Chapter 27

RENAISSANCE ARCHITECTURE IN GREAT BRITAIN AND THE NETHERLANDS.

BOOKS RECOMMENDED: As before, Fergusson, Palustre. Also, Belcher and Macartney, _Later Renaissance Architecture in England_. Billings, _Baronial and Ecclesiastical Antiquities of Scotland_. Blomfield, _A Short History of Renaissance Architecture in England_. Britton, _Architectural Antiquities of Great Britain_. Ewerbeck, _Die Renaissance in Belgien und Holland_. Galland, _Geschichte der Hollandischen Baukunst im Zeitalter der Renaissance_. Gotch and Brown, _Architecture of the Renaissance in England_. Loftie, _Inigo Jones and Wren_. Nash, _Mansions of England_. Papworth, _Renaissance and Italian Styles of Architecture in Great Britain_. Richardson, _Architectural Remains of the Reigns of Elizabeth and James I._ Schayes, _Histoire de l’architecture en Belgique_.

+THE TRANSITION.+ The architectural activity of the sixteenth century in England was chiefly devoted to the erection of vast country mansions for the nobility and wealthy _bourgeoisie_. In these seignorial residences a degenerate form of the Gothic, known as the Tudor style, was employed during the reigns of Henry VII. and Henry VIII., and they still retained much of the feudal aspect of the Middle Ages. This style, with its broad, square windows and ample halls, was well suited to domestic architecture, as well as to collegiate buildings, of which a considerable number were erected at this time. Among the more important palaces and manor-houses of this period are the earlier parts of Hampton Court, Haddon and Hengreave Halls, and the now ruined castles of Raglan and Wolterton.

+ELIZABETHAN STYLE.+ Under Elizabeth (1558-1603) the progress of classic culture and the employment of Dutch and Italian artists led to a gradual introduction of Renaissance forms, which, as in France, were at first mingled with others of Gothic origin. Among the foreign artists in England were the versatile Holbein, Trevigi and Torregiano from Italy, and Theodore Have, Bernard Jansen, and Gerard Chrismas from Holland. The pointed arch disappeared, and the orders began to be used as subordinate features in the decoration of doors, windows, chimneys, and mantels. Open-work balustrades replaced externally the heavy Tudor battlements, and a peculiar style of carving in flat relief-patterns, resembling _appliqué_ designs cut out with the jigsaw and attached by nails or rivets, was applied with little judgment to all possible features. Ceilings were commonly finished in plaster, with elaborate interlacing patterns in low relief; and this, with the increasing use of interior woodwork, gave to the mansions of this time a more homelike but less monumental aspect internally. English architects, like Smithson and Thorpe, now began to win the patronage at first monopolized by foreigners. In +Wollaton Hall+ (1580), by Smithson, the orders were used for the main composition with mullioned windows, much after the fashion of +Longleat House+, completed a year earlier by his master, John of Padua. During the following period, however (1590-1610), there was a reaction toward the Tudor practice, and the orders were again relegated to subordinate uses. Of their more monumental employment, the +Gate of Honor+ of Caius College, Cambridge, is one of the earliest examples. Hardwicke and Charlton Halls, and Burghley, Hatfield, and Holland Houses (Fig. 184), are noteworthy monuments of the style.

+JACOBEAN STYLE.+ During the reign of James I. (1603-25), details of classic origin came into more general use, but caricatured almost beyond recognition. The orders, though much employed, were treated without correctness or grace, and the ornament was unmeaning and heavy. It is not worth while to dwell further upon this style, which produced no important public buildings, and soon gave way to a more rigid classicism.

+CLASSIC PERIOD.+ If the classic style was late in its appearance in England, its final sway was complete and long-lasting. It was _Inigo Jones_ (1572-1652) who first introduced the correct and monumental style of the Italian masters of classic design. For Palladio, indeed, he seems to have entertained a sort of veneration, and the villa which he designed at Chiswick was a reduced copy of Palladio’s Villa Capra, near Vicenza. This and other works of his show a failure to appreciate the unsuitability of Italian conceptions to the climate and tastes of Great Britain; his efforts to popularize Palladian architecture, without the resources which Palladio controlled in the way of decorative sculpture and painting, were consequently not always happy in their results. His greatest work was the design for a new +Palace at Whitehall+, London. Of this colossal scheme, which, if completed, would have ranked as the grandest palace of the time, only the +Banqueting Hall+ (now used as a museum) was ever built (Fig. 185). It is an effective composition in two stories, rusticated throughout and adorned with columns and pilasters, and contains a fine vaulted hall in three aisles. The plan of the palace, which was to have measured 1,152 × 720 feet, was excellent, largely conceived and carefully studied in its details, but it was wholly beyond the resources of the kingdom. The garden-front of +Somerset House+ (1632; demolished) had the same qualities of simplicity and dignity, recalling the works of Sammichele. Wilton House, Coleshill, the Villa at Chiswick, and St. Paul’s, Covent Garden, are the best known of his works, showing him to have been a designer of ability, but hardly of the consummate genius which his admirers attribute to him.

+ST. PAUL’S CATHEDRAL.+ The greatest of Jones’s successors was _Sir Christopher Wren_ (1632-1723), principally known as the architect of +St. Paul’s Cathedral+, London, built to replace the earlier Gothic cathedral destroyed in the great fire of 1666. It was begun in 1675, and its designer had the rare good fortune to witness its completion in 1710. The plan, as finally adopted, retained the general proportions of an English Gothic church, measuring 480 feet in length, with transepts 250 feet long, and a grand rotunda 108 feet in diameter at the crossing (Fig. 186). The style was strictly Italian, treated with sobriety and dignity, if somewhat lacking in variety and inspiration. Externally two stories of the Corinthian order appear, the upper story being merely a screen to hide the clearstory and its buttresses. This is an architectural deception, not atoned for by any special beauty of detail. The dominant feature of the design is the dome over the central area. It consists of an inner shell, reaching a height of 216 feet, above which rises the exterior dome of wood, surmounted by a stone lantern, the summit of which is 360 feet from the pavement (Fig. 187). This exterior dome, springing from a high drum surrounded by a magnificent peristyle, gives to the otherwise commonplace exterior of the cathedral a signal majesty of effect. Next to the dome the most successful part of the design is the west front, with its two-storied porch and flanking bell-turrets. Internally the excessive relative length, especially that of the choir, detracts from the effect of the dome, and the poverty of detail gives the whole a somewhat bare aspect. It is intended to relieve this ultimately by a systematic use of mosaic decoration, especially in the dome. The central area itself, in spite of the awkward treatment of the four smaller arches of the eight which support the dome, is a noble design, occupying the whole width of the three aisles, like the Octagon at Ely, and producing a striking effect of amplitude and grandeur. The dome above it is constructively interesting from the employment of a cone of brick masonry to support the stone lantern which rises above the exterior wooden shell. The lower part of the cone forms the drum of the inner dome, its contraction upward being intended to produce a perspective illusion of increased height.

St. Paul’s ranks among the five or six greatest domical buildings of Europe, and is the most imposing modern edifice in England.

+WREN’S OTHER WORKS.+ Wren was conspicuously successful in the designing of parish churches in London. +St. Stephen’s+, Walbrook, is the most admired of these, with a dome resting on eight columns. Wren may be called the inventor of the English Renaissance type of steeple, in which a conical or pyramidal spire is harmoniously added to a belfry on a square tower with classic details. The steeple of +Bow Church+, Cheapside, is the most successful example of the type. In secular architecture Wren’s most important works were the plan for rebuilding London after the Great Fire; the new courtyard of Hampton Court, a quiet and dignified composition in brick and stone; the pavilions and colonnade of +Greenwich Hospital+; the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford, and the Trinity College Library at Cambridge. Without profound originality, these works testify to the sound good taste and intelligence of their designer.

