Yves Pauwels quotes Victor Hugo in the subtitle of L’Architecture et le livre en France à la Renaissance: “Une magnifique décadence”? Hugo formulates the study’s question about the origin of architectural variation during the French Renaissance, specifically in the orders: the classical styles of architecture traditionally defined as Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, Tuscan, and Composite. Pauwels expands earlier essays to explore the diffusion of architectural treatises in sixteenth-century France as indispensable: first in mastering Vitruvius’s orders and, later, as a medium for creation. Pauwels’s book contributes to a growing body of scholarship on Renaissance architectural theory and treatises. If his argument about print’s impact is not entirely novel, Pauwels’s carefully curated evidence and scrupulous formal comparisons concretize this narrative.

Pauwels’s text is divided into three sections based on stages of architectural development. Following a brief preface and introduction, each section presents essays of varying length that describe the manner in which French architects learned, mastered, and, finally, surpassed Vitruvian models. Bibliographies of primary and secondary works follow, along with name and location indexes. To supplement his book’s 134 images, Pauwels refers readers to the excellent Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance-hosted Architectura online database, which he curates with Frédérique Lemerle.

As elsewhere in his work, Pauwels deploys a linguistic metaphor for architecture’s development: Renaissance practitioners needed to standardize a formal grammar before they could imagine novel utterances. Section 1, “Les ordres avant les ordres: L’intuition de l’humanisme,” presents case studies that demonstrate the orders’ emergence in France. Subsections treat the conduits through which the orders spread: Spain, Rome, and Sebastiano Serlio. “Reflets de Rome” and “Les débuts du Serlianisme” present familiar arguments about the impact of artistic exchange with Rome and Serlio’s treatise. Section 2, “Autour de 1549: La leçon des traités,” focuses on a second generation of Vitruvius modernizers: Hans Blum’s Quinque columnarum exacta descriptio (1550), Jean Martin’s translation of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1546), Jean Goujon’s illustrations for Martin’s Vitruvius (1547), and Jacques Androuet du Cerceau’s XXV exemplum arcuum (1549). Section 3, “L’architecture à la française,” explores Pierre Lescot, Jean Bullant, and Philibert de l’Orme’s work in what Pauwels regards as the advent of a French formal vocabulary which, while cognizant of Vitruvian precedents, introduced elements uniquely suited to a French context.

In the first section, Pauwels argues that scholars have overstated the direct impact of Italian sources and idiosyncratic exchanges. He instead emphasizes print, geography’s great mediator, as the principal inspiration for early use of the orders in France. In addition to exploiting Cesare Cesariano’s (1521) and Martin’s (1547) editions of Vitruvius, Pauwels focuses on the Medidas del Romano by Spaniard Diego de Sagredo. Translated in 1536, Medidas became the first book about architecture to be published in France in the vernacular, making it accessible to a wider audience. Unfortunately, Pauwels says, Sagredo (and the Spanish generally) imitated Cesariano’s “least Vitruvian” (39) forms, and thus Medidas presented orders that did not entirely comply with the ancient text. Pauwels compares Spanish buildings and Sagredo’s illustrations against French examples such as the chapel at the Château of Villers-Cotterêts, linked to Jacques and Guillaume Le Breton, Jean de Calvimont’s Hôtel Labenche in Brive, and the church of Saint-Georges in Belloy-en-France, persuasively arguing that the deviations in their orders (the placement of Corinthian columns in a Doric portal at Brive or the Corinthian columns’ sculpted angels in Villers-Cotterêts’s chapel, for example) had precedents in the Iberian Peninsula. While maintaining the significance of the ancient ruins and contemporary theory of Italy, Pauwels expands the web of formal exchange to include Spain and the Hapsburg Low Countries. This vast European network more acutely acknowledges the complexity of Renaissance cultural exchange which other scholars have highlighted (see, for example, Christy Anderson’s recent contribution, Renaissance Architecture, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

Whereas hispanisms crept into French architecture via individual contacts and Sagredo’s treatise, the mid-sixteenth century witnessed a prolific textual exchange which, Pauwels says, standardized the orders. Section 2 concentrates on texts including the Hypnerotomachia which, Pauwels posits, along with Serlio’s Livre extraordinaire (1551), Sagredo, and Martin’s Vitruvius, inspired the ephemeral architecture of Henri II’s entries. Pauwels’s observations about these authors’ influence on the Fontaine des Innocents, the Louvre’s courtyard facade, De l’Orme’s Anet forecourt, and Goujon and Bullant’s work at Écouen are meticulous. He also advances Hans Blum’s Quinque columnarum exacta descriptio as a critical step in the orders’ development; its proportional system, legible images, and sparse text appealed to artisans, presaging Vignola’s Regola (Rome, 1562; Paris, 1620–30) in its popularity in France. Pauwels shows that the 1551 French translations of Blum’s premise, address, text, and images were variously adopted by Bullant, Du Cerceau, Julien Mauclerc, and Mathurin Jousse.

