CHAPTER IV

CENTRAL MEDIÆVAL DESIGN

Gothic architecture is a natural development of the Romanesque architecture of northern France. It took its origin in the second half of the twelfth century, that origin being wholly constructional. The Romanesque builders were extremely harassed by their problems of masonry roofing, as mentioned in Chapter III, and there was taken up as a device to facilitate this vaulting the plan of an arched rib of carefully-worked hard stone, carried diagonally across the open space which required the stone roof: then another similar rib crossing the first one, leaving only triangles, each about one-fourth of the full size of the open space, which triangles could be vaulted with great ease. Instead of a square or parallelogram containing a thousand square feet horizontal and needing to be covered by a somewhat complicated vault, all that was required was the careful adjusting of two narrow arches in cut stone, and then the very simple vaulting of each one of the four triangles, about two hundred square feet each, horizontal. This was a simple and rather obvious device, one would think: but it took thirty years to develop, and once complete, the whole great system of Gothic building and the whole Gothic style, including everything from the cathedral of Reims to the smallest chapel, came from it as a matter of course.

If the student desire a clear notion of the nature and the appearance of Gothic rib-vaulting he may study Plate XXVI, in which the structure can be seen better than in the high vaults of a cathedral. Each rib is a part of an independent arch of stone, perhaps a foot wide and twenty inches or two feet deep. The arch-solids (voussoirs) are very carefully cut, and the arch built with all its company of corresponding arches to meet at top, midway, in a boss of cut stone. This done, the triangular spaces are easy enough to build with smaller and rougher stones, and the haunches are loaded outside and above with still ruder masonry.

The style was developed in that tract of country which lies between the Loire on the south, the Somme on the north, the Meuse on the east, and, on the west, a line drawn north and south through the cities of Caen and Angers--a district about one hundred and thirty by two hundred and fifty miles, equal to England and Wales south of the Trent and the Mersey, or, say, the State of Pennsylvania. The style was never quite at its best except in what is now France, though the boundaries of the district above named were soon overpassed by the perfected Gothic. The most nearly French, and therefore most normal and faultless, examples out of France are those of the Rhine and of northern Spain where French master-masons seem to have worked. The Gothic, beginning as early as 1290 in England, is of extreme beauty in a simple, quasi-domestic, less grand and less perfectly developed way than the French. The Gothic of Germany and the Austrian dominions differed from the normal type in being somewhat fantastical and irregular, but still more in a lack of a thoroughly intelligent proportion of the parts. The so-called Gothic of Italy is never admirable as a style except in a few Cistercian monastic churches: and the magnificent cathedrals such as Orvieto, Siena, Monreale, and Florence are rightly beloved indeed for their magnificent combination of the decorative arts of form and color--their mosaics, their delicate sculptures in marble, their wrought and highly developed porches, their superb wall-tombs--but are of minor architectural importance from the very fact of their complete lack of constructional significance.

Let us consider the cathedral of Amiens in the department of the Somme, about sixty miles north of Paris. This we may take as being the accepted representative of French Gothic churches, lacking indeed some features which others of its own time have retained, but completely typical in its plan and structure. Plate XXVII gives the interior looking westward from the choir and shows the nave in steep perspective so that its seven bays are much foreshortened, and with this a part of the north aisle and a part of the choir in which we stand. The great height of the nave is shown without that sometimes disagreeable appearance of a narrowness disproportionate to the height such as is sometimes seen in photographs taken directly on the axis of so lofty a church. The members which go to make up this great height are also visible; the first row of nave arches repeated in the choir and in the transept, the second story of arched openings which gives us the triforium,[41] and the third story which is called the clearstory, and which contains the great windows as well as the vaulting which constitutes the inner roof of the church. The round window in the distance forms an important part of the west front. Close to the spectator the lofty wall broken up into canopies and arches and crowned with a forest of pinnacles is entirely of carved oak, and includes an incredible number of most exquisite carvings, which decorate all parts of the partition itself as well as the stalls or the seats for choristers which are dimly seen below. The iron gates, seen as closed, give access to this enclosure which is the liturgical choir, that is to say, the enclosure made within the architectural choir, and intended to serve for the clergy and their assistants. As to epochs, the whole structure of the church is of the thirteenth century: its vaulting, its arches and piers and windows and its delicate sculpture; and its original plan, though conceived during the last years of the twelfth century, cannot be thought to have been perfected until the structure rose upon it. The carved work of the choir is very much later, representing the last development of Gothic art and belonging more properly to our Chapter V:

it is known to have been executed between 1508 and 1520. A very few years later were wrought the splendid sculptures in stone of the outer choir screen--the massive wall which encloses this graceful work in carved oak: but these must be referred to Chapter V. The great iron gates, beautiful of their kind, belong to the eighteenth century: they replace a noble jubé or rood screen which once separated the choir from the crossing, where nave and transepts meet.

