Part 25

Next in grandeur, perhaps, to this church, is the east end of S. Martin’s. Seen from the street below the east end, its great height, and the combination of the apsidal transepts and choir with the fine central steeple produce very great effect. It is worthy of notice, how completely similar all these apsidal terminations are in Cologne, and how like those of the same date in the north of Italy. The apses here, for instance, are almost exactly like that of the choir of S. Maria Maggiore at Bergamo.

Cologne is rich in metal-work and early stalls. In S. Cunibert is a fine brass standard for lights, with a crucifix; in the choirs of S. Pantaleon and S. Andrew, some good thirteenth century stalls; S. Gereon has also some old candlesticks, and some woodwork worth notice, as also have some of the other churches.

Perhaps the best example of later work in the city is the fine church of the Minorites, a good fourteenth century building, with a lofty and elegant lead turret rising out of the centre of the roof.

I found in several of the Cologne churches services in the morning, attended exclusively by children. They had no seats, but a succession of boards, with small kneeling-stools at regular intervals, were provided for them. The singing was uncommonly good and hearty, and after one of the services (at S. Maria in Capitolio), I asked the children about it, and they told me that they went every day before school. I looked at some of their school-books, and found that they had a rather full Scripture history abridgment; and among other books one full of songs and hymns, which seemed to be particularly good and spirited--hearty, merry songs, which would be sure to take with children. We should do well if we could have such a service and such books for our English children.

There was an exhibition of early German pictures of considerable interest in the old hall called the Gurzenich. I found that it was organized by a Christian Art Society, which has a large number of members, and seems to be very actively at work. In the great hall of the Gurzenich is a magnificent fire-place, of late middle-pointed date, and much like the Courtrai fire-place in general idea; there are some very spirited figures in armour in its niches. This building is well known on the exterior by its general ancient character, and particularly by the lead canopies over the figures in its lowest stage.

But Cologne is too well known to make any more of my notes (which might be extended to tenfold length) palatable; and I shall, therefore, hurry on to what is, I believe, newer ground to most ecclesiologists than are its time-honoured and well known buildings.

From Deutz (the bridge to which place from Cologne affords the best general view of the city) a few hours of railway took me to Hamm, and thence by a branch I reached Münster. The country here is cheerful and English-looking; though rather flat, it is woody and well cultivated, and thickly populated,--at least, so I gathered by the multitude of passengers who swarmed at every station, all in blue smocks, and all smoking vehemently.

The churches and domestic buildings at Münster are almost equally interesting. Of the latter, the Rathhaus is the most remarkable. It is very elaborate and beautiful in all its details, but (like most of the house-fronts here) boasts of a regular show front. The ground stage consists of four open arches; the next, of four richly-traceried windows, divided by figures in niches, carved with great spirit; and above this is an immense stepped gable-end, divided into seven panels in width, and rising to about twice the height of the real roof. It is pinnacled, and filled with open traceries, which, being pierced above the roof, show the sky through their openings. The lower part of the building is of the best middle-pointed, but in the gable some of the tracery is ogee and poor.

This front was followed in Münster throughout the rest of the Middle Ages, as also by the Renaissance school, so that the whole town is full of arcaded streets, like an Italian town, and all the houses have more or less exaggerated fronts, stepped and pinnacled high above the roof-line. The _tout ensemble_ of such a town, it may be imagined, is picturesque in the extreme, though not so valuable as at first sight it seems likely to prove to the architectural traveller. The endless repetition of the same--and that a bad--idea, is very tiresome, and so, beautiful as is the Rathhaus in some of its detail, and striking as it certainly is in its general effect, I have not forgiven it as being the first example with which I am acquainted of a long series of barbarisms.

The only old apartment in this building, so far as I could discover, is a room called the Frieden-Saal. It is a low council-chamber, of late date, which has been most elaborately restored, and renovated with much rich colour. There are some very good hinges and locks on a series of closets here.

