Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 01.djvu/880

ARCHITECTURE. such as Siena anil ililan (q.v. for illustration); but Italian artists were ri])e for the Renaissance style founded by Brunelleschi and his followers early in the Fifteentli Centviry, a style based on the study of Roman monuments adapted • to mcdiieval needs. The new style employed the dome very successfully in its churches, but it was preeminently a decorative and not a constructive style, and, like the Roman architecture which it followed, found its best expression in civil not in religious monuments. Single artists stamped their works with a special style. Brunellcsclii, Alberti, Bramante, Sansovino, ilichelangelo, Pal- ladio, arc not merely names — they are types. The Roman scheme of iising the constructive arch within a decorative framework of pilasters or columns and architrave became a Renaissance conmionplace. The palaces and civic buildings of Florence, Rome, Venice. Lombardy. Genoa (for illustration see these titles), represent the essen- tial features of the style rather than such churches as those of Santo Spirito at such Italian cities as Fiorcnco. Mantua. Loreto, Saint Peter's at Rome, La Salute at Venice. Although early Renaissance decoration is so exquisitely delicate, the heaviness and size of its details grew to be a characteristic. The imitation of classic style was at first not complete; Alberti aimed at it" but it did not reach its cold perfection until Palladio. just before the opposite school of fan- tastic irregularity, called the Barocco, came to the front before the close of the Sixteenth Cen- tury. The style was at first almost entirely in the' hands of Florentine artists, who introduced it everywhere; then the Lombards took the lead under Bramante, with a branch in Venice; finally the Roman school, with Jlichelangelo, Raphael, Vignola, and many others, obtained sujiremacy. Meanwhile the new style was spread- ing oer Europe, where it first blended with and then superseded Gothic. This occupied nearly the entire Sixteenth Century, for although it penetr'&ted to France about 1.500, it did not obtain national foothold in Germany until about 1.550, or in England much before 1600. In none of these countries was it used in its original purity, being everywhere affected by national peculiarities. The most artistic changes were those in France, whose chateau architecture, especially in the Loire region and near Paris, produced masterpieces of composition worthy of comparison Avitli the best Italian work. Blois, Cliambord, the Louvi-e. the Tuileries, the Luxem- bourg, and Versailles form an unsurpassed series. For illustrations of the Louvre, the Luxembourg, and Versailles, see these titles.

Germany was more foreign to the elassicspirit: and the percentage here and in England of ]iurely classic design was uuich smaller than in Italy or France. German art, even at the Heidelberg Schloss, was too finical and barocqvie; English art, as soon as under Inigo .Tones it had shaken off all remnants of civil Gothic, adopted an ex- tremely pure Palladian Renaissance, as at White- hall and Saint Paul's, but this soon passed into a more picturesque style, as at Blenheim.

The Ni>-ETEEXTn Centiry. The regular se- quence of develo])ing styles ceases in an abrupt way with the wars of the French Revolution. Before that time no style of architecture had ever existed which was not in the main the result of natural evolution. Since the close of the Eighteenth Century, however, a marked change is evident. Since tlien there lias liecn no true stvle anywhere, but merely a series of fashions of imi- tation chasing one another rapidly across the background of equally mutable social conditions. The first of these fashions which attracts our attention is the so-called ,S7j//(> Empire, the char- acter of decorative design infiuenced in part by new study of Roman antiquity and partly repro- duced from the work of the preceding re'ign and fitted to the grandiose requirements of Napole- on's brief dominion. The French Republic had shown a marked deference to what were sup- posed to be the thoughts and ambitions of the Roman Republic as before the civil war of -Marius and Sulla, or before B.C. 100. and a fancied attempt to reproduce the Roman forms is evident in all the Avork of the Xapoleonie epoch. This, however, applies only to the larger masses, for in the furniture and metal work of the time there is more of Louis Quinze than of .-Emilius Paulus — a formalized rococo rather than a modernized Greco-Roman style. The endurance of this fashion was brief," however. The Arc de I'Etoile and the great Church of the iladeleine in Palis were begun and their char- acter determinea during this period. Also the character which we associate with Paris of wide and elegant avenues was fixed by Percier and Fontaine, although such arcades" as those of the Rue de Rivoli and the Rue Royale were not destined to become a favorite /addition to im- portant streets. The influence of the Empire style was hardly felt outside of Paris; and for succeeding students it has been rather a fashion in costly furniture and the hanging of walls with silk than an architecture of dignity. With the return of peace there came to Europe the most complctel_y non-artistic time which had there been known since iiuiii emerged from the period of rough-stone implements. It is a matter not settled to the satisfaction of any inquirer, the cause of the coiii])lete disappear- ance from the European mind of decorative ability during the first half of the nineteenth century. In Great Britain the unassuming and, on the whole, agreeablv simple buildings of the Georgian period were copied, as they were also in the L'nited States; and contemporaneously with this, in the countries above named, there was a strong inclination to study the newly discovered monuments of pure Grecian art, the buildings of Athens and Ionia, and also the remains of Roman imperial art existing in Italy and its neighborhood. The closing years of the Eighteenth Century had produced a number of extraordinarily important books, in which, for the first time, the facts concerning those ancient buildings were made known to Europe. Under the influences thus introduced into the mind of the Nineteenth Century, there were built Roman porticoes with square box-like churches behind them, such as the magnificent Cathedral of Saint Isaac in Saint Petcrsburs; and in such buildings as this the Imperial Roman feeling for costly and splendid material revived. Smaller churches of this sort are somewhat abundant, as in London. Saint Pancras; and in America, the imitations of marble churches executed elaborately in pine wood. The same influence in other architecture than that of churches is seen in the famous Walhalla on the hills near Regensburg. the Hall of Fame at JVIunich. the Capitol at Washington (q.v. for illustration).