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Art. 10.-A HISTORY OF FRENCH ARCHITECTURE.

A History of French Architecture, from the death of Mazarin till the death of Louis XV, 1661-1774. By Sir Reginald Blomfield, R.A. Two vols. Bell, 1921. ENGLISH Scholarship is debtor to Sir Reginald Blomfield for a remarkable series of books; and it is no small feat that one so busily occupied with the practice of his art should have done so much for its history and criticism. His first venture (in conjunction with Mr Inigo Thomas) was the little volume on the 'Formal Garden in England' (1892) which gave an impetus to the planning of gardens. The woeful landscape gardening,' which had run out in the waggling paths and shrubberies of suburban plots, has been discredited; and one of the definite architectural gains of our time and additions to the beauty and pleasure of life has been the spread of this out-of-doors design.

Sir Reginald's next task was the History of Renaissance Architecture in England' (1897). Some volumes of lectures and essays followed. In 1911 he brought out the first part of his French history, from the reign of Charles VIII to the death of Mazarin (1494-1661), and the two volumes before us bring it down to the limit the author has set himself. Much research has gone to their making. The buildings in their present condition have been studied and compared with the rich material of elevations and plans provided by the French draughtsmen and engravers of the 17th and 18th centuries. But beside the monuments themselves and the records of design for these and others that have disappeared, a mass of evidence is now available bearing upon the authors of the buildings, their official superiors, their assistant staff, the sums paid them, and the time occupied in construction. The most notable of these sources is 'Les Comptes des Bâtiments du Roi' for the reign of Louis XIV, to whose printing and editing M. Jules Guiffrey devoted so much patience and learning. There are, besides, the proceedings of the Academy of Architecture, the correspondence of the Directors of the School of Rome, and other magazines of fact. From such documents the author, as in his previous volumes, draws conclusions about the share of

architects in various works which sometimes challenge accepted history. Among previous critical authorities J. F. Blondel, the architect-historian, comes in for high praise, and his views are often endorsed by his 20thcentury successor.

The book has the amount of illustration it could bear without expanding beyond reasonable limits of size and cost. The plates are reduced versions of the engraved plans and elevations of Marot and others, supplemented by Sir Reginald's own pencil sketches. For completeness photographs are also needed, in spite of their peculiar disabilities, but for these we must go to the collections of Planat and Rümler, to monographs on Versailles, the Louvre, and the Châteaux of France. One of the best productions of the kind is the 'Petit Trianon' of Messrs Arnott and Wilson, an exhaustive array of measured drawings and well-executed photographs. The order of Sir Reginald's book is biographical, with occasional chapters of introduction and summary. It is written with its author's customary lucidity and vigour.

Sir Reginald Blomfield's scholarship has never been mere scholarship; it has aimed at practice, and he continues to restate and drive home the doctrine that was the burden of his English history and of the earlier French. His attitude and insistence are best understood if we recall the doctrines that he was up against when he began to write. Ruskin, the prophet of a previous generation, was alive to beauties in the enrichment of architecture rather than to its large essentials. For him and his followers the Renaissance was a dead hand upon the intense and fine imagery of mediæval building. Morris and the Arts and Crafts group who succeeded looked upon the architect as a 'man in the office' who smothered the life of the 'craftsman'; and their ideal was a state of things in which a building would come together by the co-operation of the stone-worker, woodworker, and so forth, without the intervention of a general designer. Now, whatever we call such a designer, he must certainly have existed when the great Gothic buildings took shape. A period followed when this general control was more uncertain. The tradition of Gothic construction lingered while Renaissance detail filtered in. The amalgam had many charms, witness such a

building as the Château de Montal; but it was inevitable that with knowledge of what had happened in Italy the day of the scholar-architect should succeed, with a more conscious effort after mass, scale, and proportion, a different social standing and enlarged authority. As Brunelleschi had broken the reign of the master-builders in Florence over the problem of the Dome, so in France Philibert de l'Orme and Bullant, in England Inigo Jones, returned from Italy, stand at the opening of the new chapter. Sir Reginald would allow of course that much rich possibility in motive and material was lost in the rather theoretical austerity of the new departure; he instances indeed the delightful Manoir d'Ango. His point is that ornament and detail are not architecture, and that the new departure was inspired by that principle.

