CHAPTER V

LATE MEDIÆVAL DESIGN

In Chapter IV we have seen how strongly the artistic effect of the Gothic churches depends upon their structure. Everything in the structure depends upon and leads up to the vaulting; everything in decorative treatment depends upon the structure. That is true except in so far as the universally felt need of ornament founded on the study of nature and of abstract form modifies design. Thus the carving in conventionalized leafage of a band, straight or seemingly bent around a pier, and the choice of colors in a decorative window or a painted panel of wall beneath a window, are indeed independent of the structure. Moreover, the Gothic sculptors were as exceptionally energetic and forcible as the Gothic builders, and worked with them in the production of great schemes of associated sculpture which were in harmony with the work of these very bold and skillful builders. Now, when, after the final expulsion of the English king and his armies from France, the suppression of the domestic feuds between hostile parties, and the pacification of the country under Charles VII, there was a sudden recrudescence of building and of decorative art, the half ruined churches were repaired, those destroyed were replaced. Between 1455 and 1515 there was a revival of architectural art comparable to that of the close of the twelfth century. There were not as many great churches undertaken, because nearly every diocese had its cathedral, and because the exclusively ecclesiastical point of view was no longer held by the people of the towns or by the nobility: but this was made good by the great increase in the number and splendor of civic and private buildings.

There is, then, a new and very magnificent Gothic art beginning about the time of the conquest of Bordeaux and Gascony, when the English armies were finally driven out of France, and ending only with the complete establishment of the classical revival under Francis I. Contemporaneous with this, or nearly so, was the very splendid art of Spain, that curious and fantastic earliest Renaissance marked for us by such monuments as the Casa Lonja of Valencia, the portal of the University at Salamanca and that of the church of St. Paul at Valladolid: and in Belgium, the epoch of the great town halls, that of Louvain being of about 1460: that of Audenarde at the close of the epoch now under consideration. In Germany, too, there was the beginning of a most attractive civic architecture: and in England, although the civil war of the Yorkists and Lancastrians postponed anything like peaceful growth in art until near the close of the fifteenth century, there was established, beginning with the accession of Henry VII, in 1485, the so-called Tudor architecture which was really a continuation and development of the curious Perpendicular Gothic art with the added feature of fan-vaulting--the most original and perhaps also the most splendid artistic achievement of the British Isles. Now in all this highly organized and florid art there was a general abandonment of the constructional principle which had been the root of the earlier Gothic, and there was no new constructional device or system invented to take its place. The new art is an art of convenience and splendor, but it has no especial root in the necessities of building. The new Gothic builders were very skillful and learned, they knew rib-vaulting by heart, and also they understood vaulting in the solid shell: they could do anything,--but there was no special task to which they had set themselves and therefore they played with their buildings. Nor was there to be introduced, during the centuries that were to follow, any new principle of building.

In Greek building, in Roman building, in Romanesque building, and especially in its culmination in the Gothic system, we are to look to the way in which the buildings have been carried out. Plan, that is to say the arrangement of parts for utility or internal effect, has much to do with our appreciation of a building: but the structure, the actual putting together of materials, is of still greater importance. You do not pretend to judge of a Greek temple without being able almost to count the stones of which it is composed or without appreciating fully the relative part which they play. In Gothic architecture, assuredly no person would dream of finding any enjoyment in a church without having first secured a good working knowledge of how it came to be what it is--how the stone roof is kept in place in the wonderful way that we see it and what part is played by pier and flying buttress. But this interest in the life of the structure becomes faint as we consider the buildings of the four centuries beginning with the year 1400. We have to consider some splendid works of art produced between that year and the outbreak of the French Revolution, but in none of them is there any special call for studying the theory or practice of the builders. They may build well or they may build carelessly: that is comparatively indifferent under the new régime, for designs are made and carried out for their own sake; nor is the master of construction any longer the master of design.

