BRITAIN AND FRANCE. l6TH TO l8TH CENTURA
wing is just visible) is a masterpiece of civilised reticence, elegant,
not very warm-hearted, yet far from pedantically correct with its
two-storied triumphal arch and the remarkably original little
semicircular third-storied pediment above. The links backward
with Lescot's age are as evident as the links forward with the subtle
perfection of the Rococo hStel. The curved "colonnades especially
convey that distinct feeling of Rococo. The way in which they
smooth over the angular break at the corners is very French and very
accomplished. A similar interior effect is achieved at Maisons-
Lafitte by the oval rooms in the wings. These were new to France;
an Italian motif introduced, it appears, by Mansart and Levau. Of
its Italian use in churches and palaces (Palazzo Barberini) enough has
been said. Its most prominent occurrence in France is in the mighty,
very Italian and very Baroque fancy palaces published in Antoine
Lepautre's (1621-91) Desseins de plusieurs palais in 1652—the parallel
to Puget's sculpture—in Louis Levau's church of the College des
Quatre Nations (now Institut de France) of 1661 and in his country
house of Vaux-le-Vicomte, begun in 1657. The church of the Col-
lege des Quatre Nations (fig. 83) is, broadly speaking, a Greek
cross, but the arms and the corners between the arms are designed
with considerable freedom and difier widely from each other. The
dominant features of the church are the oval centre with its dome
and an oval atrium. Oval also is the effect of the earlier Sorbonne
Church (fig. 82) by Jacques Lemercier (1635-42), where a Greek cross
is combined with a circular centre but with a great deal of deliberate
stress on one axis of the cross as against the other. There is just as
much spatial ingenuity in these plans as in those of contemporary
Italy, although their detail appears cold and restrained against the
Baroque of Rome.
Vaux-le-Vicomte (figs. 84 and 85) is in many ways the most
important French building of the mid-iyth century. It was begun
by Levau for Colbert's predecessor Fouquet, and is surrounded by
gardens in which the great Lenotre first experimented with ideas
later to be developed so spectacularly at Versailles, Lebrun, Louis's
Premier Peintre, qlso worked at Vaux before he started at Versailles.
In the house itself (as at Maisons and some others before) the
traditional plan of the Luxembourg is given up for that of the
Palazzo Barberini with very much shorter projecting wings, and
the centre pavilion is occupied by a domed oval saloon, again on the
pattern-of the Barberini Palace. In the wings the roofs have still the
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