Gothic Architecture

The term was first used during the later Renaissance, and as a
term of contempt. Says Vasari, "Then arose new architects who
after the manner of their barbarous nations erected buildings in
that style which we call Gothic", while Evelyn but expresses the
mental attitude of his own time when he writes, "The ancient Greek
and Roman architecture answered all the perfections required in a
faultless and accomplished building" -- but the Goths and Vandals
destroyed these and "introduced in their stead a certain
fantastical and licentious manner of building: congestions of
heavy, dark, melancholy, monkish piles, without any just
proportion, use or beauty." For the first time, an attempt was
made to destroy an instinctive and, so far as Europe was
concerned, an almost universal form of art, and to substitute in
its place another built up by artificial rules and premeditated
theories; it was necessary, therefore, that the ground should be
cleared of a once luxuriant growth that still showed signs of
vitality, and to effect this the schools of Vignola, Palladio, and
Wren were compelled to throw scorn on the art they were determined
to discredit. As ignorant of the true habitat of the style as they
were of its nature, the Italians of the Renaissance called it the
"maniera Tedesca", and since to them the word Goth implied the
perfection of barbarism, it is but natural that they should have
applied it to a style they desired to destroy. The style ceased,
for the particular type of civilization it expressed had come to
an end; but the name remained, and when, early in the nineteenth
century, the beginnings of a new epoch brought new apologists, the
old title was taken over as the only one available, and since then
constant efforts have been made to define it more exactly, to give
it a new significance, or to substitute in its place a term more
expressive of the idea to be conveyed. The word itself, in its
present application, is repugnant to any sense of exact thought;
ethnically, the art so described is immediately Franco-Norman in
its origins, and between the Arian Goths, on the one hand, and the
Catholic Franks and Normans. on the other, lies a racial,
religious, and chronological gulf. With the conquest of Italy and
Sicily by Justinian (535-553) "the race and name of Ostrogoths
perished for ever" (Bryce, "The Holy Roman Empire", III, 29) five
centuries before the beginnings of the art that bears their name.
Modern scholarship seeks deeper even than racial tendencies for
the root impulses of art in any of its forms, and apart from the
desirable correction of an historical anachronism it is felt that
medieval art (of which Gothic architecture is but one category),
since it owes its existence to influences and tendencies stronger
than those of blood, demands a name that shall be exact and
significant, and indicative of the more just estimation in which
it now is held.

But little success has followed any of the attempts at definition.
The effort has produced such varying results as the epithets of
Vasari and Evelyn, the nebulous or sentimental paraphrases of the
early nineteenth century romanticists, the narrow archeological
definitions of De Caumont, and the rigid formalities of the more
learned logicians and structural specialists, such as MM. Viollet
le Duc, Anthyme St-Paul, and Enlart, and Professor Moore. The only
scientific attempt is that of which the first was the originator,
the last the most scholarly and exact exponent. Concisely stated,
the contention of this school is that the whole scheme of the
building is determined by, and its whole strength is made to
reside in a finely organized and frankly confessed framework
rather than in walls. This framework, made up of piers, arches and
buttresses, is freed from every unnecessary incumbrance of wall
and is rendered as light in all its parts as is compatible with
strength -- the stability of the building depending not upon inert
massiveness, except in the outermost abutment of active parts
whose opposing forces neutralize each other and produce a perfect
equilibrium. It is thus a system of balanced thrusts in
contradistinction to the ancient system of inert stability. Gothic
architecture is such a system carried out in a finely artistic
spirit (Charles H. Moore, "Development and Character of Gothic
Architecture", I, 8).

This is an admirable statement of the fundamental structural
element in Gothic architecture, but, carried away by enthusiasm
for the crowning achievement of the human intellect in the domain
of construction, those who have most clearly demonstrated its pre-
eminence have usually fallen into the error of declaring this one
quality to be the touchstone of Gothic architecture, minimizing
the importance of all aesthetic considerations, and so denying the
name of Gothic to everything where the system of balanced thrusts,
ribbed vaulting, and concentrated loads did not consistently
appear. Even Professor Moore himself says, "Wherever a framework
maintained on the principle of thrust and counter-thrust is
wanting, we have not Gothic" (Moore, op. cit., I, 8). The result
is that all the medieval architects of Western Europe, with the
exception of that produced during the space of a century and a
half, and chiefly within the limits of the old Royal Domain of
France, is denied the title of Gothic. Of the whole body of
English architecture produced between 1066 and 1528 it is said,
"The English claim to any share in the original development of
Gothic, or to the consideration of the pointed architecture of the
Island as properly Gothic at all, must be abandoned" (Moore, op.
cit., Preface to first ed., 8), and the same is said of the
contemporary architecture of Germany, Italy, and Spain. Logically
applied this rule would exclude also all the timber-roofed
churches and the civil and military structures erected in France
contemporaneously with the cathedrals and (though this point is
not pressed) even the west fronts of such admittedly Gothic
edifices as the cathedrals of Paris, Amiens, and Reims. As one
commentator on Gothic architecture has said, "A definition so
restricted carries with it its own condemnations" (Francis Bond,
"Gothic Architecture in England ", I, 10).

A still greater argument against the acceptance of this structural
definition lies in the fact that while, as Professor Moore
declares, "the Gothic monument, thought wonderful as a structural
organism, is even more wonderful as a work of art" (op. cit., V,
190), this great artistic element, which for more than three
centuries was predominant throughout the greater part of Western
Europe, existed quite independently of the supreme structural
system, and varies only in minor details of racial bias and of
presentation, whether it is found in France or Normandy, Spain or
Italy, Germany, Flanders, or Great Britain -- this, which is in
itself the manifestation of the underlying impulses and the actual
accomplishments of the era it connotes, is treated as an accessory
to a structural evolution, and is left without a name except the
perfunctory title of "Pointed", which is even less descriptive
than the word Gothic itself.

The structural definition has failed of general acceptance, for
the temper of the time is increasingly impatient of materialistic
definitions, and there is a demand for broader interpretations
that shall take cognizance of underlying impulses rather than of
material manifestations. The fact is recognized that around and
beyond the structural aspects of Gothic architecture lie other
qualities of equal importance and greater comprehensiveness, and,
if the word is still to be used in the general sense in which it
always has been employed, viz., as denoting the definite
architectural expression of certain peoples acting under definite
impulses and within definite limitations of time, a completely
evolved structural principle cannot be used as the sole test of
orthodoxy, if it excludes the great body of work executed within
that period, and which in all other respects has complete
uniformity and a consistent significance.

It may be said of Gothic architecture that it is an impulse and a
tendency rather than a perfectly rounded accomplishment;
aesthetically, it never achieved perfection in any given monument,
or group of monuments, nor were its possibilities ever fully
worked out except in the category of structural science. Here
alone, finality was achieved by the cathedral-builders of the Ile-
de-France, but this fact cannot give to their work exclusive claim
to the name of Gothic. The art of any given time is the expression
of certain racial qualifications modified by inheritance,
tradition, and environment, and working themselves out under the
control of religious and secular impulses. When these elements are
sound and vital, combined in the right proportions, and operating
for a sufficient length of time, the result is a definite style in
some one or more of the arts. Such a style is Gothic architecture,
and it is to this style, regarded in its most inclusive aspect,
that the term Gothic is applied by general consent, and in this
sense the word is used here.

