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Until recent decades, studies of sixteenth-century French architecture told the story of the “march of classicism,” that is, the waning of France’s native Gothic style, as it was progressively supplanted in favour of the Renaissance style, first imported at the end of the fifteenth century in the wake of the invasions of Italy. According to this schema, French classicism evolved from the naïve and superficial application of ornament à l’antique in traditional cathedrals and chateaux to the correct and thorough — yet still distinctively French — style developed under the aegis of Henry II and ratified by the French academies of the seventeenth century. Against the twinideals of the Italian Renaissance and the French Baroque, both posed as normative models of classicism in histories of architecture, the earlier, so-called “mixed” style of the French Renaissance had long been subject to scathing criticism, or at best, benign condescension. By calling into question the prejudices behind these negative assessments, new research in the field has endeavoured to assess early sixteenth-century French architecture according to its own terms, that is, as a resourceful, experimental, and frequently resistant response to the unavoidable influence of Italy.

Lire la suite (Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme)