How to Study Architecture by Charles H. Caffin (free reads .txt) 📕

VIII, in surrounding himself with a new kind of political advisers, had also welcomed foreign artists to his court. Among them were Holbein, a versatile designer in various mediums as well as a great portrait painter; Torrigiano, who executed Henry VII’s Tomb in Westminster Abbey (1512); Giovanni da Majano, who modelled the busts of the emperors in the terra-cotta medallions over the entrance-gates of Hampton Court; Benedetto da Rovezzano, designer of the Tomb of Cardinal Wolsey, which has perished, and a certain John of Padua, who is supposed to have been the architect of Longleat House in Wiltshire.

Henry’s partiality for Italian artists may well have been inspired by the example of Francis I, whom he met in 1520 on the celebrated “Field of the Cloth of Gold.” At any rate there are many examples of sculpture, dating from the first half of the sixteenth century, represented in tombs, choir-screens, and organ-screens, which were purely Italian in their decorative design and of marked refinement. Terra-cotta enrichments, of similarly pure Italian craftsmanship, are to be seen in certain specimens of domestic architecture, such as Sutton Place, near Guildford, Surrey, and the entrance tower of Layer Marney, Essex, both of which were completed in 1525.

The suppression of the monasteries, 1536-1540, resulted in a revival of architecture, for in many cases the buildings were bestowed upon laymen who converted them into mansions, while a large part of the Church funds was devoted by Henry VIII and Edward VI to the erection and endowment of Grammar Schools.

ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN PERIODS

Under Elizabeth England reached a hitherto unexampled prosperity and the period is one of country-house building, in which especial attention began to be paid to the allied art of landscape gardening. Among the most famous are: Burghley House and Kirby Hall, Northamptonshire; Knoll and Penshurst, in Kent; Charlecote, Warwickshire; Longleat House and Longford Castle, Wiltshire; Wollaton, Nottinghamshire, and Haddon Hall, Derbyshire.

Some of the mansions built during the reign of James I, the so-called “Jacobean Period,” are Holland House, Kensington; Bolsover Castle, Derbyshire; Old Charlecote House, Kent; Audley End, Essex; Hatfield, Hertfordshire; Ham House, Surrey; Bramshill, Hampshire; Bickling Hall, Norfolk; and Aston Hall, Birmingham, which was completed in the following reign.

The houses mentioned in both these lists are constructed of stone or brick; but timber construction was still employed, especially in Cheshire, Lancashire, and Shropshire. To these periods also belong the following Colleges. In Cambridge: The Gate of Honour, Caius; Emmanuel; the courts of Sidney Sussex and St. John’s; the quadrangle, Clare, and Nevill Court, Trinity. In Oxford, Jesus, Wadham, Pembroke, Merton Library, and the Gateway of the Schools, now the Bodleian Library.

It is of little advantage to try to distinguish between the Elizabethan and the Jacobean period. Both represent a progression from the Gothic in the direction chiefly of superior conditions of comfortable living; but they retain many of the Gothic characteristics, while the modifications, more or less Renaissance, are in the manner of embellishments, and applied not according to any structural principles but as opportunities of imitation were available.

Books of Design.—There were books on the use of Classic Orders. The first to reach England was the work of the Italian Serlio, who had become domiciled in France. In 1567, John Shute, a painter and architect, who had been sent to Italy by the Duke of Northumberland, brought out his “Chief Groundes of Architecture,” the first work of its kind published in England. In 1577 appeared the pattern book of Vredeman de Vries of Antwerp, representing Italian details, debased by Flemish and German ingenuity, which was responsible especially for the prevalence of strap-ornament, that is to say, geometric designs of flat bands, studded with knobs, as if they were metal or leather work, attached to the wall by rivets.

The decorative inspiration, therefore, was purer at the beginning than in its subsequent development. For example, the decorative use of the orders is better in some of the earlier buildings than the later ones. In fact, what chiefly distinguishes the Jacobean from the Elizabethan is an increasing grossness of detail, apparent in the furniture and fittings, as well as in the embellishment of the exteriors.

Architect’s Function.—These conditions were fostered by the circumstances under which the building was conducted. There were architects whose names survive, the earliest being John Thorpe, the designer of Kirby, Burghley, Longford Castle, and Holland House. But the custom of the time seems to have limited the architect’s function to the supplying of a plan and design; probably more in the nature of a sketch than of actual detailed drawings, after which the building was handed over to the sole control of a master-mason, who worked out his details from the pattern book. Naturally, such a divorce of construction and design was little likely to result in the consistent development of an architectural style.

Plans.—The square plan was retained from Gothic times in the case of colleges and in some mansions. But usually, to secure more air and light the fourth side was dispensed with, the gate-house, which had been its central feature, becoming a separate building. And the tendency was to prolong one side and shorten the wings, so as to produce the E plan, or to lengthen the wings by projecting them on each side of the main façade, thus forming a letter H. Or the wings are replaced by outlying pavilions joined to the main building by corridors. Sometimes the plans are irregular, representing the additions made to an original Gothic house.

