The Garden Axis: French Gardens

The notion of a strictly symmetrical layout which the Italians had touched upon and then discarded was reborn in French hands as the logical outcome of the new parterre. The transition from a garden that was still rectangular, disconnected and self-centered, basically medieval, to one that was conceived as a unit harmoniously composed about a central axis yet outward looking, truly of the Renaissance, was accelerated during the reigns of Francis's son and disastrous grandsons. Francis did not care for his son. He married him while still a child to Catherine dei Medici. Henri II reacted by rejecting not only his father and the wife his father had chosen for him but also the Italian artists whom they both patronized. When Henri ascended the throne Primaticcio, who had led the Italian group at Fontainebleau, was dismissed and replaced by the Frenchman Philibert de l'Orme. In the resulting conflict of personalities between Catherine, Queen in title, and Diane de Poitiers, Queen in fact, great strides forward were made. But there was no question of reverting to a pre-Italian period; by this time there were artists native to France who had absorbed the influence of the School of Fontainebleau and wished to try their wings without Italian supervision. The conflict was now not between Gothic and Renaissance styles, but between the Renaissance as interpreted by native artists and the Renaissance as interpreted by Italians. Built almost at the same time the two chateaux, Anet, designed by Philibert de l'Orme for Diane de Poitiers, and Monceaux-en-Brie, by Primaticcio for Catherine dei Medici, illustrate the difference of attitude. Both are drawing-board unities. Each has gone far towards forgetting that the chateau was once a fortress, but the garden at Anet is an inward-looking garden, as the chateau itself is a more inward-looking building than that at Monceaux. De L'Orme could still not rid his plans of the memory of the days of the Free Companies when outside walls were high and outside windows were small, while the Italian whose outside windows were large is already moving in the direction of the vista garden by laying one rectangular plot behind another and binding them together on the same axis as the house.