Architecture en France » sculpture

Medieval Style and Art in France

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 04:44:09 +0000

Top Ten French Gothic Cathedrals

The Gothic style originated in France; the Ile de France and Picardy are dotted with fine cathedrals.These ten cathedrals represent the heights of the Gothic style. But warning; if you get addicted, you’re going to want to search out the others too – Sens and Senlis, Soissons, Noyon, Mantes… you might never stop!
1. Laon is one of the earliest Gothic cathedrals, but its architect created marvellous effects of transparence and depth in the façade and the famous towers. At the top of the towers are the famous bulls of Laon, said to be statues of the oxen which dragged the stone from the quarries up the hill to the cathedral. The church is filled with light, and the pristine simplicity of the architecture makes this little visited cathedral an obligatory stop for any traveller who wants to understand the aspirations of the early Gothic.
2. Chartres cathedral rises on a hill above the river Eure and the cornfields of Beauce. This is Gothic style at its most classic and powerful. The west front and transept porches are finely carved with figures of prophets and saints, and much of the original stained glass survives. The little figures of the donors at the bottoms of the windows, all exercising their trades – furriers, carpenters, bakers – are worth seeking out for an unusually realistic view of medieval life.
3. Notre Dame, Paris is perhaps not the finest of the Gothic cathedrals, and lost most of its furnishings in the French Revolution. But the façade, an almost square, monumental form, shows perfectly how the Gothic style uses geometrical proportions to create strongly articulated architecture.
4. Bourges is the most visionary of French cathedrals – a single, huge, open space without transept or narthex to break the pattern. Its double aisles are arranged so that the central aisle is a miniature copy of the nave of the church, with its own triforium and clerestory – as if the cathedral had been sliced in two and a new one inserted into the middle. As at Chartres, the stained glass is original – and since much of it is in the side chapels, close-up viewing is possible.
5. Amiens cathedral is massive – the biggest Gothic cathedral in France. And it’s a very pure Gothic style – simple, light, serene. The west front is full of carved detail, including symbols of the labours of the months and the virtues and vices as well as Biblical personages and local saints.
6. Reims cathedral was where the French kings were crowned; royal patronage made it a wealthy and strikingly beautiful building. The statues of the west façade – particularly the ‘smiling angel’ – have a grace and plasticity that make them the summit of the Gothic style in sculpture. Inside, the sheer height of the church is amazing.
7. Strasbourg cathedral’s lace like façade is a marvel, particularly when the setting sun brings out the redness of the sandstone. Inside, the famous astronomical clock provides a kitsch counterpoint to the glories of the Gothic nave.
8. Beauvais was the most ambitious of the Gothic cathedrals. Pride becomes before a fall, though, and after two separate vault collapses, the masons just gave up – the building was never finished. Even the stub of the church, though, is impressive – the highest and lightest work that the Gothic ever produced.
9. Albi cathedral is very different from any of the northern cathedrals. Its southern Gothic style is massive and ponderous, not light and transparent, and as if to stress the difference, it’s built in brick, not stone. But though the exterior looks like a fortress, inside it’s a treasure house of art, including fine frescoes, a painted vault, and a rood screen covered in painted statues.
10. The little-known Saint-Bertrand de Comminges isn’t one of the architectural masterpieces of France. But with its mixture of Romanesque narthex and Gothic nave, and its fine stained glass and Renaissance choir stalls, it’s one of those delightful places where every age has left its impression and every glance discovers new beauties. And how could you miss out a cathedral with its own stuffed crocodile?

Human-centered Focus in Architecture and Painting

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 04:37:29 +0000

Some of the greatest and most enduring accomplishments and advances of the Renaissance were in architecture and the fine arts. The main emphasis of these areas was on humanity and human nature and as a result it was a conscious turn away from the otherworldly concerns of the Middle Ages.
Renaissance Replacement of Gothic Style Architecture
In architecture the Renaissance churches and buildings replaced the lofty and complex Gothic style of the Middle Ages with a more personal touch of rich and sensuous Renaissance architecture. The Gothic style had been characterized by an emphasis on “height” with the aim to create majestic buildings, such as the Notre Dame de Paris or the Cologne Cathedral. These churches were intended to signify and demonstrate the power of God and of such religious institutions leading people to worship the glory of God.
However, the focus of Renaissance architecture was on geometry and symmetry. This new approach to architecture was largely inspired and propelled by a return to humanist values of ancient Greek and Roman thought and philosophy, an era the Renaissance considered the “Golden Age”. It started in Italy in the 15th century and later spread to the rest of Europe facilitated and greatly benefited by the invention of the printing press.
The Influence of the Renaissance on Sculpture and Painting
The natural forms and beauty of the human body redefined and revolutionized the style of Renaissance painting and sculpture by famous sculptors like Michelangelo, Donatello and Verrocchio.
Both in sculpture and painting the artists’ eye for naturalistic details of human anatomy and attempts to create “lifelike” people, animals, and nature was opposed to the otherworldly point of view of the Middle Ages, where natural accuracy was not seen as relevant; instead religious symbolism and spiritual aspects were regarded as the predominant force and inspiration of medieval painting and art.
In fact, during the Renaissance the body came to be seen as an operating machine, which is, for example, reflected in the drawings by Leonardo Da Vinci. This new approach was also a by-product of renewed medical and research and dissection, which was relevant for the growing concern of accurate portrayal of the human body.
Consequently, during the Renaissance, the human anatomy became an object of close scrutiny and study influencing various other parts of human life and art and later leading to systematic empirical research and the dawning of science.

FRANCE, ARCHITECTURE.