+THE 18TH CENTURY.+ The Anglo-Italian style as used by Jones and Wren continued in use through the eighteenth century, during the first half of which a number of important country-seats and some churches were erected. _Van Brugh_ (1666-1726), _Hawksmoor_ (1666-1736), and _Gibbs_ (1683-1751) were then the leading architects. Van Brugh was especially skilful in his dispositions of plan and mass, and produced in the designs of Blenheim and Castle Howard effects of grandeur and variety of perspective hardly equalled by any of his contemporaries in France or Italy. +Blenheim+, with its monumental plan and the sweeping curves of its front (Fig. 188), has an unusually palatial aspect, though the striving for picturesqueness is carried too far. Castle Howard is simpler, depending largely for effect on a somewhat inappropriate dome. To Hawksmoor, his pupil, are due +St. Mary’s, Woolnoth+ (1715), at London, in which by a bold rustication of the whole exterior and by windows set in large recessed arches he was enabled to dispense wholly with the orders; St. George’s, Bloomsbury; the new quadrangle of All Souls at Oxford, and some minor works. The two most noted designs of James Gibbs are +St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields+, at London (1726), and the +Radcliffe Library+, at Oxford (1747). In the former the use of a Corinthian portico--a practically uncalled-for but decorative appendage--and of a steeple mounted on the roof, with no visible lines of support from the ground, are open to criticism. But the excellence of the proportions, and the dignity and appropriateness of the composition, both internally and externally, go far to redeem these defects (Fig. 189). The Radcliffe Library is a circular domical hall surrounded by a lower circuit of alcoves and rooms, the whole treated with straightforward simplicity and excellent proportions. Colin Campbell, Flitcroft, Kent and Wood, contemporaries of Gibbs, may be dismissed with passing mention.

_Sir William Chambers_ (1726-96) was the greatest of the later 18th-century architects. His fame rests chiefly on his _Treatise on Civil Architecture_, and the extension and remodelling of +Somerset House+, in which he retained the general _ordonnance_ of Inigo Jones’s design, adapting it to a frontage of some 600 feet. _Robert Adams_, the designer of Keddlestone Hall, _Robert Taylor_ (1714-88), the architect of the Bank of England, and _George Dance_, who designed the Mansion House and Newgate Prison, at London--the latter a vigorous and appropriate composition without the orders--close the list of noted architects of the eighteenth century. It was a period singularly wanting in artistic creativeness and spontaneity; its productions were nearly all dull and respectable, or at best dignified, but without charm.

+BELGIUM.+ As in all other countries where the late Gothic style had been highly developed, Belgium was slow to accept the principles of the Renaissance in art. Long after the dawn of the sixteenth century the Flemish architects continued to employ their highly florid Gothic alike for churches and town-halls, with which they chiefly had to do. The earliest Renaissance buildings date from 1530-40, among them being the Hôtel du Saumon, at Malines, at Bruges the Ancien Greffe, by _Jean Wallot_, and at Liège the +Archbishop’s Palace+, by _Borset_. The last named, in the singular and capricious form of the arches and baluster-like columns of its court, reveals the taste of the age for what was _outré_ and odd; a taste partly due, no doubt, to Spanish influences, as Belgium was in reality from 1506 to 1712 a Spanish province, and there was more or less interchange of artists between the two countries. The +Hôtel de Ville+, at Antwerp, by _Cornelius de Vriendt_ or _Floris_ (1518-75), erected in 1565, is the most important monument of the Renaissance in Belgium. Its façade, 305 feet long and 102 feet high, in four stories, is an impressive creation in spite of its somewhat monotonous fenestration and the inartistic repetition in the third story of the composition and proportions of the second. The basement story forms an open arcade, and an open colonnade or loggia runs along under the roof, thus imparting to the composition a considerable play of light and shade, enhanced by the picturesque central pavilion which rises to a height of six stories in diminishing stages. The style is almost Palladian in its severity, but in general the Flemish architects disdained the restrictions of classic canons, preferring a more florid and fanciful effect than could be obtained by mere combinations of Roman columns, arches, and entablatures. De Vriendt’s other works were mostly designs for altars, tabernacles and the like; among them the rood screen in Tournay Cathedral. His influence may be traced in the Hôtel de Ville at Flushing (1594).