Now it is clear enough what we have to admire and enjoy when we stand within such a church as this. The least attentive beholder is struck by the great height of the church; and the roof, one hundred and forty feet above the head, is not invisible nor lost in darkness, but shows its elaborate structure of elastic ribs carrying thin vaults which bear upon the ribs and thrust in every direction, so that the general character of the construction is readily grasped. The height is made manifest--it is in a manner explained--by its division into three stories, each of which again seems to be subdivided by the sculptured capitals which mark the springing of the arches. The cruciform plan leading the eye away into halls and passages, not perceived at first, adds to the ultimate effect of grandeur dependent upon space, however much it may delay the fullness of that impression. The abundant detail in mouldings and in floral sculpture as well as in constructional elements probably increases the effect of size by means of the constant repetition of its similar groups: and it is in itself capable of giving the greatest pleasure to the student who finds in it, as it were, a museum of decorative sculpture arranged not in meaningless succession as when fragments are arranged upon a shelf, but in highly significant order and in sequences both horizontal and vertical. There is still for the student of such matters the constantly growing respect for the logical acumen of the builders, who insert nothing for mere ornamentation but who make their constructional members tell as decorative features. Here are no slabs of precious marble nor any bas-reliefs delicately wrought in stucco, as in the buildings of imperial Rome, nor, at present, any chromatic effects whatever, except those of the great windows; for whatever traces of painting were left from the Middle Ages have been destroyed long ago. The building can never have affected surface decoration, in the Roman sense: a decoration covering all parts of its interior and concealing or ignoring the structure; the effective paintings that there were we know to have been local in their character, near the eye, and having a definite message of ecclesiastical import. The decorative instinct of the Gothic builders was not there but in the treatment of the actual building. Let us consider another great cathedral, that of Reims in the department of the Marne. Plate XXVIII gives two views in the interior, both near the east end. In the one, you look westward far down the north aisle, about four hundred and twenty feet from where we stand, to the open door seen in the west front. In the other, we look across the choir proper, that is the liturgical enclosure, from southwest to northeast, seeing the beginnings of the curve of the chevet or rounded apse. In these interior views are seen in a more intimate way the characteristics of a great Gothic church. The vastness, the height, the soaring grandeur of the interior are for the moment ignored, and we see the lower vaults and the clustered pillars which support them and the higher vaults of the nave, as well as the delicate sculpture of the capitals. The interior, however, though certainly the thing of primary importance, is not all that we have to study.

The outside of the Gothic Church is as closely related to the structure as is the inside and forms one with it. Plate XXIX gives the exterior of Amiens cathedral. The highest windows are those of the clearstory, which is the upper part of the central nave, in this case the nave of the choir. Below these is the roof of the inner aisle hidden here by the pyramidal roofs of the

chapels, built much later. Now as to the forest of flying buttresses, those sloping bars of stone carried on stone arches, which surround the clearstory, the only purpose of these is to receive and neutralize the thrust of the vaults within. The high vault above the clearstory pushes against the uppermost flying buttresses. The vault of the inner aisle has its much less formidable thrust taken up by the vaults of the outer aisle as far as the lines of the plan are straight, east and west, and by those of the chapels as soon as the curve of the chevet[42] begins. By means of the double set of flying buttresses, those within and higher and the outer and lower ones, the thrust of the high vaults is carried across the whole space occupied by the two aisles, and finally turned over to the upright piers which themselves serve also as buttresses for the outer aisle. Or, to approach the same set of counteracting forces from without, we have as we walk along either flank of the church, or around the curve of the chevet, a row of heavy and solidly built stone piers with much their greatest horizontal dimension in a direction across the axis of the church; that is to say, each one of them is perhaps twenty feet in and out by three feet or three and a half or four feet in width, measured east and west. Each one of these piers is built in with the low wall outside the outer aisle, or of the chapel, as seen in Plate XXIX, and the lower part of this wall helps to resist the thrust of the roof-vaulting of that same aisle or chapel. As the pier goes up, it is soon left clear of all walls and roofs, and the flying buttresses from the vaults butt against it.

The Gothic builders had other thoughts over and above their logical desire to show everywhere the true structure. They had also the taste for upward-pointing lines: a taste which seems to have grown with the development of the style. It was not this taste which in the first place made their buildings high as compared with their width: that was a mere matter of convenience and of obtaining very large windows above the aisle roofs. But the pointed arch itself, and the steep roof needed to protect the stone vaults from rain in a rainy climate, led these builders constantly towards the steeper pitch, the sharper point, the more lofty and soaring design.