Gothic architecture and Gothic art are the aesthetic expression of
that epoch of European history when paganism had been
extinguished, the traditions of classical civilization destroyed,
the hordes of barbarian invaders beaten back, or Christianized and
assimilated; and when the Catholic Church had established itself
not only as the sole spiritual power, supreme and almost
unquestioned in authority, but also as the arbiter of the
destinies of sovereigns and of peoples. During the first five
centuries of the Christian Era the Church had been fighting for
life, first against a dying imperialism, then against barbarian
invasions. The removal of the temporal authority to Constantinople
had continued the traditions of civilization where Greek, Roman,
and Asiatic elements were fused in a curious alembic one result of
which was an architectural style that later, and modified by many
peoples, was to serve as the foundation-stone of the Catholic
architecture of the West. Here, in the meantime, the condition had
become one of complete chaos, but the end of the Dark Ages was at
hand, and during the entire period of the sixth century events
were occurring which could only have issue in the redemption of
the West. The part played in the development of this new
civilization by the Order of St. Benedict and by Pope St. Gregory
the Great cannot be over estimated: through the former the
Catholic Faith became a more living and personal attribute of the
people, and began as well to force its way across the frontiers of
barbarism, while by its means the long-lost ideals of law and
order were in a measure re-established. As for St. Gregory the
Great, he may almost be considered the foundation-stone of the new
epoch. The redemption of Europe was completed during the four
centuries following his death, and largely at the hands of the
monks of Cluny and Pope St. Gregory VII (1073-1085), who freed the
Church from secular dominion. With the twelfth century were to
come the Cistercian reformation, the revivifying and purification
of the episcopate and the secular clergy by the canons regular,
the development of the great schools founded in the preceding
century, the communes, the military orders, and the Crusades;
while the thirteenth century, with the aid of Pope Innocent III,
Philip Augustus, St. Louis, and the Franciscans and Dominicans,
was to raise to the highest point of achievement the spiritual and
material potentialities developed in the immediate past.

This is the epoch of Gothic architecture. As we analyse the
agencies that together were to make possible a civilization that
could blossom only in some pre-eminent art, we find that they fall
into certain definite categories. Ethnically the northern blood of
the Lombards, Franks, and Norsemen was to furnish the physical
vitality of the new epoch. Political the Holy Roman Empire, the
Capetian sovereigns of the Franks, and the Dukes of Normandy were
to restore that sense of nationality without which creative
civilization is impossible, while the papacy, working through the
irresistible influence of the monastic orders gave the underlying
impulse. Normandy in the eleventh century was simply Cluny in
action, and during this period the structural elements in Gothic
architecture were brought into being. The twelfth century was that
of the Cistercians, Carthusians, and Augustinians, the former
infusing into all Europe a religious enthusiasm that clamoured for
artistic expression, while by their antagonism to the over-rich
art of the elder Benedictines, they turned attention from
decoration to plan and form, and construction. The Cluniac and the
Cistercian reforms through their own members and the other orders
which they brought into being were the mobile and efficient arm of
a reforming papacy, and from the day on which St. Benedict
promulgated his rule, they became a visible manifestation of law
and order. With the thirteenth century, the episcopate and the
secular clergy joined in the labour of adequately expressing a
united and unquestioned religious faith, and we may say,
therefore, that the civilization of the Middle Ages was what the
Catholic Faith organized and invincible had made it. We may,
therefore, with good reason, substitute for the undescriptive
title "Gothic" the name "The Catholic Style" as being exact and
reasonably inclusive.

The beginnings of the art that signalized the triumph of Catholic
Christianity are to be found in Normandy. Certain elements may be
traced back to the Carolingian builders, the Lombards in Italy and
the Copts and Syrians of the fourth century, and so to the Greeks
of Byzantium. They are but elements however, germs that did not
develop until infused with the red blood of the Norsemen and
quickened by the spirit of the Cluniac reform. The style developed
in Normandy during the eleventh century contained the major part
of these elemental norms, which were to be still further fused and
co-ordinated by the Franks, raised to final perfection, and
transfigured by a spirit which was that of the entire medieval
world. Marvellous as was this achievement, that of the Normans was
even more remarkable, for in the style they handed on to the
Franks was inherent every essential potentiality. At this moment
Normandy was the focus of northern vitality and almost, for the
moment, the religious centre of Europe. The founding of
monasteries was very like a mania and the result a remarkable
revival of learning; the Abbeys of Bec, Fecamps, and Jumi�ges
became famous throughout all Europe, drawing to themselves
students from every part of the continent; even Cluny herself had
in this to take second place. It was a very vigorous and a very
widespread civilization, and architectural expression became
imperative. Convinced that

she was playing a part and a leading part in the civilization of
Europe . . . Normandy perceived and imitated the architectural
progress of nations even far removed from her own borders. At this
time there was no other country in Europe that for architectural
attainment could compare with Lombardy. Therefore it was to
Lombardy that the Normans turned for inspiration for their own
buildings. They adopted what was vital in the Lombard style,
combined this with what they had already learned from their French
neighbours, and added besides a large element of their own
national character (Arthur Kingsley Porter, "Mediaeval
Architecture", VI, 243, 244).

What are these elements which were borrowed from the Lombards and
the Franks, and which were to form the foundations of Gothic
architecture? They are, from the former:



�  the compound pier and archivolt,

�  the alternate system, and

�  the ribbed and domed vault.

From the latter (i.e. from the Carolingian remains):



�  the modified basilican plan with its triple aisles crossed by a
projecting transept, and its three apses. This, the basis of the
typical Norman and Gothic plan, was derived directly from the
Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem, the date of which is unknown.
It may have been built by Constantine, or by Justinian, or at any
date between. In any case it is not earlier than A.D. 300, nor
later than 550;

�  the doubled western towers,

�  the lantern or central tower over the crossing, and

�  the threefold interior system of arcade, triforium, and
clerestory.

It will be seen that the main dispositions of the Gothic plan are
derived from Carolingian developments of Byzantine modifications
of the early Christian basilica, itself but an adaptation of that
of pagan Rome; from the Lombards, however, had been acquired three
elements which were to lie at the base of Gothic construction.
Many of the most characteristic features of Byzantine,
Carolingian, and Lombard architecture had been permanently
rejected, showing that the process followed was not one of slavish
imitation but rather of conscious selection; the vast
possibilities inherent in others had not been appreciated, as for
instance the polygonal, domed motive of San Vitale and Aachen
surrounded by its vaulted ambulatory, from which the Franks were
to evolve the Gothic chevet, while the pointed arch the Normans
never used, though they must have known of, or imagined, its
existence.