The third section demonstrates how architects mastered, then manipulated, Vitruvius’s orders. Here, Pauwels addresses Ancy-le-Franc, the tribune in the salle of the Louvre, the Tuileries, De l’Orme, Bullant, and their impact on seventeenth-century production. Through his characteristic formal close reading, Pauwels shows that at Ancy-le-Franc, Serlio did not always adhere to his treatise’s instructions. In examining the salle of the Louvre, Pauwels argues against Henri Lemonnier’s theory of Greek inspirations for Lescot and Goujon’s tribune caryatids, instead proposing a textual source: Walter Ryff’s Vitruvius Teutsch (1548). Pauwels briefly mentions additional mid-century trends, such as architecture’s relationship to other arts and the late Valois tendency to mix forms, in passages on rustication and the mode for using colored stone to ornament facades. Through discussions of the Tuileries’s “French” order, Anet, and the Premier tome’s novelties (stereotomy, original forms, personal aspects, and diverse inspirations), Pauwels positions De l’Orme as Vitruvius’s French heir, arguing that the architect’s late work evidences the “emancipation” (175) of an “inventive genius” (175) who rendered Vitruvius obsolete for contemporary French audiences. Pauwels further contends that De l’Orme’s Counter Reformation religious career motivated the architect to invent a proportional system, the divines proportions, inspired by “paleo-Christian” (184) and “gothic” (176) models rather than Vitruvius’s and Serlio’s pagan precedents. Pointing to Francis I’s and Henri II’s ambitions for an empire, Pauwels claims that the late work of De l’Orme, Bullant, Lescot, and Goujon liberated French architecture, permitting “its independence, even its supremacy, not only over the Italian model, but even over the antique precedent” (159), an assertion that itself finds precedents as far back as Léon Palustre’s La Renaissance en France (1892).

Pauwels’s broad approach to the orders’ development via printed treatises is valuable in that it encourages the consideration of alternate sources, such as Sagredo’s Medidas, and the thorough scrutiny of architectural elements. His discussions of works such as the baptismal font of Notre-Dame of Semur-en-Auxois in Burgundy intertwine examinations of architecture and sculpture, French and Spanish models, and built and printed sources, and will hopefully inspire studies that similarly combine an expansive investigation of references with attention to formal detail. Although previous scholars (see in particular Monique Chatenet, Le Château de Madrid au bois de Boulogne: sa place dans les rapports franco-italiens autour de 1530, Paris: Picard, 1987) have examined Spanish influence on individual edifices, Pauwels’s is the first protracted examination of Iberian impact, and invites scholars to look beyond Italy for formal sources. While Pauwels focuses on print, his mapping of human exchanges and their impact, as with the intersections of French and Spanish architects and texts in Orléans and Rouen, are also astute. His methodology of using sparse details to analyze architectures that do not survive (as in Henri II’s entries or at the Tuileries) is likewise instructive. Perhaps the book’s most significant contribution to architectural history, however, is Pauwels’s simultaneous attention to both Renaissance theory and practice, a welcome synthesis in a field that often concentrates on one or the other.

Though Pauwels is committed to his stated objective of formal investigation, additional references to the socio-historical context of the treatises’ creation and diffusion (which he treats separately in another recent book, co-written with Frédérique Lemerle: Architectures de papier: La France et l’Europe [XVIe-XVIIe siècles], Tournout: Brepols, 2013) would have enriched the current text. His reliance on Vitruvius as the unique canon by which to measure sixteenth-century architecture is more problematic, as it implies a rigorously defined and easily communicable standard. In section 1, Pauwels labels deviations as incorrect; “l’ensemble n’est guère ‘correct’” (39), “déroutant” (41), “étrange” (40). However in section 2, thanks to the profusion of treatises, architects’ deviations from Vitruvius earn the favorable labels of “variations” (129), “innovations” (119, 179), or “inventions” (211). Pauwels also refers to the work of anonymous masons as “maladroite” (42, 48) or “malmenée” (39), whereas De l’Orme’s (mis)treatment of Hôtel Bullioud’s triglyphs indicates only a fleeting lack of “maturité intellectuelle” (64). In such judgments, Pauwels’s Vitruvian standard allows him to define canonical versus unorthodox orders; however, this may be a modern perspective. A contemporary understanding of or aspiration for a concrete theory of the orders is debatable: Serlio, for instance, states that people “prefer licentious things to the elements which follow rules” (Sebastiano Serlio, Sebastiano Serlio on Architecture, Volume 2, Books VI–VII of “Tutte l’opere d’architettura et prospetiva,” Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks, eds., New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001, 155). Here, Pauwels misses an opportunity to define what may be the central problem of Renaissance architectural theory and practice: who creates the canon, and how—outside of a collection of specific examples—can it be defined in abstract, theoretical terms? Although indisputably influential, Pauwels’s Vitruvian standard requires an architecturally homogeneous antiquity and a Renaissance consensus on aesthetic perfection—uneasy propositions both.

Pauwels’s thoughtful reconstruction of the diffusion of printed treatises is original in its breadth and its particulars. This, along with his investigation of Franco-Spanish connections and De l’Orme’s evolution, are fundamental contributions. When read alongside contextual works by Pauwels and others, L’architecture et le livre en France provides a captivating biography of the orders in the French Renaissance.