BRITAIN AND FRANCE. l6TH TO l8TH CENTURY
adorned, open in galleries on the ground floor, which Jones had
taken from a. piazza at Leghorn (in fact Covent Garden was known
in Evelyn's and Pepys's time as die Piazza), because it is the first of
the regularly planned London squares. Its west side was centred on
the small church of St. Paul's with its low, very grave, Antique
portico, a design inspired by the Italian 16th-century books on
architecture and the earliest classical portico of detached columns
erected in the North.
Now here, though only for a moment, a church had to be men-
tioned. For about one hundred years church architecture had all but
stopped in Britain, And in France, although there are a number of
interesting 16th-century churches with curious mixtures in varying
proportion of Gothic conceptions with Southern detail (for in-
stance St. Eustache and St. Etienne du Mont, both in Paris), they
are not amongst the-historically leading works. The same might
also be said of the lyth century, or at least its beginning.
Paris now took over the Gesu scheme of facade and interior (see pp.
116-118), the scheme which, as has been said before, became more
widely popular than any other during the period between 1600 and
1750 (Jesuit Novitiate Church begun 1612, now destroyed; St.
Gervais begun 1616 by de Brosse; Church of the JFeuillants begun
1624 ? by Francois Mansart).
The parallelism between this French development based on Vignola
and the English one based on Palladio need not be specially stressed.
It was part of the universal tendency of the north of Europe early
in the iyth century. In Germany at exactly the same time Elias Holl
(1573-1646) built his Palladian Augsburg Town Hall (1610-20).
And in palace architecture in France Salomon de Brosse (c. 1550/60-
1626) at the request of Maria de* Medici incorporated into his
monumental plan for die Luxembourg Palace, begun in 1615, motifs
of the Mannerist parts of the Pitti Palace in Florence. The plan of
the Luxembourg consists of an H-shaped corps de logis with lower
wings along a cour d'honneur and a screen wall on the front side. The
central axis is strongly marked by the entrance pavilion in the screen
wall and the centre pavilion of the corps de logis.
Such grand symmetrical schemes, more rigidly formal as a rule
than Elizabethan-and Jacobean compositions, are characteristic of
France. They were originally (that is early in the i6th century, at the
time when the Loire chateau of Chambord was designed in perfect
symmetry with thick round towers) a fusion of symmetrical dis-
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