Architektur (Französische Spatrenaissance und Frühbarock - Late Renaissance and Early Baroque in France) 1. Chor der Kirche St.Pierre zu Paris (Choir of the Church of St. Pierre in Paris) 2. Hotel de Ville (The City Hall (Hotel de Ville) 3. Theil des Louvrehofs (A part of the Courtyard of the Louvre) 4. Galeria Heinrich`s IV. im Louvre (Gallery of Henry IV in the Louvre) 5. Theil von Delorme`s Gartenfacade der Tuilerin (Part of Delorme's garden façade of the Tuileries Palace) 6. Kirche St. Etienne du - Mont in Paris (Church of Saint-Etienne-du-Mont in Paris) 7. Theil der Facade des Stadthauses zu Orleans (Part of the façade of the Town Hall of Orleans) 8. Grabmal Ludwig`s XII. (Tomb of Louis XII) 9. Portal von Schloss Anet (Portal of the Chateau d’Anet) 10. Delorme`s Franzosische Saule (Delorme’s French Column)

Description

This engraving reveals the transition from the Late Renaissance to the Early Baroque in French architecture, both aesthetically and structurally. The late 16th-early 17th-century France was a period when royal power redefined urban space. The Louvre and Tuileries area became a spatial testing ground for these new representational approaches. While traces of this tradition are still visible in the choir of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, one of the last great examples of medieval Gothic architecture, the engraving also presents the first coherent examples of the "French classical façade language" developed by innovative architects such as Pierre Lescot and Philibert de l'Orme. This new language is characterized by cordon lines, pilaster arrangements, an emphasis on continuity, and the rational organization of mass-proportion geometry. Many of the architectural examples shown here are central structures that shaped the visual policies of French court and state programs. While the Hotel de Ville (Paris City Hall) embodies the ideology of modern urban governance, the Louvre courtyard and the Henri IV Gallery encode the palace's cultural role as a "royal museum-library." Delorme's designs for the garden façade of the Tuileries Palace and the theoretical detail known as the "French column" are crucial for representing the turning point in French architecture where the relationship between support and ornament began to diverge from the Italian classical tradition. The portal of the Chateau Anet and the tomb of Louis XII in the engraving embody the iconographic aspect of monarchical monumentality (death, eternity, legitimacy) with symbolic intensity. Within this framework, the engraving does not merely present select facades. It directly reveals how the "High Renaissance" style, originating in Italy, became distinctive in France, how Gothic continuity dissolved, and the motifs with which local royal-palace culture constructed a "new national architecture."