So much is clear. More difficult is it to formulate the peculiar balance between living freedom and a pedantic revival of classic elements which Sir Reginald holds to have been maintained till towards the close of the 18th century in France and England. The claim is that what the scholars imported the artists established as a fresh vernacular tradition. It is evident that, when architectural design began to look backward as well as forward, when the architect was doubled by an archæologist, there must be danger of the dose of learning overpowering the art, a danger the greater as the archæology became more exact. The great men of the Louis XIV-XV period, Sir Reginald argues, contrived to borrow the features of Roman and Italian design without pedantry, using them as so much material' in a 'language' embracing old terms and new; they could dispense with the orders,' and still more with their 'superposition,' and design as free from slavery to the past as the greater Italians. But archæology in the end became too strong, reinforced by Pompeii and Greek temples; and under its tyranny the free life of the tradition foundered.

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From this point of view' tradition' means a limitation of the elements accepted for the play of design, so that a store of experience in their handling grows from man to man. The plant must not be at the mercy of constant uprooting or of reckless manuring; it must take from the museum stores no more than it needs for its

proper life, yet must be fed with past examples of fineness, if it is not to run out into weediness or sterility. The artists must be aiming sufficiently at doing the same thing to be half-automatic about a great part of their design, and yet alive in the margin left for originality. If these conditions of health apply to all artistic tradition, they have peculiar force in the case of architecture. A painter can make endless experiment at little cost before committing himself to his final form, and remake a failure. An architect is not free to pull his work to pieces, unless he be a François Mansart working for a complaisant millionaire; he can only conjecture roughly the effect his design will have in the solid. The more therefore he can use the experience of his masters and contemporaries and treat as accepted doctrine the main matters of building, the less is he subject to disaster, and the freer to concentrate on his margin of difference from a substantial lump of common experience.

These are the advantages of 'tradition' as such, but the author is brought up early in his book against an influence that affected its health in France. What was the effect upon it of the foundation and activity of the Academies? Historically the Academy of Painting and Sculpture came about as a refuge from the tyranny of the guilds. Only the King's artists were free from strict supervision and interference by medieval corporations; and this freedom was secured by the inclusion of privileged artists in the new body. The Academy of Architecture, on the other hand, grew out of a consultative committee formed by Colbert, which became professional at the time of the Louvre competitions. The members of both were very definitely the King's servants and to some extent his pensioners; and they were unable to leave the country save by his permission. But to the new servitude there was another side. Those artists, enrolled by the State, were employed by the State. In this country we have a State machinery for the training of artists, but not its complement-work for them when they have been trained. In Paris the craftsman who was trained was also employed in the State manufactories of Gobelins and Sèvres; and painters and sculptors, as well as architects, were engaged on the vast royal projects at Versailles and elsewhere.

Apart from these historical differences, the leading conception of an academy is that of an authoritative school, preserving a body of tradition and moulding the new generations in its light. With such an ideal few would quarrel. But the sad historical truth is that the schools of the academies have never been able to maintain this position, and that the living schools have had to grow up outside of them. The French Academy of Architecture has perhaps come nearest to the ideal in the fine tradition of workmanship it has fostered, and also in educating a line of highly competent, brilliant, and learned draughtsmen; and this has depended on its most definite educational venture, the setting up of the school in Rome with its system of prize pupils. But this success was itself to prove a danger to the health of the 'tradition' which is to Sir Reginald the life-blood of architecture. The more intensely and closely the students of the School of Rome studied and rendered the remains of ancient architecture, the nearer came the day on which these would be religiously copied and 'revivalism' smother the freedom of the designer. Archæological study has its own life and logic. When it had exhausted Rome, Greece was waiting for it; when it had revived Greece, the Middle Ages took their turn; the architect ended with a surfeit in a museum of styles. The villains of the piece were for Sir Reginald the 'amateurs '-Winckelmann, De Caylus, Quatremère de Quincy. But is it not inevitable that research should breed its own professionals ? Moreover, in tilting

against amateurs,' Sir Reginald is on rather treacherous ground. As against the professional master-builder Alberti, the man of new ideas, was an amateur; so was Claude Perrault the doctor, Inigo Jones the painter, Wren the man of science who became architect.

Sir Reginald Blomfield, who is himself an excellent type of Academician, says the best he can for the activities of the French Academy, but, when he comes to sum up the results of a regime of stricter authority, his instinct as an artist revolts, and another attitude is forced upon him. He looks back with regret to the days of his hero François Mansart; and for the namesake Jules Hardouin Mansart, typical architect of the Colbert system, he has contempt and a dislike that approaches

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