St. Germain en Laye, form the best models of the style to be found near the French capital.

fourth period.

The great change from the geometrical spirit of the architecture of the fourteenth century to the flowing lines and fanciful combinations of the Flamboyant style, began to take place soon after the year 1400, but did not become fully