of decadent Roman art, as Lescot has done in these friezes of the Louvre.
Another noticeable characteristic of this phase of Renaissance design in France is its excessive profusion of ornament. The wall surfaces are embossed with reliefs, or set with niches, disks, or tablets until no broad plain surfaces remain. Such extravagance of ornament is characteristic of later Roman, and debased Gothic, but it is foreign to the finest classic, and the pure Gothic, art.
Of the architectural work of De l'Orme little is now extant, and the most of that which has survived has suffered such alterations that we can form from the monuments themselves but an imperfect idea of their original aspect. We have, however, in the fragments that remain, in Du Cerceau's prints, and in the illustrations to his own writings, enough to show that he was a man with little artistic genius, though he had an ardent passion for architecture as he understood it.[1] He was among those architects of his time who went to Rome to study the antique, and he tells us in his book[2] that he dug about their foundations, and made drawings and measurements. His most important work was the palace of the Tuileries, begun in 1564. Of this gigantic scheme only a small part, the central part on the garden side, was completed by De l'Orme, and this was much altered by successive architects before the building was
- ↑ Viollet le Duc, in his Entretiens sur l'Architecture, p. 362, says, "Philibert De l'Orme était peut-être l'artiste dont le goût était le plus sûr, le sentiment le plus vrai, les principes les plus sévères." This estimate appears to me singularly short-sighted, but it is in keeping with the artistic limitations of its gifted author, whose great abilities did not, I think, include the finest powers of artistic judgment. Viollet le Duc's own architectural projects, as illustrated in the Entretiens, are enough to show this. A truer estimate is given by M. Berty, in his Life of De l'Orme, as follows: "Ayant absolument rompu avec la tradition Gothique, toujours plein du souvenir des monuments romains qu'il avait étudiés en Italie, et qui constituaient pour lui la vraie architecture, De l'Orme, visant sans cesse à la majesté, n'atteignit souvent que la lourdeur. D'un autre côté, trop préoccupé de la recherche d'une beauté rationnelle qu'il demandait plutôt au calcul qu'au sentiment, procédé pernicieux qui égare a coup sûr, il ne pent éviter les bizarreries et même les gaucheries dans ses conceptions. . . . C'est sur le terrain de la science qu'il a vraiment dominé tous ses rivaux, en acquérant des droits incontestables à la reconnaissance de la postérité." (Les Grands Architectes Français, etc., p. 36.) It was the scientific ability of De l'Orme that Viollet le Duc could best appreciate, his own genius being more scientific than artistic.
- ↑ Le Premier Tome de l'Architecture, etc., Paris, 1567.
