Page:Character of Renaissance Architecture.djvu/256

214 cylindrical columns of unusual height. The church has no triforium, but the columns are connected by arches at the usual triforium level, and these arches carry a balustraded passageway. The archivolts of this arcade have classic profiles and keystones, and the balustrade is of neo-classic form. In the west front, begun in 1620, neo-classic features are adjusted to Gothic outlines, and the central portal, in the form of a Roman triumphal arch, is furnished with columns modelled after those of De l'Orme which he claimed as his own invention.

The church of SS. Gervais and Protais at Gisors has a Flamboyant west front in parts of which Renaissance features have been inserted in different degrees of compromise with Gothic forms and adjustments. The north tower below the cornice has no such features, but the south tower has been completely masked by a late Renaissance covering in three stories of pseudo-classic orders of which the uppermost is incomplete. The main portal is flanked by pilasters, and has splayed jambs and a splayed archivolt, with an entablature at the impost. A segmental arch over this supports a ledge on which is set a tabernacle of three arches, faced by a Corinthian order having no continuous entablature but only entablature blocks, and an attic over the central arch crowned with a curved pediment. It is unnecessary to analyze this west front further; it presents one of the most confused jumbles of incongruous elements anywhere to be met with.

A different manifestation of Renaissance caprice is found in the florid exterior of the apse of St. Pierre of Caen, which is made up of details of a sixteenth-century Lombard character applied to a Flamboyant structural scheme. The round arch and the complete circle take here the place of the pointed forms, and pilasters against the angles have short Flamboyant buttresses set against them, the faces of these buttresses being treated like Lombard Renaissance pilasters.

One of the most remarkable designs to be found in the Renaissance church architecture of France is that of the portal of the north transept of St. Maclou of Pontoise. It belongs to the early period, and is much like what we have seen in the portal of the château of Azay le Rideau (p. 182). The opening is round-arched and has a narrow splay. It is flanked by pilasters and crowned with an entablature surmounted with a