Plate XXX shows the cathedral of Chartres seen over the houses of the town, from the southeast. The two great towers on the left of the picture are those which flank the west front: one of them, the simpler one, seen on the extreme left and flanking the west front on the south is the most famous tower in France and the most important single piece of work in the history of Gothic tower-building, because it shows in a faultless way the transition from Romanesque to Gothic in those forms which are immediately caused by the necessity of vaulting the interiors. These secondary parts (for the vaulted interior alone can be called a primary and essential part of the Gothic church) sympathize with that vaulted interior in the soaring character of the design, as has been said above. The other tower was rebuilt at a much later period and typifies perfectly the florid Gothic of the fifteenth century. We are to imagine, then, two towers at the west end, each very like the earlier one: and, as the picture shows, two others flanked the south transept. In the Plate, one of them is covered by scaffolding, some repairs being in progress. Two similar towers were intended to flank the north transept: and a tower, undoubtedly planned for a larger and higher mass than any one of the flanking towers just described, was to have risen from that part of the church where the transept crosses the great nave--the “crossing” as it is commonly called. Looking at this view of Chartres cathedral, we are to imagine it then as not having that high-shouldered look caused by the level line of the ridge of the church, because that roof would not be seen except in small patches, the seven great spires rising high above it and the seven square towers which support them concealing the roof except here and there as the spectator moves about the church. Now it is an unquestioned reproach to the Gothic style that no one of these great churches was ever completed. Certain towers there were which have been so shattered by the burning of the roofs that they have been taken down. Spires have existed which have now disappeared, but the greater part of the magnificent towers conceived by the builders of the early years of the thirteenth century have remained incomplete, and the churches which were to have had them are only to be judged by an effort of the mind akin to that effort we have to make in considering the buildings of classical antiquity. We are better off with Gothic art than with Greek art, because we have the details: and also because we have that which no Greek building can be said to have had, the splendid and impressive interiors: but nowhere is there a great Gothic church complete in its intended exterior effect. The nearest approach to completion is undoubtedly to be found in England, and, for a choice, in the lovely cathedral of Salisbury. The architecture is not nearly as splendid as on the Continent; it is more tranquil, more unpretending; it is less extraordinary in scale, surpassing in a less formidable fashion the buildings of residence and of government: and partly as a result of this it has been easier to build and easier to maintain these buildings in their intended completion. Plate XXXI shows this cathedral amid the trees of its close and well explains that peculiarity of position in which some English cathedrals are so much differentiated from those of the Continent. In spite of the trees, however, the great peculiarity is seen of two transepts--one crossing the nave at the point where the tower rises, as was the intention in the Chartres cathedral, Plate XXX: the other, to the eastward of that, and flanking the choir in a curious way, without example on the Continent.

Now in judging such building, and such artistic intention as this, it is evident that we cannot use the maxims which are convenient to observe in the case of a Greek or a Greco-Roman monument. Lightness takes the place of evident stability: that is the first thing to notice. It is not so much that the walls are thin, as that they have disappeared: there are no walls--only a series of piers dividing windows, the opening filled with glass being much greater, if measured along a horizontal line running through the windows, than is the extent of the solid masonry. You see at once wherein there is an excuse for the saying “a wall of glass with a roof of stone.” But there is more than this: the primary object of the designer has been to treat his construction as the main inspiration of his design. Inside and out everything is shown as it really is, the exact duty done by every stone in the structure is clearly visible to even an uncareful observer. This may be thought true of early Greek work as well: but then the structure of the Greek temple is the simplest conceivable, a mere carrying of stone beams upon stone posts--no arches to thrust, no windows to open in the wall, most of all, no attempt to roof anything with masonry except in so far as a stone beam is strong enough to span a small open space between two strong pillars. Moreover, the Greek temple was so covered up with painting, and where the paint did not conceal the whole surface that surface was already so carefully smoothed and unified, that it was hard to distinguish stone from stone even in the marble-built temples of Athens--whereas those of the soft stone regions, coated with stucco, were in architectural effect absolutely monoliths. As for the Roman structure, built with unexampled massiveness, and wonderfully imposing in its mass and in the great size and noble proportions of its interiors, it was concealed from view by the entirely contradictory pretense at trabeated construction in the modified Greek orders of columns and pilasters: and where these were not in use the walls were very commonly concealed by marble in great sheets, by tiling of glass, or by moulded stucco. The Gothic building also was painted: nor was there any hesitation on any one’s part in putting up surfaces of stucco to paint upon where an elaborate picture was wanted: but this concealed nothing except the joints of a few courses of stone. The essential facts of the structure remained visible outdoors and in, and it was by a judicious proportioning of the parts of these structures, each to all the others, that the chief architectural effect was obtained.

Another class of fourteenth century buildings must be named, the Italian Gothic churches. Plate XXXII gives the most perfect piece of work among them, the tower known as Giotto’s Campanile. Its exterior face is entirely sheathed in marble, thin slabs for the most part, white which has grown yellow, red which has grown a warm brown, and black or nearly black; and to the larger members of the elaborate composition is added the minute mosaic of one band after another all the way up, and the still more delicate play of light and shade caused by slight and well modelled reliefs of ornamental character. Down below, unseen in the photograph, is a row of statues in niches, and two horizontal bands of bas-reliefs of sacred and legendary subject. The tower is exceptional in its perfect building: but there is nothing in the scheme of construction: it is almost as simple as a Greek temple. And this is where the great cathedral by its side is similar in character. Not Gothic in proportion, nor in any system of buttresses, nor in the disappearing of walls in constructional piers, nor in the disposition of the sculpture; it is Gothic only in its having pointed arches, and ribbed vaults, though these are so stayed up by massive masonry that the thing is no more elastic than the halls of Roman thermæ.[43] But it is beautiful in detail, encrusted and embossed, and most imposing in mass without, however ill-proportioned in the nave, within; and even within it is a grandiose nave up which you walk towards the culmination of the whole in the sanctuary under the great cupola.