The actual steps in the development of what may be called the
Gothic order, from the primitive basilica to the full perfection
of Chartres, fortunately exist, and we may trace the progress year
by year and at the hands of diverse peoples. By the beginning of
the tenth century, the available supply of ancient columns having
become exhausted, square piers built up of small stones had
everywhere taken the place of circular monolithic shafts, but the
old basilican system remained intact (except in the polygonal,
Carolingian churches), arcades supporting roof-bearing walls
pierced by narrow windows, and an enclosing wall independent in
its construction and forming aisles covered by lean-to roofs of
wood. In Sant' Eustorgio at Milan (c. 900) we find evidences that
transverse arches were thrown from each pier of the arcade to the
aisle wall, so necessitating the addition of a flat pilaster to
each pier to take the spring of the arch. These arches may have
been evolved for the purpose of strengthening the fabric, or for
ornamental reasons, or in imitation of similar arches in the
Carolingian domical churches; but whatever their source the fact
remains that they form the first structural step towards the
evolution of the Gothic system of construction. Next, transverse
arches were thrown across the nave, the first recorded example
being the church of SS. Felice e Fortunato at Vicenza, dated 985.
Neither for structural nor aesthetic reasons was it necessary that
these nave arches should spring from every pier, so every
alternate pier was chosen, the intermediate transverse aisle arch
being suppressed and the pier, that no longer had a lateral arch
to support, reduced in size. To support the great nave arches,
pilasters were of course attached to the nave face of the pier,
and these, as well as the aisle pilasters, were made semicircular
in plan. If we assume, as we may, that in other examples all the
transverse arches of the aisle were retained, while only each
alternate pier bore a nave arch, we shall have a plan made up of
compound piers supporting longitudinal and transverse wall-bearing
arches that divide the entire area into squares, large and small,
the great square often being four times the area of each aisle
square.

The next step for a people on the highway of progress would be the
vaulting, in masonry, of these squares, for the wooden roofs were
inflammable; moreover the Carolingian builders had constantly so
vaulted their smaller square roof areas. The process began at
once, and of course with the aisle squares, where the structural
problem was simplest. The date is not recorded; no early examples
remain in Lombardy, but in Normandy we find, about 1050, churches
which possess aisles covered by square, groined vaults, with the
transverse arches showing. The next step was of course the
vaulting of the great squares of the nave, but before this was
attempted the rib vault was devised, and the task rendered
structurally more simple. The old transverse aisle arches had
given the hint; where an aisle so spanned was to be vaulted, the
arches already in place formed a very convenient shelf on which
some of the vault stones might rest, and, by so much, a portion of
the temporary centering might be dispensed with. Intelligence
could not fail to suggest that an expedient useful in the case of
the transverse arch might be equally useful in that of the
diagonals, which were far more difficult of construction, as well
the most liable to give way in the case of ribless, groined
vaults. When did this era-making invention take place, and at the
hands of what people? Where, we shall probably never know, nor yet
the exact date; but it could not have been earlier than 1025, nor
later than 1075. San Flaviano at Montefiascone, authentically
dated 1032, has aisles with rib vaults which are original and, if
so, are the earliest on record, while the nave vault of Sant'
Ambrogio at Milan (c.1060) is of fully developed rib construction.
"The most rent authorities (such as Venturi, Storia dell' Arte
Italiana, 1903, who cites Stiehl, 1898) accept the view hat the
vaults are of foreign fashion derived from Burgundy, and were
about contemporaneous with the campanile [1129] . . . . It seems
that on the evidence we are compelled to suppose that Sant'
Ambrogio derived its scheme of construction from Normandy. It may
be that the origin of the vault is to be sought for even in
England; but there are many reasons for thinking that the seed
idea, like so many others, came from the East." (W. R. Lethaby,
"Mediaeval Art", IV, 100-111.)

In all probability the Lombards are the originators of this device
so pregnant of future possibilities. The new vault, groined,
ribbed, and domed, was in a class by itself, apart from anything
that had gone before. Particularly did it differ from the Roman
vault in that, while the latter had a level crown, obtained by
using semicircular lateral and transverse arches and elliptical
groin arches (naturally formed by the intersection of two
semicircular barrel vaults of equal radius), the "Lombard" vault
was constructed with semicircular diagonals, the result being that
domical form which was always retained by the Gothic builders of
France because of its intrinsic beauty. Finally, the new diagonals
suggested new vertical supports in the angles of the pier, and so
we obtain the fully developed compound pier, which later, at the
hands of the English, was to be carried to such extremes of
beauty, and to form a potent factor in the development of the
Gothic structural system.

The last step in the working-out of the Gothic vaulting plan
remained to be taken - the substitution of oblong for square
vaulting areas. This was finally accomplished in the Ile-de-France
after various Norman experiments, the evidences of which remain in
the vaults of St-Georges de Bocherville and the two great abbeys
of Caen. The sexpartite vaulting of the latter, together with that
of the five other similarly vaulted Norman churches and of the
choir of St-Denis at Paris, has always been an architectural
puzzle, since it is manifestly a stage in the development of the
oblong quadripartite vault, and yet is found in these cases some
years after the latter system is known to have been fully
understood in France, and nearly three-quarters of a century later
than the vault of Sant' Ambrogio. There is reason to suppose that
it is a revival of some of the earlier experiments in the
development of the large, oblong, high vault from the small,
square, aisle vault. It is conceivable that sexpartite vaults may
once have existed in Lombardy and before the quadripartite vault
was evolved; this would explain the persistence in Sant' Ambrogio
of the vaulting shafts on the intermediate piers, for which no
apparent reason exists. The vault of the Abbaye aux Dames may be
considered either as a ribbed quadripartite vault of square plan,
bisected and strengthened by a transverse arch with solid
spandrels, or as a series of transverse arches, one on each pair
of nave piers, with the roof spaces filled in by curved surfaces
of stone supported on diagonal ribs meeting on the crown of each
alternate transverse arch. In the first case would be indicated a
fear to trust the stability of so large a quadripartite vault,
until experiment proved its efficiency; in the second, a stage in
the evolution of the great Sant' Ambrogio vault, all local
evidence of which has been lost. The vault of the Abbaye aux
Hommes is one more stage in the development; here the vault spaces
are curved both from the transverse arch and from the intermediate
arch, which so becomes, not an arch -- as in the Abbaye aux Dames
-- but a true vaulting rib. The result is a very strong vaulting
system, particularly effective in its light and shade and its line
composition, and it does not seem surprising that the Norman
builders should have reverted to it from time to time, or that
Abbot Suger himself should have borrowed it for his fine new
abbey, choosing it for its strength or its beauty in place of the
simpler and more open quadripartite vault.

In the meantime the second great structural problem, that of the
abutment of the vault thrusts, had been solved by the Normans. In
Roman construction the thrust of barrel vaults had been
neutralized by walls of great thickness, that of groin vaults
either by the same clumsy expedient or by transverse walls; when
the Lombards first threw their transverse arches across narrow
aisles, they added shallow exterior pilaster-strips at the point
of contact, rather it would seem for decorative than for
structural reasons, as the walls already were strong enough to
take the slight thrust of the small arches. With the vaulting of
the nave the problem became serious; in Sant' Ambrogio they dared
not raise the spring of the high vault above the triforium floor,
and the thrust of the vault was taken by two massive arches
spanning the aisles, one below this floor, the other above, the
latter being hidden under the wide, sloping roof of the nave which
was continued unbroken to the aisle walls. This was, of course,
but the transverse wall of the Romans, pierced by arched openings;
the result was unbeautiful, and the task fell to the Normans of
devising a better and more scientific method. At their hands the
Lombard pilaster-strip became at once a functional buttress
instead of a decorative adjunct, while the successive steps in the
evolution of the flying buttress remain on record and are
peculiarly interesting. In the Abbaye aux Hommes,

the expedient was adopted of constructing half-barrel vaults
springing from the aisle walls and abutting against the vaults of
the nave beneath the lean-to roof. These were in reality concealed
flying buttresses, but they were flying buttresses of bad form;
for only a small part of their action met the concentrated action
of the vaults that they were designed to stay, the greater part of
it operating against the walls between the piers where no
abutments were required (Moore, op. cit., I, 12, 13).

