Jacques Germain Soufflot
b. Irancy, Auxerre, 1713;
d. Paris, 1780.1

Jacques Germain Soufflot was a seminal French Neo-Classicist, notable in particular for the Hotel-Dieu in Lyon and Ste Genevieve (the Pantheon) in Paris. In Rome from c.1731 to 1738, he gravitated to the French Academy, where several younger pensionaries were to be associated with the proto-Romantic circle of Pannini and Piranesi, dedicated to celebrating the glories of the remains of Roman antiquity. At the same time, Roman architecture was being transformed by the Florentines A. Galilei and F. Fuga, the anti-baroque rationalism of Galilei’s work at S. Giovanni in Laterano - contemporary with Soufflot’s stay - stunning in its impact. On his return to France, Soufflot practised in Lyon and joined the Lyon Academy. He returned to Italy in 1750 in the company of the future Marquis de Marigny, then being groomed for the post of Director General of Royal Buildings. On this trip he made a special study of theatre design and was amongst the first architects to examine the recently rediscovered remains of Herculaneum and the great Greek Doric temples at Paestum. Marigny appointed him to the control of royal building in Paris in 1755 and he was admitted to the Academie Royale de l’Architecture. Soufflot’s Roman training aligned him with J. F. Blondel and other critics concerned with the threat to progress represented by the “unregulated imagination” which had produced the novelties of the Rococo genre pittoresque. His contributions to debates in the Lyon Academy make it clear that, like them, he saw the discipline of the classical rules as essential for progress. Putting progressive principles into practice in his designs for the Hotel-Dieu at Lyon, he combined a new strictness of line, firmness of form, simplicity of contour and rigorously architectonic conception of detail (associated with the ancient Greek tradition by Academic critics) to produce a more profound gravitas than had been characteristic in 18-century France - though it certainly was not foreign to the work of his Roman contemporaries. Beyond Greek Doric, Soufflot’s extra Vitruvian interests extended to Gothic, then still largely despised. At Ste Genevieve in Paris, in line with radical reductive theory but recalling experiments going back to Claude Perrault, his aim of uniting the lightness of Gothic construction with the purity and order of Greek forms was prophetic of the essential eclecticism of mainstream Neo-Classicism.