RENAISSANCE ARCHITECTURE IN GREAT BRITAIN AND THE NETHERLANDS

<< RENAISSANCE ARCHITECTURE IN FRANCE:THE TRANSITION, CHURCHES

RENAISSANCE ARCHITECTURE IN GERMANY, SPAIN, AND PORTUGAL >>

CHAPTER XXIII.

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 (15581603) 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 (15901610), 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.

FIG. 184.--BURGHLEY HOUSE.

JACOBEAN STYLE. During the reign of James I. (160325), 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 (15721652) 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.

FIG. 185.--BANQUETING HALL, WHITEHALL.

FIG. 186.--PLAN OF ST. PAUL'S, LONDON.

ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL. The greatest of Jones's successors was Sir Christopher

Wren (16321723), 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).

FIG. 187.--EXTERIOR OF ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL.

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.

FIG. 188.--PLAN OF BLENHEIM.

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 (16661726),

Hawksmoor (16661736), and Gibbs (16831751) 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.

FIG. 189.--ST. MARTIN'S-IN-THE-FIELDS, LONDON.

Sir William Chambers (172696) 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 (171488), 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 153040, 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 (151875), 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).

FIG. 190.--RENAISSANCE HOUSES, BRUSSELS.

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 (156679), 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. (15881648), and do not include a single

church of any importance. The royal castles of the Rosenborg at Copenhagen (1610)

and the Fredericksborg (15801624), 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 (16981753), 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, 157075, 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, 162051; 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.

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