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 04:27:45 +0000

French architecture of the early modern period is characterized by three main tendencies: the survival of Gothic technology and form, the influence of Italian and ancient models of classicism, and the effort to form a strong French architectural language. Political and social overtones varied in the Renaissance, with ancient and Italian classical influences gradually merging with a lively Late Gothic tradition to express cultivation and splendor. In the seventeenth century, French kings elaborated universal principles and state institutions to express their political and cultural ambitions. Finally, in the eighteenth century, architecture itself was redefined as an instrument of social change.
THE RENAISSANCE
After Charles VIII returned from his Italian military campaigns in 1495, strong Gothic traditions were given a new patina of Italianate structure and ornament. For example, on the court side of the Francis I wing of the château (residential castle) of Blois (Loire Valley, 1515–1524), a typically Gothic spiral staircase, disengaged on three sides, is covered with Renaissance ornaments such as medallions and balusters. Soon, a series of royal châteaus showed a more radical reorganization of plans and external forms, as seen in the château of Chambord (Loire Valley, 1519–c. 1559) and the seven châteaus in the Île-de-France region (including Madrid, Fontainebleau, and St.-Germain-en-Laye) built during the last years of the reign of Francis I (1515–1547).
In the last projects of Francis I, from 1540, and during the reign of Henry II (1547–1559), the French digested Italian models and devised their own versions of them. Many French architects traveled to Italy, and some, such as Jacques Androuet du Cerceau (c. 1520–c. 1585) and Philibert Delorme (1514–1570), produced books. Other publications on ancient architecture, Renaissance buildings, and idealized architectural designs were translated into French or written by Italian architects invited to the French court. As in Italy, the new model for the architect of this generation was no longer the medieval mason but the cultivated man of ancient learning. The portion of the Louvre by Pierre Lescot (Paris, c. 1546–1578) and Delorme’s Anet (Eure-et-Loire, from 1547) are two of the most remarkable and exemplary châteaus of the times. Because of its fundamental changes, this period, which closes with the reign of Henry IV (1589–1610), is called the “Second Renaissance.”
Until early in the seventeenth century, churches resisted all but the most superficial changes. The massive vertical paired bell towers and deep-set porches of the facade of St.-Michel of Dijon (1520–1560) are reminiscent of Late Gothic churches, despite their classical ornaments. The same can be said for the overall Gothic plans and structures of the churches of St.-Gervais (1494–1621) and St.Eustache (1532–1637) in Paris.
A pioneering hôtel (noble town house) called the Grand Ferrare (Fontainebleau, 1542–1546), completed by Sebastiano Serlio, set the standard for domestic architecture. Residences in towns and in the countryside were soon patterned on its biaxial symmetry and the en suite planning of its apartments. Classical forms became more prominent, as in Serlio’s Ancy-le-Franc (Burgundy, from 1546), but medieval features persisted, as in the new design for the defensive towers, traditionally round but now squared into corner pavilions. The death of Henry II in 1559 was followed by a period of religious conflict (the Wars of Religion, 1562–1598) and economic strife during which little was built.
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY AND THE BIRTH OF THE GRAND STYLE
The reign of Henry IV launched a two-hundred-year building boom in the private sector to satisfy the social ambitions of a rising middle class. While the symmetrical Grand Ferrare remained the ideal in domestic architecture, in Paris the Hôtel Lambert (Louis Le Vau, begun 1641) and the Hôtel de Beauvais (Antoine Le Pautre, 1654–1660) demonstrate how natural features and the constraints of the site could be ingeniously masked and turned to advantage. Elegant places royales (royal squares) attracted private building around them (in Paris, the Place Royale, today the Place des Vosges, 1605, and the Place Dauphine, from 1607). Designed with uniform facades framing a statue of the king, several of these squares were built in Paris as well as in many other towns from the late seventeenth through the eighteenth century.
Two outstanding châteaus were built to express bids for political power—Maisons (Île-de-France, 1641–1660) for René de Longueil by François Mansart (1598–1666), and Vaux-le-Vicomte (1657–1661) for Nicolas Fouquet by Le Vau (1612–1670). Vaux-le-Vicomte imported from Italy the idea of one artist (in this case Charles Le Brun, 1619–1690) coordinating the décor, architecture, and garden design. Louis XIV (1643–1715) transplanted the entire artistic team, including the garden designer AndréLeNôtre (1613–1700), and even the very trees of Vaux to Versailles (Le Vau, 1668–1670; Jules Hardouin-Mansart, 1678–1689), thereby announcing the royal cultural hegemony from the outset of his personal reign (from 1661). The Sun King’s authority radiated from the palace, the satellite palaces, extensive gardens, hunting grounds, and the newly built town that constituted the country’s new administrative and cultural capital.