In the Abbaye aux Dames these defects were remedied, for all the
barrel vault was cut away except that narrow part which abutted
against, the spring of the vault. The flying buttress had been
invented. As yet it was hidden under the triforium roof and did
not declare itself to the eye. but functionally it was complete.

The fruit of the Cluniac reform working on Norman blood had been
the evolution of the main lines of the Gothic plan (barring the
eastern termination, or chevet) together with the development of
the Gothic system of vaulting and the Gothic principle of
concentrated thrusts met by pier buttresses and flying buttresses.
The true "Gothic system" is therefore the product of Normandy. In
the meantime what had been done towards the working-out of the
other half of the Gothic idea -- the discovering anew of the
underlying principles of pure beauty, their analysis into the
elements of form and composition, proportion, relation and rhythm,
line and colour, and chiaroscuro and finally what had been
accomplished in the direction of evolving that new quality of
form-expression which, differing as it does from any school of the
past, gives to Gothic art its peculiar personality? -- Nothing, so
far as Normandy is concerned, except as regards certain large
architectonic qualities first revealed in Jumi�ges, and, following
this, in the Abbeys of Caen and St-Georges de Bocherville. The
Abbaye aux Hommes is the norm of all French cathedrals; the Abbaye
aux Dames, of the English order; while Jumi�ges, the first in
date, remains one of the most astonishing buildings in history. If
it had antecedents, if it came as the culmination of a long and
progressive series of experiments in the development of
architectonic form, the evidence is forever lost, for, as it now
stands, it is isolated, almost preternatural. So far as we know,
it had no precursors, and yet here are the majestical ruins of a
monastic church larger than any since the time of Constantine and
far in advance, so far as design and development are concerned, of
any contemporary structure. Montier en Der, an abbey of Haute-
Marne, built by Abbots Adso and Berenger (960, 998), is the only
recorded structure which bears the least kinship to Jumi�ges, and
the difference between the two separated by only fifty years -- is
that between barbarism and civilization. All that was good in
Lombard architecture has been assimilated, and in addition we find
fixed for the whole Gothic period those lofty and monumental
proportions, that masterly setting out of plan, the powerful
grouping of lofty towers, the final organism of arcaded triforium,
and clerestory that together were to set the type of Gothic
architecture for its entire term and endure unchanged, though
infinitely perfected, so long as the Christian civilization of the
Middle Ages remained operative. After Jumi�ges the abbeys of Caen
were easy, and, given a continuation of cultural conditions,
Amiens and Lincoln inevitable.

During the latter half of the eleventh century these cultural
conditions ceased in Normandy. After the death of William the
Conqueror the duchy fell on evil times, and the working out to its
logical and supreme conclusion of the great style fell into other
hands, viz., those of the French of the old Royal Domain and of
the transplanted Normans in England. In France the eleventh
century had been marked by royal inefficiency, unchecked feudal
tyranny, episcopal insubordination to papal control, indifference
to the Cluniac reform, and general anarchy. By the middle of the
century Cluny had done its immediate work and had begun to lapse
from its lofty ideals, but others were to take its place and do
its work, and in 1075 St. Robert of Molesme founded in Burgundy
the first house of that Cistercian Order which was to play in the
twelfth century the part that Cluny had played in the eleventh.
The preliminary fight that was to clear the ground in France began
with the Council of Reims called by Pope Leo IX (1049-1054), when
the sovereign pontiff and the monastic orders made common cause
against the simony, secularism, and independence of the French
episcopate. The contest was carried on simultaneously with the
even greater fight against the empire, and, as there, the victory
remained with the papacy. With the close of the eleventh century
conditions in France had become such that the torch that fell from
the hands of the decadent Norman could be caught by the crescent
Frank and carried on without a pause.

During the first half of the twelfth century the outburst of
architectural vigour in the Ile-de-France is very remarkable.
Soissons, Amiens, and Beauvais became simultaneously centres of
activity, and the rib vault makes its appearance at the same time
in many places.

During the first phase of the transition, 1100-40, the builders
struggled to master the rib vault in its simpler problems: they
learned to construct it on square and on oblong plans and even
over the awkward curves of ambulatory aisles, but their
experiments were always on a small scale. During the second phase
(1140-80) the problem of vaulting great naves was attacked; the
evolution centres in the peculiar development which the genius of
the French builders gave to the concealed flying buttress and to
the sexpartite vault, both borrowed from Normandy (Porter, op.
cit., II, 54).

The semicircular ambulatory of Morienval (c. 1122), with its
vaulting supported on ribs curved in plan, and the church of St-
Etienne at Beauvais (c. 1130), of which Professor Moore says that
with the exception of St-Louis of Poissy it is "the only
Romanesque structure extant on the soil of France that was
unmistakably designed for ribbed, groined vaulting over both nave
and aisles", are valuable landmarks in the development. The second
task of the French builders was simplified by the introduction of
the pointed arch. As in the case of the ribbed vault, there is no
means of knowing the exact source from whence this was derived. It
had been in use in the East for nearly a thousand years before it
appeared in the West; it was established in the South France as an
effective and economical contour for barrel vaults by the year
1050, whence it migrated to Burgundy and so to Berry (where it
appears in 1110), but always in connection with vaults rather than
arches. The earliest structural pointed arch recorded in France is
in the ambulatory of Morienval, referred to above, and is dated
1122.

This form, so pregnant of structural and artistic possibilities,
may have been brought from the Holy Land by returning pilgrims, or
it may have been independently evolved. Whatever its source, its
advantages were so great from a practical standpoint that it is
hard to believe that the races that had produced Sant' Ambrogio
and Jumi�ges should not have worked out independently the idea of
the pointed arch. Its two great virtues are its slight thrust as
compared with the round arch, and its infinite possibilities of
variation in height. The elliptical diagonals of the Romans did
not commend themselves to the builders of the North, and the
doming that resulted from the uniform use of semicircular arches,
while not offensive in the case of square areas, became impossible
where oblong spaces were to be covered, the expedient of stilting
the longitudinal arches not yet having suggested itself. With the
pointed arch in use, all difficulties disappeared. Once introduced
it became in a few years the universal form, and its beauty was
such that it immediately won its way against the round arch for
the spanning of all voids. Almost coincidentally with the
acceptance of the pointed arch came the device of stilting, the
transverse arches of Bury (c. 1125) being so treated. This would
seem to indicate that to the Gothic builders the value of the
pointed arch lay rather in its comparatively small thrust and in
its intrinsic beauty than in the facility with which it might be
used for obtaining level crowns in oblong vaulting areas. This
stilting of the longitudinal arches was from the beginning almost
invariable in France; structurally, it concentrated the vault
thrust on a comparatively narrow vertical line, where it could be
easily handled by the flying buttress; it permitted the largest
possible window area in the clerestory, while the composition of
lines and the delicately waved or twisted surfaces were so
beautiful in themselves that, once discovered, they could not be
abandoned by the logical and beauty-loving Franks.

