BRITAIN AND FRANCE. l6TH TO l8TH CENTURY
Again the contrast between the only slightly older chapel itself and
this addition from abroad is striking. And as the one was in the idiom
with which everybody had grown up, while the other seemed to
speak a foreign language, it is understandable that English patrons
wavered between admiration and bewilderment. Very few were
prepared to go the whole way (more in fact in France, where there
was less of a racial contrast than in England), and those who did, had
to rely on craftsmen from Italy, because the English or even the
French mason could not at once get into a manner so novel both
technically and spiritually.
* Now of Italians there were more and more who found their way
into France and were welcomed by Francis I, but few who travelled •
on to Britain. Leonardo da Vinci died in France. Primaticcio came
in 1532, Serlio in 1540. They were all painters and not trained for
building in the mediaeval sense. They only designed, and for the
execution of their designs had to rely on the native master masons.
A deep antagonism developed at once between the Italians and the
competent traditional craftsmen of France to whom these Italian
intruders were mountebanks and jacks-oŁ-all-trades. So the new
ideal of the artist-architect entered France in this interesting form of
a struggle between the builder and the decorator.
However, the contrast does not often appear in actual buildings.
For—again probably thanks to racial affinity—the French master
masons very soon adopted the Italian vocabulary and usedlt to pro-
duce an essentially original style neither Gothic nor Renaissance.
Two stages can be distinguished: the first that of the Loire school,
the second that of Lescot's work at the Louvre. The wing of Francis I
at Blois (pL ixxix) was built between 1515 and about 1525.
Every motif used in its decoration is of the North Italian Early
Renaissance. On the other hand, the very existence of a newel
staircase, and also the fact that its vertical supports are scarcely
disguised buttresses, are mediaeval. Yet the emphasis on horizontal
divisions, the even stronger emphasis , on the top cornice, and
the arcaded galleries along the whole garden front prove that the
designer of Blois, a Frenchman for all we know, had a feeling for
what the Renaissance meant.
The attitude of English architects was characteristically different.
Hampton Court had been begun in 1515 for Cardinal Wolsey. A
little kter Henry VHI asked Wolsey to make birr) a present of the
palace in its unfinished state. He added to it, amongst other parts,
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