Roofs.—Many Gothic features were preserved. Oriel and bay windows were frequent, and the windows retain their mullions and transoms, and increase in size, being often carried up through several stories. Square or octagonal towers abound, occasionally battlemented but generally finishing in a parapet or cresting, the roof being concealed or rising in a low cone or pyramid. Similarly, the main roofs vary; high, flat, and low ones even occurring in the same design. They are covered with lead or tiles, and surrounded by balustrades, formed of battlements, successive arches, or pierced ornament. Gables are edged with scroll-work, while dormer-gables, as in the Netherlands and Germany, are stepped or carried up with variously curved outlines. The chimneys, single or grouped in stacks, continue to be a prominent feature, their decoration, occasionally, as at Kirby and Hatfield, involving a use of orders.

Use of Orders.—The orders when applied to the façade, are treated with little regard to purity of style and are often disfigured with strap ornament. When used in interior decoration, the pilasters frequently diminish in width toward the base, or swell out in bulbous curves; there being little or no limit to the extravagance of form that columns and pilasters alike assume in chimneypieces and furniture. Indeed, during the Jacobean period the grotesqueness of ornament notably increased, accompanied by a corresponding coarseness in the modelling. Moreover, this characteristic invaded the gardens, where trees and hedges were trimmed or “pleached” into the shape of birds, or beasts, or fantastic designs.

However, although the mansions of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods will not stand scrutiny on the score of architectural propriety, they have besides their picturesqueness a quality that is aptly characterised in Cowper’s phrase, “the stately homes of England.” They possess dignity and, above all, are homelike. They bear the stamp, not of the professional architect, but of the variegated family life that they have fostered for successive generations.

Interiors.—And this is equally true of the interiors. Comfort is not sacrificed to stateliness. The chief apartments may attain grand proportions, but they do not give the impression of being reserved for merely ceremonial purposes; they are centres of domestic life. The Gothic feature of the Great Hall was preserved; and, in the early examples, while the family and the retainers still took their meals together, a dais occupied one end, the opposite end being separated from the buttery or larder, and the kitchen by a richly decorated wooden screen, above which was the minstrel gallery. The conspicuous feature of the hall was the fireplace, with a chimneypiece on which the most elaborate decoration was lavished, the rest of the walls being panelled in wood to a height of eight or ten feet, leaving a space above for trophies of the chase or family portraits. This type of hall is still retained in all the dining halls of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges.

Adjoining the hall was a solar for the intimate life of the family. Gradually, as the taste for privacy increased, a separate room was used for dining and other living-rooms were added until the hall came to be more and more an entrance hall, and the main living apartments were disposed as in Italian and French custom, on the second floor. This caused the staircase to be treated as a prominent feature, which, as it were, prolonged the spaciousness of the hall. Occasionally of marble or stone, it was usually constructed of oak with massive newel-posts and balustrade, richly decorated.

In the earlier examples, and even in some later ones, as Inigo Jones’s design of Chevening House, the apartments are arranged on the “thoroughfare” system, opening into one another en suite. But the inconvenience of this in the entertaining of guests led to the adoption of a corridor along one side. By degrees this was widened and developed into what is the most distinctive feature of these old English houses—the Long Gallery. Lit with tall windows, often with deep bays that form attractive alcoves, it served as a pleasant sitting-room and equally as a place for exercise in wet weather, while its inner wall provided space for pictures. In fact, this room seems to have been the origin of the term “picture gallery.”

Special care was bestowed upon the ceilings. Occasionally the beams were exposed, but the usual practice by this time was to sheathe them with lath and plaster, the surface of which was decorated with stucco relief in geometrical designs. At times the flat of the ceiling was connected with the walls by a concave member, called a cove. Often, when the wainscot was not carried up to the level of this, the upper part or dado also was decorated with stucco relief.

It is characteristic of the use of the pattern books that the motives of decoration employed in the exterior and interior embellishment are used also in the furniture of the period, which on the whole is distinguished by its massiveness, exuberance of ornament, and the mechanical method of the workmanship. For much of the ornament is either cut out of the flat wood with a jig-saw or carved upon forms that have been turned upon a lathe.

ANGLO-ITALIAN PERIOD

With the accession of Charles I commenced an era of more refined and cultivated taste. The King, as a young man, escorted by the pleasure-loving Duke of Buckingham, had visited the Court of Spain in search of a wife, and had seen the wonderful array of Titians and Rubens’s in the Royal Gallery. Later he had married Henrietta Maria, daughter of Henri IV, who, under the inspiration of his wife, Marie de’ Medici, was introducing the classical style into French architecture.

Inigo Jones.—Charles himself had planned to erect a palace at Whitehall that should surpass the Louvre in grandeur and found in Inigo Jones (1573-1652) an architect fully qualified for the ambitious enterprise. He had made a prolonged study of the Renaissance style in Italy, spending much of the time in Vicenza, where he had become an ardent admirer of Palladio’s work.

Whitehall Palace.—His plan of Whitehall Palace provided for an immense rectangle, 1152 by 720 feet, surrounded by façades, three stories high. The interior court was to be divided into three parts by two wings of two stories, which were to be united to the main side-façades by transverse wings, so that the plan would have embraced a large court and six smaller courts, one being circular in plan. However, a scheme of such