The structural and aesthetic advance was now headlong in its
impetuosity. A few years after Bury, St-Germer de Fly was built,
the date assigned by Professor Moore being about, 1130. Here we
find a building almost as surprising as Jumi�ges; for if the date
quoted above is correct, the church has no prototype, no promising
stages of experiment. The vaulting, both of the ambulatory and of
the apse, is stilted and has its full complement of ribs, the
shafting throughout is finely articulated, the dimensions are
stately, the proportions just and effective, while the easterly
termination is a perfectly developed apse with rudimentary chapels
-- a chevet in posse. The flying buttresses are still concealed
under the triforium roof, and outwardly the building has no Gothic
character whatever; but the Gothic organism is practically
complete.

With Abbot Suger's St-Denis, the easterly termination of which is
of original construction and is dated 1140, we come to what is
almost the fully developed Gothic plan, order and system, together
With the true chevet of double apsidal aisles and chapels. This
last feature, perhaps the most brilliant in conception and
splendid in effect of the several parts of a Gothic church, may
have been derived either from the triapsidal termination of the
Carolingian basilican church, or from the polygonal domed
structures of the same epoch. Transitional forms are found
throughout the eleventh century, and the development from such a
plan as that of St. Generou, on the one hand, or Aachen, on the
other, to St-Denis presupposes only that degree of inventive force
and overflowing vitality which, as a matter of fact, existed
during the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

With the chevet as fully developed as it now appears in St-Denis,
there remains only the gradual perfection and refinement of the
structural system and the giving it that quality of distinctive
beauty in every aspect that was to be the very flowering of the
Catholic civilization of the Middle Ages. From the middle of the
twelfth century both processes went on apace and simultaneously.
Noyon followed immediately, and here, it is maintained, the flying
buttress for the first time emerged through the roof, displaying
in logical fashion the system of construction, and at the same
time bringing the abutment above the springing of the vault, where
the greatest thrust actually occurred, while permitting the
lowering of the triforium roof so that the clerestory window might
be given great height and brought into better proportion with the
arcade and triforium. Senlis, of the same date, exhibits a great
advance in mechanical skill and logical exactitude, with an
innovation that commands less admiration -- the substitution of
cylindrical columns for the intermediate piers on the caps of
which rest the shafts of the intermediate ribs of the sexpartite
vault. Continued in Notre-Dame, Paris, this clever but
unconvincing, device proved to be but an experimental form, and
was abandoned as unsatisfactory in the greatest monuments of
French Gothic, such Chartres, Reims, Bourges, and Amiens, where
recourse was had to the specifically Gothic compound pier, with
the shafts of the transverse ribs, at least, of the vault brought
frankly and firmly down to the pavement.

The cathedral of Paris was begun in 1163 with the choir, and
completed in 1235 with the raising of the western towers. From
East to West there is a steady growth in certainty of touch, in
structural efficiency, and in the expression through beauty of
form and line of the culminating civilization of medievalism. The
interior order exhibits the defects of the imperfectly organized
Norman system, particularly in the lofty, vaulted triforium or
gallery, so great in size that there is no rhythm in the
relationship of arcade, triforium and clerestory, together with
the columnar scheme of Sens and Noyon (the imposing of the vault
shafts on the caps of plain cylindrical columns), which must be
regarded as falling back from the perfect articulation of the true
Gothic system. The plan, however, is nobly developed, the general
relations of height and breadth fine to a degree, while in the
west front (1210-35) Gothic design reaches, perhaps, the highest
point it ever achieved so far as classical simplicity, power, and
proportion are concerned. The seed of Jumi�ges has developed into
full fruition. The fa�ade of Notre-Dame must rank as one of the
few entirely perfect architectural accomplishments of man. With
the cathedral of Paris, also, the new art shows itself in all its
wonderful inclusiveness; design, as apart from constructive
science, appears full flood in the entire treatment of the
exterior; the Lombard rose window has been evolved to its final
point; decorative detail, both in design and in placing, has
become sure and perfectly competent; while sculpture, stained
glass, and, we know from records, painting have all forged forward
to a point at least even with the sister art of architecture. In
sculpture especially the advance has been amazing. For many
generations it was held that the restoration of sculpture as a
fine art was due to Italy, and specifically to Niccolo Pisano, but
as a matter of fact the task was accomplished in France a century
before his time. The revival began in the South, where Byzantine
remains were numerous and the tradition still lingered. At
Clermont-Ferrand, by the end of the eleventh century, a school of
competent sculptors had been developed; Toulouse and Moissac
followed suit, and by 1140 the Ile-de-France was producing works
which show "a grace and mastery of design, a truth and tenderness
of sentiment, and a fineness and precision of chiselling that are
unparalleled in any other schools save those of ancient Greece and
of Italy in the fifteenth century" (Moore, op. cit., XIII, 366).
The sculptures of St-Denis, of Chartres, of Senlis, and of Paris
are perfect examples of sculpture beyond criticism in itself and
exquisitely adapted to its architectonic function; the statue of
Our Lady in the portal of the north transept of Paris may be
placed for comparison side by side with the masterpieces of
Hellenic sculpture and lose nothing by the test. Of stained glass
enough remains here and elsewhere to show how marvellous was the
wholly new art brought into being by the genius of medievalism;
and that the painting and guilding of all the interior surfaces
was on a scale of equal perfection, we are compelled to believe.
As the cathedrals and churches now remain to us -- much of the
glass destroyed by savage iconoclasm and brutality, every trace of
colour vanished from the walls, while the original altars
themselves have been swept away together with their gorgeous
hangings and decorations (monstrosities like that of Chartres, for
instance, taking their places); shrines, screens, and tombs, all
wonderfully wrought and glorious in colour and gold, shattered and
cast into the rubbish heap -- they can give but an inadequate idea
at best of the nature of that Christian art which in the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries came as the result of a fusion of all the
arts, each one of which had been raised to the highest point of
efficiency. Of the lost colour of Gothic art Mr. Prior says,

We can readily be assured that nothing of crudity found place in
the colour scheme of the Middle Ages -- for have we not their
illuminated manuscripts in evidence? For its pure and delicate
harmony, a page of a thirteenth or fourteenth century manuscript
may compete with the work of the greatest masters of colour that
the world has known, and we cannot doubt that the same mastery of
brilliant and harmonious tints was shown in the colour scheme of
cathedral painting (op. cit., Introd., 19).

Some hint of what has been lost may be obtained from the faded
frescoes of Cimabue and the painters of Siena, as they may be seen
to-day at Assisi and Florence and Siena itself.

The defects of Paris are almost wholly absent in Chartres, which
is the most nearly perfect of all Gothic cathedrals both in
conception and in the details of its working out. It is
unquestionably the noblest interior in Christendom, even though
the lower portions of its choir have been ruined by the most
aggressive vandalism known to the eighteenth century. Its
relations of dimension are of the same final and classical type as
are those of the west front of Paris, while it stands at that
middle point of achievement when the defects of the Norman system
had been eliminated, and those of the too exuberant vitality of
the thirteenth century had not yet appeared. As has been said
above, Gothic architecture is an impulse and a tendency rather
than a perfectly rounded accomplishment; the element of
personality entered into it as into no other of the great styles,
and it was therefore subject not only to dazzling flights of
spontaneous genius, but also to the misguided imaginings of daring
innovators. The noble calm of the Paris facade was followed by the
nervous complexity and lack of relation of Laon. Only five years
after this same masterpiece of Notre-Dame was achieved, the flying
buttresses of the chevet were reconstructed, and in place of the
original fine simplicity and logic of the system of doubled arcs,
announcing perfectly the fundamental plan, were substituted the
present daring and superb, but illogical and ungainly arches
soaring from the outer abutments across both aisles sheer to the
spring of the high vault. Similarly, when Amiens was built, the
just proportions of Chartres were sacrificed to the pride of
structural ability, and a faultless harmony of parts and
proportions yielded to wire drawn elegance and awe-inspiring
altitudes, destined a little later, in Beauvais, to be the Nemesis
of Gothic art. Finally, the system of concentrated loads, which
made possible a structure of masonry that was but a skeleton,
supporting vaults of stone and filled in by walls of glass, was so
tempting to the sense of daring and to the inevitable logic of the
French genius that it led to a recklessness in the reductions of
solids to a minimum that, however much it may have justified
itself structurally, however marvellous may have been the results
it made possible in the line of glowing and translucent walls of
Apocalyptic colour, must be considered as falling away from the
justice and the grandeur of a classically architectonic scheme
such as that of Chartres.

