FRENCH ARCHITECTURE ABOUT 1630
cipline in mediaeval castles and in Italian Renaissance palaces. With
Delorme's plan of 1564 for the Tuileries (devised no doubt under
the influence of the Escorial) the grand scale was reached. The
Tuileries were to have a 2OO-foot front and five courts. A little later,
under Charles IX, a yet bigger project was drawn up by Jacques
Androuet Ducerceau (c. 1510-85) who has so far only been
mentioned as a writer on architecture. Charleval in Normandy
was intended to be a large square with a square inner courtyard and
a cour d'honneur in front, possessing on the right and left service
wings each again with two courts. The size intended was over 1000
by 1000 feet, far more that is than the Escorial. From such schemes
Charles I*s and Charles ITs ideas for a gigantic Whitehall palace
were derived, the ideas which were first put on paper by Inigo Jones
and then in exactly as Italian a style by John Webb, his pupil.
But before 1650 or 1660 Jones and Webb were almost alone in
pursuing such Southern ideas. The popular style in England after
the Jacobean and often still side by side with the Jacobean was a
homely Dutch style with curved and pedimented gables (Kew
Palace, etc.). To this corresponds in France the style of Henri IV
still lingering on into the thirties of the iyth century, a style of
brick buildings with stone quoins and window dressings, best
illustrated by the architecture of the Place des Vosges in Paris
(1605-12) and by Richelieu's little town of Richelieu, founded
in 163*1 and designed with his palace by Lemercier (c. 1585-1654),
The palace, long since destroyed, was modelled on the Luxembourg
pattern and thus already a conservative work "when it was completed.
For in monumental French architecture Richelieu's period and
even more that of Mazarin are characterised by a broad new influx
of Italian ideas—and that now meant ideas of die Baroque—and by
the way they were developed in the hands of a few leading archi-
tects into a classic French style which corresponds in terms of build-
ing to that of Poussin in painting, of Corneille in drama and of
Descartes in philosophy. There is no parallel in England to this
phase, though from 1660 onwards parallelism, if in very different
national idioms, is again patent.
Francois Mansart (1598-1664) is the first great protagonist, Louis
Levau (1612-70) the second, Mansart's two magna opera were
built between 1635 and 1650: the Orleans wing at Blois and the
country house of Maisons-Lafitte. The cour cThonneur at Blois
especially (pi. ixxxrv; on the extreme right a corner of Francis Ts
161