STRAPWORK ORNAMENT

novel language of ornament known as bandwork or strapwork*
Floris in his town hall handles it with discretion. It hardly appears
in the towering gable with its obelisks, scrolls and caryatid pilasters,
the finishing flourish to this
ponderous building, and a
motif entirely in the Northern
mediaeval tradition. But in
the smaller town halls, guild
halls and market halls, and the
private houses of the Nether-
lands these gables, the leitmotif
of the i6th and early lyth
centuries, are overcrowded
with strapwork. The pro-
vincial decorator-architects
were not prepared to give
up any of the exuberance to
which the Flamboyant of the
15th century had accustomed
them. And instead of making
up an ollapodrida of Gothic and
Renaissance, such as the Spanish did in their Plateresque, they were
headstrong and imaginative enough to invent something for them-
selves. For invention these forms must be called, even if they can be
traced back to such Mannerist detail as that round the top windows
of the Palazzo Massimi (pi. LV), and to the work of the Italian
decorators at Fontainebleau. They consist chiefly of somewhat
stocky thick-set curves of fretwork or leather-strap appearance
(fig. 81), sometimes flat, but more often three-dimensional and
contrasted with naturalistic garlands and caryatids. The popularity
of the strapwork style soon spread into the adjacent countries—
not to France of course, but to Germany as well as England.

To understand Elizabethan and Jacobean architecture in England
one has to be familiar with the three sources just mentioned: the
Italian Early Renaissance, the Loire style in France and the strap-
work decoration of Flanders. This wide-awake interest in so many
foreign developments is the aesthetic equivalent of England's new
international outlook since Queen Elizabeth, Gresham and Burghley.
However, one has also to remember all the time that a strong Per-
pendicular tradition, the tradition of the picturesque, asymmetrical.

155

81. TYPICAL FLEMISH AND DUTCH STRAP-
WORK ORNAMENT OF THE LATER l6TH
CENTURY (FROM THE RHINELAND COUNTY
HALL, LEIDEN, 1596-98).