An upsurge of religious building, mostly during the reign of Louis XIII (1610–1643), saw revitalized religious orders rebuild numerous monasteries and churches. Church facades followed two models: the pedimented portico of the Pantheon of Rome or the two-story facade of the church of Il Gesù in Rome (Giacomo della Porta, begun 1571). These were emulated in the street and court entrances of Jacques Lemercier’s Church of the Sorbonne (Paris, 1630–c. 1648). In a more vertical French variation, the facades of St. Gervais (Paris, Salomon de Brosse, 1616–1621) and St.-Louis (Paris, today known as St.-Paul–St.-Louis, Étienne Martellange, begun in 1627) added a third level of orders (a system of proportions, columns, capitals and entablatures). Likewise, French domes were often more vertical than their Italian counterparts. They were placed closer to the facades, as in the Dome of the Invalides (Paris, Jules Hardouin-Mansart, 1676–1706), with tall drums and wooden beams raising the external profile.
Architectural historians traditionally contrasted the “baroque” “exuberance” and “persuasiveness” of Italian architects with the “classical” “reserve” and “rectilinearity” of their French counterparts. However, recently historians have pointed out the cross-fertilization and common agendas between the two. Palladian and Roman influences abound in Le Vau’s work, as in the curved wings and loosely connected pavilions of the Collège des Quatre Nations (Paris, College of the Four Nations, today the Institut de France, 1662–1670). As Claude Mignot (1989) aptly observes, the long-spanned entablature supported by freestanding columns on the east facade of the Louvre (projects from 1657; attributed to Claude Perrault, 1667) was no less “persuasive” than Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s curvaceous colonnade in front of St. Peter’s.
In the years 1640 to 1690 Lemercier, Pierre Le Muet, Le Vau, François Mansart, and Jules Hardouin-Mansart together reestablished the French “grand style.” They shunned mannerist excess of ornament and embraced a clearer expression of volume and the relation of the parts to the whole. New royal institutions—the Royal Academy of Architecture, founded in 1671, and the offices of first architect to the king and the surintendant des bâtiments (superintendent of king’s buildings), effectively a minister of culture—served as forums for articulating these rules of “good taste.”
CLASSICAL REFORM IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
The rococo style developed in the first half of the eighteenth century in reaction to the oppressive court life of Versailles in the latter part of the reign of Louis XIV. Primarily ornamental and used in interiors of domestic architecture, its forms were characterized by asymmetrical and sensual curves. Germain Boffrand (1667–1754) added a rococo masterpiece to the Hôtel de Soubise in the oval salons “de la princesse” and “du prince” (Paris, 1735–1739). Combining painting, gilding, sculpture, windows, mirrors, and multitudes of candles, he produced a bright and weightless effect. Here, all was sensual ease and luxury. Rococo set the stage for the rethinking of classical forms and the appeal to the senses on a deeper level that were characteristic of neoclassical architecture in the second half of the eighteenth century.
Neoclassicism sought to reform architectural taste through structural rationalism, an ethnographic interest in antiquity, the sensory power of architecture in nature, and social reform. Marc-Antoine Laugier (Essai sur l’architecture, 1753) argued for simplified structures and thus proposed a return to origins through imitation of a mythical “primitive hut.” Antique-style trabeation and long, unbroken entablatures seem to structure the Pantheon, Giovanni Nicolo Servandoni’s facade design for the church of St.-Sulpice (Paris, begun in 1732), and Jacques Gondouin’s School of Surgery (Paris, 1769–1775). Empirical knowledge of Gothic construction, however, underlay Jacques-Germain Soufflot’s (1713–1780) church of Ste.-Geneviève (Paris, known today as the Pantheon, 1757–1789). A more technical interest in structure and functional building types was fostered by the strengthened institutions of civil and military engineering, the École des Ponts et Chaussées and the École du Génie de Mezières, founded in 1747 and 1748, respectively.
Leading French artists spent several years at the French Academy in Rome (founded in 1666), a major international art center at the time. The new archaeological discoveries of Paestum, Herculaneum (1738), and Pompeii (1748) fanned their enthusiasm for reexamining classical architecture. Mid-century publications about Greek ruins, by James Stuart and Nicholas Revett and by Julien-David Leroy and about Roman ruins, by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, emphasized visual poetry and powerful forms through light, scale, and setting. Leroy underscored how architecture existed in historical and ethnographic contexts, thus encouraging architects to invent appropriate forms for their times.
Architecture parlante, a term associated with the next generation and with the approach of the French Revolution (1789–1799), sought to mold form and ornament to express a building’s purpose and thereby inspire social reform. Étienne-Louis Boullée’s (1728–1799) striking project for a cenotaph to Newton (1784), in the form of an astronomical observatory, commemorated the scientist’s genius. Its dramatic spherical form and lighting effects would awe the visitor who entered its orb via a long, dark tunnel. Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736–1806) used classical forms in a more expressive manner in a ring of tollhouses (1784–c. 1790) around Paris. Ledoux thought that new plans and building types would encourage social reform; a notable example of such a socially motivated project was his centrally planned industrial community, the Salt Works at Arc-et-Senans (1773–1779). New social agendas also meant that new building types emerged; one example was the freestanding monumental theater, such as Victor Louis’s theater in Bordeaux (c. 1773–1780) and Marie-Joseph Peyre and Charles de Wailly’s Théâtre de l’Odéon in Paris (1767–1782). Due to the Revolution, few buildings were built during the last decade of the eighteenth century.

