CHAPTER XII
LESCOT AND DE L'ORME
Among the architects of the later French Renaissance Pierre Lescot and Philibert De l'Orme were preeminent. The change which they effected gave the French architecture a more marked neo-classic dress, yet still without wholly eliminating its native character. This change was of course analogous to that which had been wrought in Italy by the later designers of that country, but the resulting forms in France were different from those of the Italian art, and were to the last peculiarly French, though, as before remarked (p. 179), not expressive of the French genius in its integrity. This was entirely natural. The architecture of a people inevitably retains much of its original character while yielding to foreign influences. It had been so with the Italian art of the Middle Ages when it was subjected to the Gothic influence, and it could not be otherwise with the French art of the sixteenth century when the later Renaissance wave swept over it.
Lescot and De I'Orme came strongly under the influence of Vignola and Palladio, their Italian contemporaries, and they fully accepted the Italian belief in the superiority of the neo-classic principles of design to those which had given rise to what they considered the architectural barbarisms of the Middle Ages. Lescot, says Berty,[1] "was one of the first French architects to employ the ancient style in its purity," and De l'Orme, according to Milizia,[2] "exerted all his industry to strip architecture of her Gothic dress and clothe her in that of ancient Greece."
Lescot is said to have designed the Fountain of the Nymphs, now known as the Fountain of the Innocents,[3] in Paris, in collaboration with Goujon, the sculptor. In this work there is
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