Of the churches, there are some five or six old, besides some modern. The cathedral is very curious. Its plan shows two western towers, then a transept; a nave of two (!) very wide bays; transept again; and an apsidal choir, with several apsidal chapels round its aisle. The internal effect of the nave is singular. It is very simple, but from the great width of the bays rather bold-looking. The most notable things here are,--a very noble brass font; a brass corona in the choir; a stand for eleven candles, also in the choir; a magnificent stone rood-screen of late date; a very good _Sakraments-Häuslein_, and some niches for relics, etc., with their old doors; another stand for lights, something like that at S. Cunibert, Cologne; and some stalls of the seventeenth century, founded very closely upon mediaeval examples. The brass font is circular, supported upon five lions, the two eastern of which are standing, the others recumbent. The stem is covered with tracery and moulding, and the bowl has five large quatrefoiled circles, the eastern containing the Baptism of our Lord, and the other four the emblems of the four Evangelists, with scrolls and inscriptions in red letters; above them, a trefoiled arcade contains half-figures of the twelve Apostles. The corona is large, containing fifty candles in one row; but it is of late date, and frittered away in elaborate tracery and crocketing. The rood-screen has two doorways--one on each side of an altar in the centre of its west front. This altar still remains, with a sculpture of the Crucifixion at its back, but is not used now, a modern altar having been put up in front of it. Two very light open staircases on the eastern side of the screen lead to the Gospel and Epistle sides of the loft. There is also a very fine and large crucifix against one of the nave piers.

The main entrance to the cathedral is through a sort of Galilee of Romanesque date adorned with a number of fine statues; this is at the south-west of the church, whilst on its north side are some fair middle-pointed cloisters.

Next to the cathedral in importance is the Oberwasser-Kirche, a late middle-pointed building; it has a large south-west tower very much of the same type as the great tower at Ypres, having four windows of two lights in each stage, and four stages all exactly alike, and above them an octagonal belfry stage of later date. The first example of this kind of design is seen in the four belfry windows of the cathedral at Soest, and still more remarkably in the steeple of Paderborn cathedral, but here it is developed into even greater regularity. This design, however, is poor in kind, and only respectable when characterized as at Soest and Paderborn by massive simplicity. The south door of the Oberwasser-Kirche is good, being double with square openings within an arched head. Internally the church is very lofty and light, but of no great length, and has an eastern apse, and some traces of old wall painting. A very good brass water vat hung from a small crane by the north door and served as a stoup for holy water; this is a common plan in the Münster churches.[80]

This church was being scraped of paint and whitewash; so also in the cathedral they were removing some trumpery work of the last century, and indeed generally in this district a good deal is being done to the finer churches, and in most of them a box is provided for offerings for the restoration of the fabric: in most, I should say, which are not “evangelical”:--for in these, save where the government is repairing the stone work, they seem to be satisfied to put up pews and galleries, to keep the doors well locked, and to make their interiors look as cold, miserable, and repulsive as possible. Happily, however, the “evangelical” church is not very actively mischievous in architectural matters, and so one sees altars and reredoses still standing with candles and crucifixes, and curtains of white muslin or silk on each side, sometimes, as in the Petri-Kirche at Soest, double, first, on each side of the altar, and then the same height as the altar, and coming forward the full width of the footpace![81] In the old altars, there are always arrangements for closets--generally at one end--whilst in the middle of the back of the altar is often an opening, which I fancied might have been made for the reception of relics, but which seldom seems carefully enough fastened; the ends of the super-altars have also, very frequently, closets; generally speaking, the altars in this district are solid masses of masonry with a projecting and moulded mensa. This, however, is a digression, and I must now say somewhat of the Lamberti-Kirche, which is next to the cathedral the best church in Münster. Externally it has a western tower[82] of considerable dimensions dwarfed in appearance by the immense size of the roof which covers both nave and aisles; this is a not uncommon arrangement in this district, and has a parallel, as will be remembered, in the noble choir of S. Laurence at Nuremberg. Its main result is the great internal effect of height in the aisles and the opportunity it affords of obtaining what Germans were so fond of--an immense length of window opening. The entrance to S. Lambert on the south side is by a very beautiful doorway; the doorway itself is not very large but its jamb mould runs up to a great height and encloses a fine sculptured tree of Jesse; the branches of the tree form a series of medallions, in each of which is a half figure; the whole is very rich in its effect, and the sculpture quite exquisite. Internally the only remarkable piece of furniture I noted was a very fine rood. The proportions and arrangements of the church are very similar to those of the famous Wiesen-Kirche, at Soest, which I shall have presently to describe, and mainly noticeable for the great effect of unbroken space, owing to the large span and great height of the arches, and the small number of piers supporting the roof.

Two other churches near this afforded little worth notice. One of them was Protestant, and as a consequence, was elaborately pewed and galleried; it was seven or eight bays in length, and groined throughout, and entered by a good double door. The other was very similar, and had a curious kind of narthex under the western tower.

The Ludgeri-Kirche is of more interest, having a fine octagonal belfry of late date; this was undergoing repair, as was also the church, whose nave is of simple Romanesque with a good middle-pointed apse. There is another church of small size with an eastern apse, and a very low gabled tower at the north-west angle. This is near the railway station.

For two things besides her domestic buildings Münster is certainly to be remembered: these are the brass work and the sculpture; the latter is generally remarkably good, and I think I have seldom seen more spirited figures than I saw there.

In a silversmith’s shop, opposite the Lamberti-Kirche, I found a magnificent old monstrance, of the fourteenth century, and of very elaborate detail; it belonged to a church some miles distant, the name of which I have forgotten; this man was making church plate in very fair fashion, copying old examples with some care and with a good deal of feeling and enthusiasm; I need hardly say that such men are as rare on the Continent as they are here.

From Münster I returned to Hamm, and thence by another branch railway to Soest, travelling through a country without any feature by which to remember it save its interminable rows of poplars.

The first view of Soest from the railway is striking; several steeples, of which that of the cathedral is the grandest, stand up well behind a bank of trees, and a great extent of picturesque and half-ruined old town walls.

The town itself is very curious, much more like some large Swiss village, such as one remembers in the Upper Valais or the Hasli-Thal, than any other cathedral town that I know in northern Europe. The streets are all absurdly irregular, bending and twisting about in every possible direction, and full of half-timbered houses, which are all corbelled forward and seem generally to be very ancient. I think, indeed, that I have never seen more picturesque grouping of old buildings, but it is difficult to imagine how they can have preserved their old character so intact; there is absolutely, I believe, not one shop with a shop front or display of its wares of any kind, and hardly more than one modernized house, and this is a smart little inn with a nice garden, and a large Speise-Saal whose walls were literally covered with English prints, many of them old and very good. The population of the place consists nevertheless of some seven or eight thousand persons.

The churches have some very remarkable features, of which the most singular is a kind of narthex at the west end, not forming part of the fabric, but built within the churches, the main groining extending on over it to the west end, and a large gallery being formed above it. The best example of this is in S. Peter’s, and I shall leave, for the present, a detailed description of it.

The cathedral is a great, rude, desolate-looking church with but few remains of any interest, save at the west end, out of the centre of which rises a fine simple Romanesque steeple. This has five single-light windows in the stage above the roof, and four three-light windows above them. Then above this belfry stage is on each face a steep gable, filled in with openings of varied shapes--on one side, a large circular window, with three other small openings, and on another side three large windows of three lights, and a very small circular window. These gables are not the full width of the tower, and from the angles between them rise four tall and massive pinnacles, slightly ornamented with corbel tables under the eaves, and covered with steep pyramidal metal roofs. The spire is of metal, octagonal in section,--the angles of the octagon springing from the apices of the four gables, and from the internal angles of the four pinnacles. The size and solidity of this remarkable tower give great grandeur to it, and whilst in the treatment of its lower part we see the type of so many of the towers of later date in this district, in that of the spire we see the precursor of those noble spires rising from simple gabled towers which are the glory of Lüneburg and Lübeck.

In addition to an internal narthex, the cathedral has, in front of its tower, another groined sort of passage-way, opening to the west with six arches, and to the north and south with one arch. There is a second stage above these arches, and then from behind this mass rises the steeple. The whole of this part of the building is Romanesque, as, indeed, is the substance of the entire church though it has been much mutilated by modern additions and alterations. The interior is painfully neglected and dirty, though it is, I believe, the only Catholic church in the place. The eastern apse has upon its groining some painting, which seems to be ancient and very good, having figures of saints etc., on a large scale, but it is very much hidden by an odious modern reredos. There is a good wooden crucifix against one of the piers, and some fine very early glass in the transepts windows. Early in the morning, when I went again into the cathedral I found it full of people singing well and very heartily.

The church of S. Peter stands close to the cathedral; and its choir and aisles, ending with three apses and steep slated roofs, its windows filled with middle-pointed traceries, with the old steeple at the west end capped with a modern bulbous spire, group very picturesquely with the stern and grand steeple of the cathedral. In plan it consists of a nave and aisles, of four primary bays (each bay being subdivided by two arches opening into the aisles), transepts, choir and apsidal choir-aisles, opening into the transepts. The two western bays of the nave are again subdivided into three divisions north and south, and four divisions east and west; all this space being groined over at a low level, and having a floor above, forming a gallery level with the triforium, which also is large and spacious. The internal effect of this low, dark entrance-way is most peculiar. In S. Peter’s, its length from east to west is nearly 46 feet--just half the whole length of the nave! The architecture of the church generally is not otherwise very interesting; though the east end is good, and has some fragments of fair glass still remaining. I have already mentioned the curious arrangement of the curtains on each side of the Lutheran altar here.

