Page:Character of Renaissance Architecture.djvu/228

186 Gothic effect. The portals and windows are flanked with pilasters and crowned with entablatures, and the whole is bounded right and left by superimposed columns broken by highly ornamented niches, and banded by the string courses and entablatures. On the first floor over the portal the window pilasters are made to appear as hidden behind tall ornamental niches, composed of many neo-classic and nondescript elements, arranged in the manner of the details on Flamboyant buttresses. Only small portions of the base mouldings of the pilasters appear beneath this filigree overlay. In the story next above, the central pilaster only is hidden in this way, but here a part of the capital, instead of the base, comes into view. The manner in which the pseudo-Gothic features are adjusted to the neo-classic elements of the composition is curious in other ways. The pilasters of the several superimposed orders are, of course, of equal length in each story, and their entablatures make strongly marked horizontal lines. But the nondescript ornaments laid over these orders are carried up to unequal heights, all of them crossing the middle entablature, and the finial of the central one reaching above the architrave of the top entablature, while the lateral pilasters of this upper order are wholly exposed to view, except that the finials of the canopies over the niches below cover parts of their bases. The mixture of neo-classic and pseudo-Gothic forms is carried out in the details of these superimposed ornaments. Under the base of each niche are two diminutive pilasters, set obliquely so as to present an arris in front, like the angular members in Flamboyant buttresses, as in Châteaudun, and between these is a small shaft supporting a corbel which forms the base of the niche. The niche is flanked by slender pilasters set obliquely in conformity with those below, but these pilasters are almost entirely hidden from view by very salient nondescript ornaments worked on the face of each. The mouldings of the grouped bases, which are of different magnitudes, interpenetrate in Flamboyant fashion, and the canopies over the niches are made up of miniature entablatures on curved plans ornamented with filigree, and each of them is surmounted by a group of minute niches with statuettes, and crowned by a finial. The windows have the depressed arches of the Flamboyant style, with panelled dadoes beneath, as in Châteaudun; but their profilings are