The reader will understand that in such general statements as these in matters of fine art there are always many drawbacks and qualifications. The fifteenth century had still a deal of Gothic vigor, in all the north of Europe. There were great builders after, as before, the pivotal year 1400. This discussion will even include the names of men especially praised as being great constructors: the point is that their system of construction had little to do with their design. Jacopo Sansovino and Sir Christopher Wren were great builders, but their designs were not in any special way the better for that. Their work is marked everywhere with the modern characteristic of being designed abstractly, and as if intended to be carved out of a single block, and afterwards put into terms of mortar-masonry and cut stone, because that was the only way in which the builders of the time could proceed.

Let us consider the fan-vaulting of England. Its earliest appearance is in the cloisters of Gloucester cathedral, built after 1375. Plate XXXIII shows the eastern ambulatory of these cloisters. At the first glance this vault seems to be built with ribs like that of Amiens or that of Reims, as shown in the plates of Chapter IV; but the network of projecting ribs in the Gloucester vault is a simulacrum only. The vault is a solid stone shell, homogeneous, and built of large pieces. Plate XXXIV shows the vault of the choir-aisle of Peterborough cathedral seen as looked at from below. The joints of the stones can be made out: they have no relation to the system of mouldings and panels. In England, however, where the Gothic vaulting system had never been as important a factor in art as it was on the Continent, this new and unique system of vaulting was introduced as soon as the Wars of the Roses were over. The three great monuments

of this “fan-vaulting” are St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle, the Chapel of Henry VII, attached to Westminster Abbey in London, and chief and noblest of all, Kings College Chapel at Cambridge. This last may well be thought the finest interior in England; and the other examples mentioned are inferior in charm: and yet, since the Cambridge Chapel has been shown in photography very often, it has seemed better to consider here less-known examples. The vault is a perfectly safe building, especially on a small scale, but it is not rib-vaulting. When, however, the great vault of Henry the Seventh’s Chapel at Westminster Abbey was undertaken, about 1515, a different system had to be followed. The span or clear width of the nave is not very great and yet the task of supporting the astonishing stone roof, seen in Plate XXXV, was one worthy of the shrewdest and most daring builder of the time. The stone ribs which spring directly from the uprights with but the slightest pretense at vaulting shafts in little round mouldings with slightly marked capitals, are really the arches which carry the whole stone structure of the roof. The great pendants into which these ribs disappear, and which themselves form the basis of the fan-vaulting system, are of course without constructional value. The roof is to be taken as an elaborate piece of geometrical carving, ingeniously arranged in the semblance of a constructional work; its real construction (sound enough, intelligent enough, or the roof would not stand) masked by the extraordinary composition in radiating lines, as if the cloister of Gloucester Cathedral had lent its roof to be raised high into the air, and completed on the side towards the windows by the continuing of each circular cone in that direction. Plate XXXVI gives the admirable drawing made by Robert Willis of the construction of this vault and it is easy to see that while the mechanical skill shown in the work is great and peculiar, there is nothing whatever left of the system of Gothic vaulting, nor any dependence placed

upon the numerous radiating ribs which seem to be the very framework of the structure. They are decorative mouldings worked upon the surface of a solid stone vault, built in a single shell which extends from one to another of the great transverse arches which span the nave.

This design marks the culmination in England of that florid Gothic in which early principles have a subordinate part, while newly required elaboration and tricks of deceptive brilliancy of workmanship come to the front and absorb the interest of the beholder. No one can remain indifferent to the fantastic and yet enduring charm of such a roof. The roof of Kings College Chapel has already been mentioned as of extraordinary beauty and as forming with the vertical members which support it and the windows between them a Gothic interior as splendid as anything out of France: but its beauty is of a style which had already lost its reason for being, and its appearance of constructional dignity is in a way deceptive. The admiration we bring to such a monument is then very different from that which we give to the interiors of the great Gothic churches shown in the plates of Chapter IV, or to the many other beautiful naves and choirs of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in England, France, Spain, and Germany. At Ely and Salisbury, Bourges and Laon, Burgos and Gerona, Cologne and Vienna, the student enters a great church, whose vault was completed at any time between 1200 and 1400, with perfect certainty that the structure is as sincere and obvious as it is impressive; nor does any doubt enter his mind as to the utility of the members of the structure around him. It is only with the beginning of the florid Gothic that this wholesome frame of mind can no longer be retained.

