BRITAIN AND FRANCE. l6TH TO l8TH CENTURY
extreme. The segmental pediment especially, so sharply drawn and
yet so smooth, with the two female figures holding with an inimit-
able rhetorical ostentation the shield with Henri iTs crowned
initial, would be impossible in Rome, where at that time Michel-
angelo placed his mighty cornice on the Farnese palace; impossible
also in Northern Italy, where Palladio built the first of his serene
villas and palaces, and utterly impossible in both Spain and England.
For Spain after her early welcome of the severest Italian 16th-
century classicism (see p. 105) had almost at once relapsed into
the ornamental vagaries of her past. The austerity of the Escorial,
Philip H's vast castle-monastery, with its seventeen courts and its
670 feet of frontage without any decoration, is exceptional. What
meets the traveller everywhere is the Plateresque, a wildly mixed
style of Gothic, Mohammedan and Early Renaissance ingredients,
spread over facades and inner walls as irresponsibly as ever. The
Renaissance had evidently not yet been grasped in its meaning
(%• 79).
Almost the same happened in the Netherlands and Germany.
An international centre such as Antwerp might put up a town hall
(1561-65, by Cornelis Floris, fig. 80), tall, proud, square, of con-
sidered proportions and with a three-bay centre of proud Italian
display. The motif of the coupled columns with Ionic correctly
placed on top of Tuscan and Corinthian on top of Ionic and the
niches in between may have been seen by the architect in France
rather than Italy, or else it may come from Serlio. The date of the
Antwerp Town Hall is too early to make it probable or even possible
that another of the popular and soon apparently indispensable Books
of Orders or general Books of Architecture served as a model: Hans
Blum's Five Orders of 1550, Ducerceau's Livre d9Architecture of 1559,
Vignola's Rule of the Five Orders of 1562, BuUant's Rtgle Generate des
Cinque Manures of 1564, Delorme's Architecture of 1568 or Palladio's
Architecture of 1570. How characteristic of the ruling style of
Mannerism this sudden outcrop of books on theory is has been
pointed out before. It must however here be emphasised to what
extent France shared in the new zest for publication. Germany, in the
person of the humble Blum, made her voice heard, and England
took part too, in a somewhat homespun way, with John Shute's
Chief Groundes of Architecture, published in 1563, and with John
Thorpe's drawings at the Soane Museum in London, done no doubt
with an eye to publication but never printed. They were worked on
152