It was the Logic of the Parisian that brought to his Gothic both
its extreme excellence and its decay: the science of vault
construction fell in with his bent. The idea once having attracted
him, his logical faculty compelled him to follow it to the end.
His vaults rose higher and higher; his poise and counterpoise, his
linkage of thrust and strain grew more complicated and daring,
until material mass disappeared from his design and his cathedrals
were chain-works of articulated stone pegged to the ground by
pinnacles (Edward S. Prior, "A History of Gothic Art in England",
I, 9).

The fact must not be ignored, that even in the culminating
monuments of the thirteenth century in France the mania for
skeleton construction led to unfortunate subterfuges. The
reduction of masonry was carried beyond a possible minimum, and
its insufficiency was supplemented by hidden bars, ties, and
chains of iron.

The windows were sub-divided by strong grates of wrought-iron,
some of the horizontal bars of which ran on through the piers
continuously. At the Sainte Chapelle a chain was imbedded in the
walls right round the building, and the stone vaulting ribs were
reinforced by curved bands of iron placed on each side and bolted
to them (W.R. Lethaby, "Mediaeval Art", VII, 161).

In spite of these errors of a too perfect mastery of the art of
building, the great group of cathedrals that followed during the
thirteenth century in France must always remain the crowning glory
of Catholic architecture. Bourges, Reims, and Amiens, with the
numberless other examples of a perfected art, from the Channel to
the Pyrenees, the Alps to the sea, form the greatest cycle of
buildings in a definite and highly developed style that has ever
been produced by man, and is the most salient exposition in
history of human capacity for evolving a material perfection with
absolute beauty and spiritual significance, all under the control
and by the impulse of a dominant and undivided religious faith.

There are three abstruse subjects connected with the nature and
growth of Gothic architecture on which much has been written, yet
nothing thus far that may be considered finally conclusive:



�  the Commacini, or seventh-century guild of masons;

�  the "structural refinements" to which Professor Goodyear has
devoted so much study;

�  the application of certain mystical numbers, and their
relations to the solution of the problem of proportion.

Of the Commacini, whose name first appeals in a mid-fifth-century
document, Mr. Lethaby says,

It is generally held by scholars that the word does not refer to a
centre at Como, but should be understood as signifying an
association or guild of masons, and that the Magistri Commacini
heard of in the seventh century were of no small importance. It
does seem probable, however, that the expansion of N. Italian art
over many parts of Europe, which appears to have taken place in
the eleventh and twelfth centuries, may be traced to the fact that
in Italy the guilds had privileges which made members free to
travel at a time when Western masons were attached to manors or
monasteries (W. R. Lethaby, "Mediaeval Art", IV, 114).

Professor Goodyear may be assumed to have proved that the
irregularities in plan, the variations in spacing, the inclination
of walls, and all the other manifold peculiarities of medieval
building are in many ways premeditated, and not the result of
negligence or accident. The aesthetic excuse he makes less
obvious, however, nor has he yet established any general law which
holds as consistently as do those governing architectural
refinements in Greek architecture. The mystical deductions as to
the persistence of certain numerical laws, the occult properties
of numbers, and the angle called the "pi pitch" from the time of
the builders of the pyramids, all of which are supposed to express
certain fundamental laws governing the universe, and to have been
transmitted from father to son for thousands of years, until they
appear as the controlling principles of Gothic proportion, and the
setting out of Gothic plans, may be found in "Ideal Metronomy" by
the Rev. H. G. Wood (Boston, 1909).

When the chevet of Le Mans was finished, in 1254, the beginnings
recorded in Jumi�ges two centuries before had worked themselves
out to a point beyond which further wholesome development was
impossible. The Franks had perfected what the Normans had
initiated; the structural scheme inherent in Jumi�ges had
progressed step by step to its conclusion; the great architectural
harmonies of form and proportion and dimension, the mysterious and
evocative powers of subtile and rhythmical relationship, had
already achieved their highest fruition in Chartres and Reims,
while an entirely new category of art, no sign of which had been
accorded to the Normans, had by the Franks been brought again into
being, viz., that of absolute beauty in decoration, whether in
stone or glass or pigment, whether in itself as isolated detail or
in regard to its placing and disposition. Moreover, this latter
manifestation of art was in terms radically different to anything
that had gone before, although the principles were identified with
those of all great art: "In breadth of design, ordination of parts
and measured recurrence of structural and ornamental elements, the
Gothic artist obeyed, though in different form, the same primary
laws that had governed the ancient Greek" (Moore, op. cit., I,
22). The same was true of his sense of abstract and concrete
beauty; in the contours of his mouldings, the carving of his caps
and crockets, bosses and spandrels, the development of his
decorative compositions of mass and line, and light and shade, he
fell in no respect behind his brothers of Greece, while he
exceeded those of Byzantium. The forms were different, wholly his
own and original, but the essential spirit was the same.

In the meantime Gothic architecture had been following a parallel
course of development in England, borrowing directly from Normandy
and France, assimilating what it so acquired, and giving to all a
distinctly national character that tended from year to year
further to separate English Gothic from any other, both
structurally and artistically. No sooner was the Conquest effected
in 1066, than the building of Norman abbeys, cathedrals, and
churches was put in hand. Actually the introduction of Norman
Romanesque occurred sixteen years earlier, viz., in 1050, when St.
Edward the Confessor began the building of Canterbury. The
earliest work differs in no essential particular from that of
Normandy, except as regards size, which in many cases was
astonishing; not only were the abbeys often far larger than
anything in Normandy, they were the greatest buildings in Europe.
Winchester and St. Paul's were more than double the ground area of
the Abbaye aux Hommes, while the London cathedral and Bury St.
Edmund's were each a fourth larger even than the gigantic Cluny
itself. From the first the English peculiarity of great length
combined with comparatively narrow nave (30-35 feet in clear span)
is conspicuous. As the Norman buildings were destroyed, and
rebuilt under Gothic influence the original setting out was
generally adhered to, and Gothic naves are seldom found of a width
greater than that of the Norman. Very early, also, occurs the
typical deep English choir, Canterbury in 1096, having one nine
bays in depth. This excessive length of the eastern arm was due
quite as much to practical considerations, as to those of beauty.
Religion was popular in England for some centuries after the
Conquest, and great quantities of worshippers had to be provided
for. In Spain the choir of monks or secular clergy thrust itself
through the nave half way to the west doors; in France it usually
took in at least the crossing; the cathedrals of the Ile-de-
France were secular and the very wide choirs easily accommodated
the few canons. In England, however, the numbers of the monks and
canons was so great, and so many of the cathedrals were monastic
in their foundation, that enormously long choirs were necessary
for the seating, in their narrow width, of those permanently
attached to each church.