Let us consider the church of Brou, standing close to the town of Bourg-en-Bresse, in southern Burgundy. It was not begun until about 1510: that is to say, its construction is contemporaneous with the earlier years of Henry VIII in England,

and the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain; and, in architectural history, it is contemporaneous with so much of the building of the present St. Peter’s in Rome as fixed the architectural style of that great church. Plate XXXVII is a view of the church of Brou, looking westward to the great front whose large windows fill the nave with dazzling daylight and make that west wall itself invisible. The Gothic structure here is complete--as logical and exact as in the palmy days of the thirteenth century; but the decorative treatment is different indeed! On the right is the tomb of the Duchess Margaret of Austria, who completed the church and set up her own and her husband’s tomb with those of earlier princes of the line. This tomb is a structure wholly in keeping with the church, as it was really the cause of its being. There is nothing more interesting in such work than the completely realized naturalistic character of the statuary. Nowhere has the art of the sculptor been left so free as in these flamboyant Gothic buildings--so free to develop itself while still it remains in strict accordance with the requirements of the architectural design. The splendid church of S. Wulfran at Abbeville, in the far north of France, helps us to see still more plainly, this extraordinary development of architectural sculpture because the scale is larger and the artistic power manifested immeasurably more fit to cope with great undertakings. Plate XXXVIII giving part of the west portals of that surprising church will show how completely the sculptor’s art has changed since the portals of Reims and of Chartres were undertaken. As for the architectural treatment it is still like that of the church of Brou, Gothic with modifications. The hold which the Gothic system of vaulting, and of building to support the vaults, had over the French builders is visible in this return to earlier principles as soon as the dissensions of the country allowed.

The famous Town Halls of the Netherlands have preserved for us the most perfect, because the most unmingled, traces

of flamboyant Gothic in civic buildings. The latest of all and the smallest one of importance is that at Audenarde in Belgium, built between 1525-30. It is represented in Plate XXXIX, lending itself well to pictorial reproduction on a small scale because it depends but little on the sculptured details. A single Madonna with the Child, above the loggia from which the town authorities would speak to the people in the days of municipal independence, is the only representative sculpture of importance in all this front, below the cornice. The fantastic Gothic tracery with conventional carving covers the blank wall spaces with a continuous veil of slight and not unpleasant roughening; and the wall spaces are so small that this formal kind of ornament is not disagreeable. Small statues should have been placed in the niches; but the building does not seem to suffer much from their absence. We can judge of it as being what it is, a most simple and practical City Hall, built with pointed arches, with a steep roof adorned by tower, dormer window and pinnacle, and the whole structure covered by this thin veil of moulded, cusped and traceried ornament, chiefly because the church architecture of previous years had led up to that kind of design by natural evolution, and because the spirit of the time knew of but one architectural treatment. Therefore, without vaulting, with five stories of rooms replacing the great hall of the church, with windows made to open and shut for the convenience of the inhabitants of small rooms, the building is yet closely in agreement with the church building of the time, and is to be judged as a part of the great and long supreme style out of which it has grown.

In the famous south porch of the cathedral at Albi, this florid Gothic has reached its culmination. Plate XL shows the outer porch; that which, when the cathedral was really a fortress of some importance, guarded the first approach to the long flight of stairs, the outer perron. Nothing is more attractive among the minor charms

of spirited old architecture than these mixtures of florid and even fantastical design with the grave solemnity of fortress towers and the harsh line of battlements intended for the service of war. Passing through this gateway which is pierced in a fortress-wall merely and leads directly to no covered apartment of any sort, the visitor mounts some twenty-five stone steps and reaches the porch shown in Plate XLI, but he does not enter it by the larger archway; that is the south archway to which there is meant to be access on the level of its own sill. On the right and partly hidden by the huge buttress-pier is the narrower eastern doorway, to which access by the steps is had, from the outer porch, Plate XL. The great inner porch (Plate XLI) dates from the earliest years of the sixteenth century, and is one of the greatest triumphs as it is one of the very latest productions of that strange art which has abandoned the essential character and basis of Gothic architecture without losing its derived and secondary charm, which may be defined as the charm of picturesque variety and sharp contrast--the very reverse, or so it seems, of the calm harmony of Greek design.