Les dessous de l’architrave : une singularité de l’architecture française à la Renaissance

Abstract

Beginning in the 1530s, columns are commonly used on façades, with often strongly protruding entablatures that give the cantilevered architraves an impression of instability. Architects adopted original solutions that had no classical precedents and very few Italian models, and which were not treated in theoretical works. Either they placed consoles of varying form under the architrave, following an established Romanesque practice, or they treated the architrave like voussoirs by decorating the soffit with coffers, a form borrowed from the decoration of the soffits of arches, underscoring the recourse to a specifically French art of the line. Th e singular and sometimes paradoxical formulas, encountered especially in provincial or peripheral examples, are characteristic of the difficulties facing French architects when adapting the new classical language to a particular moment in the history of the building arts.