Christianity on Medieval Architecture

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 04:24:07 +0000

The earliest art from the Middle Ages was created under the rule of the emperor Charlemagne. In 768, Charlemagne became king of the Franks, the Germanic tribe that occupied modern day France. He was crowned emperor by Pope Leo III in 800. His contributions to the Catholic Church made it the cultural force it eventually became.
Charlemagne made tithing compulsory, generating power and wealth in the church, and creating a powerful relationship that existed until the Renaissance era. It was Charlemagne’s encouragement and investment in the church that allowed the architecturally magnificent cathedrals to be built.
Romanesque Architecture

Romanesque architecture appeared in the eleventh century. It looked back to the Roman style, but certainly had its own touch. The essential distinguishing marks of Romanesque architecture include the rounded arch, thick walls and dim interiors. Their naves now had vaults instead of wooden roofs. Their interiors were decorated with not just sculpture but also architectural ornament. The different elements of the structure are enhance by different roof levels and set off the nave and transept against the inner and outer aisles.
Romanesque architecture is seen largely in the building of the great cathedrals. San Vitale, in Ravenna was built in the 6th century, and St. Paul’s in Rome in the 4th. However, the majority of architectural growth in Romanesque cathedrals occurred between 1050-1200. Great achievements in architecture at the time included the cathedrals in Vezelay, France and Fontrevault which took creative liberties with the Romanesque archetype.
The Chapel of St. John in the Tower of London, was another Romanesque church built in 1080. Durham Cathedral in London was built in 1093, was among the largest medieval cathedrals in Europe. According to H.W. Janson, it was a breakthrough in architectural engineering, with its three story nave, and strong transverse arches.
A myriad of other cathedrals were built all over Europe using this Romanesque style. Some included the Pisa Cathedral in Tuscany, the Speyer Cathedral in Germany, and the Autun Cathedral in western France. In The History of Art, H.W. Janson writes that Europe was virtually drowning in architectural creativity. He theorizes it was because of a need to worship God and a renewed religious enthusiasm, partly due to the Crusades.
Gothic Architecture
The church in the Middle Ages also invented the Gothic style of architecture. The first example was in the Abbey Church in St. Denis built just outside of Paris in 1140. Abbot Suger wanted to make the church here the country’s spiritual and political center. He took creative liberties with the Romanesque cathedral structure and produced a design that is graceful, almost weightless. The windows appear to be almost translucent walls, creating a thin airy interior.
The Architecture of Notre Dame Cathedral
In the book, Notre Dame de Paris, art historian Alain-Erlande Brandenburg offers an in-depth analysis of the historical cathedral. The three story cathedral of Notre Dame is synonymous with Parisian art and architecture as the Eiffel Tower. This is all attributed to the Catholic Church. Artistically, the cathedral stands as a testament to Christ. Over the main doorway, in the relief, The Last Judgment, legions of angels surround Christ, while Mary and St. John kneel at his side. The rose portals are actually stained glass windows etched with an iconographic series spanning all the major Biblical figures.
In the north screen, the life of Christ unfolds. The scenes range from The Visitation, Annunciation to the Shepherds, the Nativity, Adoration of the Magi, Massacre of the Innocents, Flight into Egypt, tPresentation in the Temple, Christ in the Temple, The Baptism, Entry into Jerusalem, The Last Supper, and Washing of the Feet. The southern cycle is themed after Christ’s resurrection and includes artistic renderings all of Christ’s appearances after his resurrection.
In the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church encouraged impressive art and architecture. Aside from the notable ones mentioned here, it is also responsible for the funding and architectural engineering of numerous other massive cathedrals throughout Europe. The church also encouraged the intricate and complex art inside these cathedrals. However, the impending Protestant Reformation would change all of this.