The great abbeys and cathedrals were seldom vaulted, being covered
by timber roofs of low pitch, except as regards their easily
vaulted aisles. Barrel vaults were occasionally used, groin vaults
in innumerable cases; the groin vault with ribs first occurs in
Durham in 1093, an astonishing date, since the earliest ribbed
vault claimed for France is in the diminutive church of Rhuis, a
structure the date of which is unknown, but is placed at about
1100. The earliest known rib vault is claimed by Rivoira to be
that of San Flaviano, in Umbria, but there is some doubt as to
whether this is the original vault of a church known to have been
built in 1032. San Nazzaro Maggiore, at Milan, has an authentic
rib vault of 1075, and it appears therefore that the choir vault
of Durham is earlier than any certain example in France, however
small, and that it was built within twenty years of the first
dated rib vault in Lombardy. The vaults of Durham nave are pointed
and ribbed, and are not later than 1128, six years after the
pointed arch appears in the little French church of Morienval.

No further development towards Gothic in England until the middle
of the twelfth century. Great abbeys in the fully developed Norman
style, such as Kirkstall and Fountains, Malmesbury, Peterborough,
Norwich, and Ely were reared all over England, but the prevailing
monastic influence was Benedictine, and this was always
architecturally conservative, and at the same time magnificent.
Apses with encircling ambulatories were almost invariable, and
there was frequently the western transept, as at Bury and Ely.
Towards the end of the Norman period the Cluniac influence greatly
intensified the native richness in decoration of Benedictine art,
and to this we owe in great measure the rich and intricate carving
of the late Norman work that persisted down even to the chapel of
Our Lady at Glastonbury, built in 1184. Before this date had
occurred two events which were to initiate and, in varying
degrees, control the growth of Gothic in England: the coming of
the Cistercians and the rebuilding of Canterbury choir by William
of Sens. The Cistercians always favoured Gothic, over the massive
and grandiose Romanesque of the Benedictines and Cluniacs, because
of its early austerity and the economies it made possible in
building. Regular Canons, also, and for similar reasons, adopted
the economical new form, and this double influence was constantly
exerted toward structural and artistic simplicity -- a fortunate
thing for the new style, since it prevented a too early flowering
in the richness and luxuriance of beautiful detail.

That William of Sens introduced to England and set before English
eyes so much as he could of so much as then existed of French
Gothic is quite true, but it does not appear that his was the
first Gothic done in England, or that it had a wide or lasting
influence. Mr. Bond divides the local adaptation of Gothic into
three schools -- that of the West, the North, and the South --
giving to the former priority in time. He says:

The first complete Gothic of England commences not with the choir
of Lincoln, but of Wells, as begun by Reginald FitzBohun who was
bishop from 1174 to 1191. . . . It was in the West of England that
the art of Gothic vaulting was first mastered; first, so far as we
know, at Worcester; and it was in the West, first apparently at
Wells, that every arch was pointed, and the semicircular arch
exterminated (op. cit., VII, 105).

This development was underway at Worcester, Dore, Wells,
Shrewsbury, and Glastonbury, to name only a few of the examples
quoted, by the time the work at Canterbury passed from the hands
of William of Sens to those of William the Englishman, and there
is little evidence that it had any particular effect on the
progress already begun. In the North, Lincoln choir followed close
after Canterbury and was manifestly influenced by it in many ways,
but as Mr. Bond says, "it is equally plain that the obligation is
almost wholly to the English and not to the French part of that
design" (op. cit., VII, 111-12), for not all of Canterbury choir
is French, even in the case of the work of William of Sens
himself; the slender shafts of Purbeck marble, the springing of
the vault ribs from the level of the triforium caps rather than
from the string course above, the penetrations of the clerestory,
the elaborately compound angle piers, with their ring of detached
columns, are all English, and it precisely these features St. Hugh
copied at Lincoln. Neither does there appear in the retro-choir of
Chichester, begun about the time William of Sens went back to
France, any evidence that his work had established a dominating
precedent; here the work is of a distinctively native cast, the
columns of the arcade in particular being original to a degree and
of the most distinguished beauty.

The exotic element in Canterbury proved to be but an episode and
English Gothic went on developing itself after its own independent
fashion. The choir of Lincoln exerted far greater influence and
became the general model for all parts of England. In some cases
an attempt, and a successful one, was made to dispense with the
vault entirely, as at Hexham, Tynemouth, and Whitby, where in each
instance the timber roof of the Anglo-Norman abbey was retained,
and the chief attention was devoted to refining and improving the
detail and composition of the wall design, where extremely
beautiful results were obtained, as at Whitby, by the strictly
English elaboration of the arch mouldings and the profiling of the
pier sections. The flying buttress also was slow of acceptance and
never, indeed, became the striking feature it was in all the
buildings of thirteenth-century France. The English cared little
for logic and less for structural brilliancy, or even consistency;
the goals they aimed at were beauty in all its forms, individual
expression, novelty, originality -- qualities they not seldom
achieved at the expense of structural integrity. The Gothic of
France was singularly consistent; it rapidly developed into a
classical system from which no radical departures were made and
into which the element of individual initiative hardly ever
entered, once the body of laws and precedents had been
established. The Gothic of England never possessed any such canon
either of logic or of taste. Every bishop, abbot, or master-
builder strove to outdo his fellows, to strike out some new and
dazzling masterpiece, and if, as a result, the medieval building
of England failed of the finality, the certainty, and the
uniformity of that of France, it achieved a variety and
personality far in advance of anything to be found across the
channel. The second importation of French ideas, in the shape of
Westminster Abbey, was apparently as helpless to change the
English character as Canterbury choir had been; here also the
French setting out, the chevet, the structural system, were
overlaid with English qualities.

We may readily make the fullest allowance for French influence at
Westminster, for so entirely is it translated into the terms of
English detail that the result is triumphantly English. It is a
remarkable thing indeed, that this church, which was so much
influenced by French facts, should, in spirit, be one of the most
English of English buildings (Lethaby: "Westminster Abbey and the
King's Craftsmen", V, 125).

French "facts" were apparently as helpless to control the general
building of a people as they had been to restrain English workmen
in their detail, and after the great abbey was finished in all its
beauty England went on as before. By this time the stylistic
quality of English Gothic had been pretty well fixed in such works
as Beverley choir and transepts; Christ Church and St. Patrick's,
Dublin; Ely, presbytery, Southwell choir, Netley and Rievaulx
Abbeys, together with the "Nine Altars" of Durham and Fountains,
all completed between the years 1225 and 1250, the peculiar
qualities of English work had taken on a definite and very
beautiful form. This is the period usually denominated "Early
English", and, it shows no particular advance in structural
development, it records a notable change in point of design;
nearly all the attention of the builders seems devoted to solving
the problems of beauty in form and line, in detail and composition
-- this chiefly in the interior treatment. The relations of the
arcade, triforium, and clerestory, the varying designs of the
latter with their subtile arrangements of slender shafts and
delicate lancets; the beautiful pier sections and moulding
profiles, together with the sculpture of capitals, bosses,
crockets, and terminals -- varying as between the many sub-schools
of the four main architectural provinces, yet always marked by a
quality of pure beauty seldom attained even in the Ile-de-France -
- all are significant of a distinctively national artistic
development, even though it follows lines other than those that
held across the Channel.

