Baroque and Rococo
In a similar way to the preceding century, the churches of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have a coldness quite different from the German and Flemish Baroque or the Italian. When the Renaissance style first appeared in the early sixteenth century, there was no great need for new church building, the country being so well endowed from the Gothic centuries. St-Etienne-du-Mont (1517-1620) and St-Eustache (1532-89), both in Paris, show how old forms persisted with only an overlay of the new style. It is with the Jesuits in the seventeenth century that the Church embraced the new style to combat the forces of rational disbelief. In Paris the churches of the Sorbonne (1653) and Val-de-Grace (1645) exemplify this, as do a good number of other grandiose churches in the Baroque style, through Les Invalides at the end of the seventeenth century to the Pantheon of the late eighteenth century. Here is the Church triumphant, rather than the state, but no more beguiling. The architect of Les Invalides was Jules Hardouin Mansart , a product of the academy, who also greatly extended the palace of Versailles and so created the Cinemascope view of France with that seemingly endless horizon of royalty. As an antidote to this pomposity, the Petit Trianon at Versailles is as refreshing now as it was to Louis XV, who had it built in 1762 as a place of escape for his mistress. And even more so is this true of that other pearl formed of the grit of boredom in the enclosed world of Versailles - La Petite Ferme, where Marie-Antoinette played at being a milkmaid, which epitomizes the Arcadian and "picturesque" fantasy of the painters Boucher and Fragonard. The lightness and charm that was undermining official grandeur with Arcadian fancies and Rococo decoration was, however, snuffed out by the Revolution. There is no real Revolutionary architecture, as the necessity of order and authority soon asserted itself and an autocracy every bit as absolute returned with Napoleon, drawing on the old grand manner but with a stronger trace of the stern old Roman. One architect, Claude Ledoux , was highly original and influential, both in England and Germany. And the visionary millennialist Boullee could also be said to be a child of Revolutionary times, though it is likely that such men were inspired as much by the rediscovered plainness of the Greek Doric order as by radical politics. In Paris it was not the democratic Doric but the imperial Corinthian order that re-emerged triumphant in the church of the Madeleine (1806) and, with the Arc de Triomphe like some colossal paperweight, reimposed the authority of academic architecture in contrast to the fancy-dress architecture of contemporary Regency England.
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