The ecclesiastical architecture of the Flemish Renaissance is almost as destitute of important monuments as is the secular. +Ste. Anne+, at Bruges, fairly illustrates the type, which is characterized in general by heaviness of detail and a cold and bare aspect internally. The Renaissance in Belgium is best exemplified, after all, by minor works and ordinary dwellings, many of which have considerable artistic grace, though they are quaint rather than monumental (Fig. 190). Stepped gables, high dormers, and volutes flanking each diminishing stage of the design, give a certain piquancy to the street architecture of the period.

+HOLLAND.+ Except in the domain of realistic painting, the Dutch have never manifested pre-eminent artistic endowments, and the Renaissance produced in Holland few monuments of consequence. It began there, as in many other places, with minor works in the churches, due largely to Flemish or Italian artists. About the middle of the 16th century two native architects, _Sebastian van Noye_ and _William van Noort_, first popularized the use of carved pilasters and of gables or steep pediments adorned with carved scallop-shells, in remote imitation of the style of Francis I. The principal monuments of the age were town-halls, and, after the war of independence in which the yoke of Spain was finally broken (1566-79), local administrative buildings--mints, exchanges and the like. The +Town Hall+ of +The Hague+ (1565), with its stepped gable or great dormer, its consoles, statues, and octagonal turrets, may be said to have inaugurated the style generally followed after the war. Owing to the lack of stone, brick was almost universally employed, and stone imported by sea was only used in edifices of exceptional cost and importance. Of these the +Town Hall+ at Amsterdam holds the first place. Its façade is of about the same dimensions as the one at Antwerp, but compares unfavorably with it in its monotony and want of interest. The +Leyden Town Hall+, by the Fleming, _Lieven de Key_ (1597), the Bourse or Exchange and the Hanse House at Amsterdam, by _Hendrik de Keyser_, are also worthy of mention, though many lesser buildings, built of brick combined with enamelled terra-cotta and stone, possess quite as much artistic merit.

+DENMARK.+ In Denmark the monuments of the Renaissance may almost be said to be confined to the reign of Christian IV. (1588-1648), and do not include a single church of any importance. The royal castles of the +Rosenborg+ at Copenhagen (1610) and the +Fredericksborg+ (1580-1624), the latter by a Dutch architect, are interesting and picturesque in mass, with their fanciful gables, mullioned windows and numerous turrets, but can hardly lay claim to beauty of detail or purity of style. The Exchange at Copenhagen, built of brick and stone in the same general style (1619-40), is still less interesting both in mass and detail.

The only other important Scandinavian monument deserving of special mention in so brief a sketch as this is the +Royal Palace+ at +Stockholm+, Sweden (1698-1753), due to a foreign architect, _Nicodemus de Tessin_. It is of imposing dimensions, and although simple in external treatment, it merits praise for the excellent disposition of its plan, its noble court, imposing entrances, and the general dignity and appropriateness of its architecture.

+MONUMENTS+ (in addition to those mentioned in text). ENGLAND, TUDOR STYLE: Several palaces by Henry VIII., no longer extant; Westwood, later rebuilt; Gosfield Hall; Harlaxton.--ELIZABETHAN: Buckhurst, 1565; Kirby House, 1570, both by Thorpe; Caius College, 1570-75, by Theodore Have; “The Schools,” Oxford, by Thomas Holt, 1600; Beaupré Castle, 1600.--JACOBEAN: Tombs of Mary of Scotland and of Elizabeth in Westminster Abbey; Audsley Inn; Bolsover Castle, 1613; Heriot’s Hospital, Edinburgh, 1628.--CLASSIC or ANGLO-ITALIAN: St. John’s College, Oxford; Queen’s House, Greenwich; Coleshill; all by Inigo Jones, 1620-51; Amesbury, by Webb; Combe Abbey; Buckingham and Montague Houses; The Monument, London, 1670, by Wren; Temple Bar, by the same; Winchester Palace, 1683; Chelsea College; Towers of Westminster Abbey, 1696; St. Clement Dane’s; St. James’s, Westminster; St. Peter’s, Cornhill, and many others, all by Wren.--18TH CENTURY: Seaton Delaval and Grimsthorpe, by Van Brugh; Wanstead House, by Colin Campbell; Treasury Buildings, by Kent.

The most important Renaissance buildings of BELGIUM and HOLLAND have been mentioned in the text.