S. Paul’s is another church of precisely the same type. It has a good western steeple, with a very steep square roof, or rather, I should say, a low spire. The stages of the tower are repetitions of each other. Both this church and S. Peter’s are disfigured by a wonderful accumulation of pews and galleries; there is still, however, in the sacristy, a very good press, of three divisions in width and two in height.

I come, last, to the Wiesen-Kirche, a most remarkable building, of whose history, I am sorry to say, I know absolutely nothing. It appears, however, to have been all erected at one period--in the first half of the fourteenth century,--and its scale is so fine, and its character throughout so good, that it is certainly one of the most noticeable churches in the north of Germany. Moreover, in internal effect, I think I know no church of the same size which can vie with it for exquisite grace and elegance and, at the same time, boldness and grandeur of conception.

The plan may be described as a nave and aisles, of only three bays in length, about 76 feet in width, and 100 feet in length; the nave and aisles each terminating in an apse at the east, whilst at the west end there is an unfinished front, which seems to have been intended to have two towers. It is difficult to conceive how such a west front could ever have been suitable for a building which was in no other respect more than a mere chapel. It was never, however, at all nearly completed; and now a tall slated spire finishes one of the stunted towers in a fashion which is picturesque in the distant view, but very unsatisfactory when seen close at hand. The nave and aisles are covered with one great roof, and groined at the same level. The four nave columns are very lofty, and without any capitals; the mouldings being continuous to the groining; there being no more than four points of support in a square of about 76 by 120 feet, it may be imagined that from every point the whole interior is visible. The windows are of immense height, but judiciously treated, as in the clerestory windows at Cologne, by the arrangement of colour in the glass; besides which, a kind of transom of quatrefoils runs through all the windows at about one-fourth of the whole height. Below this transom, the glass is very rich and dark in colour; above the transom, for about half its height, there are figures under canopies, also dark with colour, and then a long sweep of beautiful grisaille runs up to the head of the windows, the patterns being all geometrical, and defined by delicate lines of colour: the whole is very jewelly and brilliant, and fortunately a good deal remains. This is, indeed, just one of those buildings which depends very much for its proper effect upon all its windows being filled with coloured glass. All the old altars remain, though the church is Protestant. There is one in each apse, and one against the west side of the two easternmost of the nave columns. All the altars have closets in their ends, and the one against the south-east column of the nave has a portion of a very good middle-pointed stone reredos and is itself richly panelled below the mensa. Behind another altar in the north-eastern apse, there is the remnant of a very fine middle-pointed rood of wood, which is now nailed up behind a late triptych. There is a very good early _Sakraments-Häuslein_ in the north wall, and a good locker in the south wall of the principal apse, both with old iron doors. On two side altars in the nave, there have been erected some very fine pieces of late tabernacle-work. They have been brought from elsewhere; and I saw no place in the church from which they can have been taken. Another similar piece of stone work has been set up in the midst of the choir, and a door pierced through it leads into a pulpit, which grows out of and rests on the Lutheran altar! The north and south doorways are very fine; the latter having a window above it within the same arch, in the common German fashion. The whole church has an open parapet and lofty buttresses, with rather small pinnacles. The view from the east is certainly very striking; and though the idea is completely that of a chapel, rather than of a more ambitious church, it is certainly one of the finest chapels of its size that I have ever seen. The whole building is being restored at the expense of the King of Prussia, and at, I should think, very great cost, as it had suffered much from decay.

V

GERMAN POINTED ARCHITECTURE

Some apology is necessary for venturing to attempt to grapple with so large a subject as is that of pointed architecture in Germany. My only excuse for making such an attempt must be the vivid recollection of the journeys I have at different times made in that country, and the desire to help cordially in explaining to those who have still the journey before them, the features which characterize its architecture.

I have unfortunately been unable to hear what Mr. Parker has told you of pointed architecture in France; but no doubt he has dilated with sufficient enthusiasm upon the exquisite art there seen, upon the skill in the disposition of the ground plans--never equalled elsewhere--upon the beauty and vigour of the sculpture, and upon the nervous manliness and at the same time delicacy of the art in nearly all the buildings of the best period, at least in the old Île-de-France, in Picardy, and in Normandy. I grieve to say that I shall be able to give no such commendation to German architecture, and that, delightful as the recollections of what I have seen there are, I cannot nevertheless shut my eyes to the fact that in most respects it is entirely inferior to the development of the same style in France and England.

There are at the same time some peculiarities in the dates of old German work which are rather striking in comparison with English and French works.