The Roots of Philibert De l’Orme: Antiquity, Medieval Art, and Early Christian Architecture

Abstract

The French Renaissance is the daughter of antiquity and the Middle Ages. If the antique reference is the more spectacular one, its grounding in the medieval tradition was never excluded from sixteenth-century culture. In 1549, for a theorist of poetry as avant-garde as Joachim du Bellay, resorting to words of the ‘vieil langaige françois’ (old French language) could bring some originality to new poetry; even better, the use of certain medieval words gave ‘great majesty’ to the language: