In the history of architecture, the example of Italy was carried north to the rest of Europe in various ways. Already, by around the beginning of the 16th century, a number of Italian sculptor-architects had settled in northern European cities, and had begun to introduce the Renaissance style, and some architects, notably the Frenchman Philibert Delorme, had journeyed to Italy to become fully acquainted with recent developments. For many, however, knowledge of Italy was acquired only at secondhand, sometimes from drawings of key buildings, but most usually from published treatises, especially those of Sebastiano Serlio (from 1537), Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola (1568) and Andrea Palladio (1570), which all ran into many editions. For other architects, especially Inigo Jones in England and Jacob Van Campen in Holland, Palladio’s treatise was to provide the impetus for them to travel to Italy, as many architects, notably the British Palladians, were to do subsequently. Thus “High Renaissance” Italy soon established the basic language of architecture for the rest of Europe, which in Britain and France underlay subsequent developments into the 18th century.

A great variety of regional styles developed during this early period in accordance with localized building traditions, stone predominating in France and southern Europe, and wood and brick construction in the Low Countries, England and the North, and these produced very different approaches. The continuing cultural orientations and systems of patronage of individual nations gave rise to classical reinterpretations of well-established building types: the hospitals and university buildings of Spain, the town halls and guild buildings of the Low Countries and Germany, and the private hotels and ch?teaux of France and the country homes of England.

In church design, Catholic countries turned in particular to Italian models such as Vignola’s Gest’ and stressed the facade. Protestant countries needed to develop new designs and their churches are much less assuming, conceived as simple congregational spaces, perhaps with side-galleries. The new tradition was developed in particular in Holland, where the plain but inventive brick-built structures were often elaborated externally with ornamental steeples. The most ambitious projects of the period were those conceived under royal patronage. For Philip II of Spain, a new royal palace was erected at El Escorial near Madrid (1562-82), and was combined with a monastery in an enormous rectangular complex. For the kings and queens of France a succession of chateaux were built or restored, including the Palais de Fontainebleau, which attracted a number of Italian designers. In Paris royal works included the remodelling of the Louvre begun by Louis LE VAU in 1546, and subsequently the Palais des Tuileries (destroyed) and DE BROSSE’S Italianate Palais de Luxembourg (1615-24). Even more ambitious were the plans for an enormous palace complex at Whitehall in London for Charles I of England; although only a fragment, Inigo Jones’s Banqueting House was finally realized (1619-22).