Early Renaissance

The many invasions of Italy from 1494 until 1525 by French armies acquainted the French kings and nobles with the charms of Renaissance art. During the reigns of Louis XII and Francis I, the French possessed the city of Milan for the first 25 years of the 16th century. It was in Lombardy, therefore, that contact was made between French art and the Renaissance, and it was the Lombard Renaissance style that appeared in France during its early Renaissance.

The new style had a certain prestige since it was imported by the nobility and aristocracy, while the middle-class burghers continued to support their native Gothic style. This social difference also applied to the artists themselves. The French aristocracy imported Italian architects and artists who had been influenced by the Italian Renaissance and who were considered to have a higher social standing than artisans. The French builders and craftspeople who executed the designs of the Italians still belonged to the social level of medieval artisans. This created a friction between the two groups, which was furthered by French resentment of imported foreign artists.

With the exception of a few brief outcroppings of Classicism in such centres as Marseille and Gaillon, French early Renaissance architecture was centred in the Loire valley, since the capital of France was at nearby Tours during the reign of Louis XII and the early part of the reign of Francis I. Most of the new architecture was secular, such as the château, which was an offshoot of the medieval feudal castle combined with the idea of an Italian villa. A characteristic example is the château at Blois, where two wings in the early Renaissance manner replaced parts of the 13th-century château. The first wing, erected (1498–1503) for Louis XII, is almost completely in the late Gothic Flamboyant style, with high roofs, an asymmetrical elevation, and pointed, depressed, and ogee arches. The only hint of the Renaissance is the occasional use of a bit of Classical decoration, such as egg-and-dart molding, mingled with the Gothic. The second wing, built (1515–24) by Francis I, is more nearly in the Renaissance style. The structure remained Gothic with a high roof and dormers and the irregular spacing of the vertical windows, but all the ornament was in the Classical mode, although its handling was often non-Classical. Classical pilasters were used to divide the elevation into bays, but there is no consistency in the proportions of the pilasters. The most notable feature of the interior elevation of the wing of Francis I is a great octagonal open staircase, five sides of which project into the court. Within is a spiral staircase set on a continuous tunnel vault that is supported by radiating piers. On the surface of the piers are panels in low relief of arabesque decoration, of a type that is found often in Lombard Renaissance architecture. The richness of the Lombard style blends very well with Flamboyant Gothic, which had always been characterized by intricate and rich decoration. The exterior elevation of the wing of Francis I consists of a series of open loggias—the two lower ones arched, the upper one with a straight entablature—reminiscent of the famous series of loggias just completed by Bramante and Raphael at the Vatican palace in Rome. Yet the Italian High Renaissance concept was expressed in France in early Renaissance terms with squat pilasters, irregularly spaced bays, and somewhat depressed arches.

The finest example of the early French Renaissance style is the château, or hunting lodge, erected between 1519 and 1547 for Francis I at Chambord. The Italian architect Bernabei Domenico da Cortona presumably made the basic model for the château, but the designs of Italian architects were usually executed by French builders (in this case Pierre Nepveu), often with many changes. Chambord is a tremendous structure, about 500 feet (150 metres) wide, with a plan showing the gradual breakdown of the old castle plan. There is a rectangular court surrounded by walls with round towers at the corners, but on three sides of the court there are only low walls serving as screens. The old donjon, or massive chief tower of medieval castles, developed into the château proper as a blocklike building with round towers at each corner. The flat passageways over the screen walls and on top of the central block were intended to form galleries from which the ladies of the court could observe the hunt. The plan of the main block of the château reveals Italian influence in its symmetrical organization on cross axes with a double spiral staircase at the centre. In the four corners left by the cross axes are four identical apartments, each of which consists of three basic rooms (chamber, antechamber, and cabinet); this form of apartment was from then on the favourite unit of French domestic planning.

Typically for this period, the silhouette and structure remained Gothic in elevation with strip windows, a multiplicity of elements, and a general vertical expression. Ornament, however, is in the Classical vocabulary of pilasters, round arches, and at times a geometric decoration consisting of slate panels set in the cream-coloured stone.