Coincidentally with the building of Westminster went on such works
as the retro- choir of Exeter, the nave of Lichfield, and Tintern
Abbey, wherein are the first signs of change from Early English to
Geometrical. This process was continued up to the end of the
century, and in the works of its last quarter are to be found the
highest attainments of English art. Carlisle choir and east front,
Peterborough and Pershore choirs, and St. Mary's Abbey, York, are
all expressed in a type of art that rises to the level of the
highest attainments of man. The exquisite line-composition of
Pershore and of York Abbeys, the refinement combined with
masculine strength, the swift, steel-like curves of the moulding
profiles, the perfected beauty of the carved foliage, together
with the masterly arrangement of the lines and spaces of light,
the hollows and depths of shade -- all work together to build up a
masterly art. Much of the product of this time has perished, and
even of York Abbey, which seems to represented the high-water mark
of pure English design, nothing remains except a shattered aisle
wall, a crossing pier, and a few piles of marble fragments. Though
at the beginning of the nineteenth century the greater portion of
the fabric was intact, about 1820 it was sold to speculators to be
burned into lime.

During the first half of the fourteenth century architectural
progress was cumulative, reaching its apogee during the reign of
Edward III. The fine simplicity and almost Hellenic feeling for
line visible in the work of the preceding half century, and that
gives it a place in this respect in advance of any other Gothic
work of any time or people, has yielded to decorative richness,
the multiplication of ornament and detail, and an intricate
composition of light and shade. The incomparable carving of
Lincoln and Wells, York Abbey, West Walton, and Llandaff,
architectural yet with all the qualities of form that are found in
the noblest sculpture, yields first to the lovely, but
naturalistic, type of Southwell chapter house, then to the
globular forms, the bulbous modelling, and the effete curves of
Patrington, Heckington, and the fourteenth-century tombs of
Beverley and Ely. Curvilinear window tracery, in all its suave
grace, has taken the place of the fine and vigorous forms as of
Netley, advanced a stage beyond the prototypes of France. Finally,
the brilliantly articulated lierne vaulting, with its intermediate
ribs emphasizing the verticality of the composition and carrying
out to completion in the roof the fine drawing of multiple piers
and moulded arches, is swerving towards the unjustifiable type
that came just before the fan vault, i.e., the criss-crossing of a
network of purely decorative ribs over the vault-surfaces in
violation of structural principle.

Decadence and perfect achievement go hand in hand -- Exeter nave,
the finest English interior remaining intact, on the one hand,
Wells presbytery, on the other. But whatever the weaknesses that
were showing themselves, they entered little into the make-up of
the great parish churches, which represent, more than the
episcopal and monastic structures, the genius of the period. This
was one of the three great epochs of such parish architecture in
England, and it is not to be forgotten that the true qualities of
English Gothic art reveal themselves quite as fully in the minor
as in the major buildings of this country. For a full century,
i.e. from 1350 until 1450, the history of English Gothic is
largely a history of parish church-building. The Black Death,
which in 1349 smote the land with a pestilence that cut its
population almost in halves, was followed by the War of the Roses,
and the peace and prosperity of Edward III did not wholly return
until the accession of Henry VII. During this long period,
however, the trend of stylistic development was wholly changed by
the remarkable innovations initiated by Abbot Thokey at Gloucester
in 1330, and carried on by William of Wykeham at Winchester from
1380.

The supreme importance of Gloucester in the history of the later
Gothic has never been adequately recognized. She turned the
current of English architecture in a wholly new direction. But for
Gloucester, English Decorated work might well have developed into
a Flamboyant as rich and fanciful as that of France. But to the
remotest corners of the land, to cathedral, abbey church,
collegiate and parish church, there was brought the influence of
Gloucester by the countless pilgrims to the shrine of Edward the
Second in her choir (Bond, op. cit., VII, 134).

The manifest tendencies of the Decorated -- not, it must be
confessed, of the most promising kind -- were terminated and
instead a new progress was instituted toward development of what
we now know as Perpendicular the first style of architecture that
can properly be called "English". Hitherto English Gothic has been
rather a lovely overlaying of Continental principles by a
distinctively racial decoration and a certain fine fastidiousness
of design, with minor modifications of plan and system that left
the foundations intact, so far as they had been apprehended and
assimilated. Now was to come a perfectly independent manifestation
in which system, design, and decoration were all new and all
exclusively English. The adoption of the French scheme of a
structural framework, the walls being no longer of masonry, but of
glass set in a thin scaffolding of stone mullions, was at last
adopted, but its working-out bore almost no relation whatever to
the French method. Before the architectural revolution there were
signs that sense of proportion and composition was decaying, as
for example in the Lady Chapel of Ely (1321), which has almost no
architectonic qualities to commend it, but, whether William of
Wykeham or profounder psychological influences are responsible,
the fact remains that the danger was averted, and England recalled
to sounder principles, which resulted in a new life in Gothic that
persisted until Henry VIII and the regents under Edward VI brought
the whole epoch of medieval civilization to an end and surrendered
an unwilling people to the Reformation. Winchester nave and York
choir; Westminster Hall, King's College Chapel, Cambridge, and St.
George's Windsor; Sherborne and Malvern, the choir vault of Oxford
cathedral and the chapel of Henry VII at Westminster, together
with the major part of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges, the
great central towers of many of the cathedrals and abbeys, and,
finally, parish churches of all sizes and almost without number,
are indicative of the surprising new life in art and therefore of
the strength of the sound Catholic civilization of England. The
beauty of the new style, its structural integrity, and its fecund
variety are worthy of high admiration. What it lacked of the
majesty of form and the serene reserve of an earlier time is
almost made up for by a fineness of line, a richness of design
without opulence, and a splendour of colour that find few
antecedents in history, while the fan vault takes its place as one
of the very great inventions of architecture. "In these splendid
vaultings of the fifteenth century we have indeed the last work of
English monastic art" (Prior, op. cit., VII, 95).

Step by step, from her point of departure from the Gothic of
France, England had worked out to the full her own form of Gothic
artistic expression. French precedents sat lightly upon her, and
she was not favourably disposed to coercion. In plan the Norman
and Burgundian type had been adhered to, and instead of that
concentration which had produced in France a parallelogram with
one end semicircular, there had been an expansion which resulted
in the episcopal or archiepiscopal cross plans of Lincoln,
Beverley, and Salisbury -- long, narrow naves, equally long
choirs, widely-spreading, aisled transepts, and frequently choir
transepts as well, with a deep Lady Chapel prolonging the main
axis still further to the east. The plan of a French cathedral
such as Paris or Amiens announces its ordonance but indifferently;
that of an English cathedral, exactly. Outwardly, the former is
hardly more than a mountainous mass without composition; vast and
awe-inspiring, but without emphasis or variety, except in regard
to its western front when taken by itself. The latter -- with its
long, lateral fa�ade, it building-up by successive planes, both
horizontal and vertical, its Lady Chapel, choir, central tower,
and west towers, its bold transepts, porches, and chapels --
becomes an elaborate yet monumental composition of brilliant and
infinitely varied light and shade. With the exception of Hales,
Lincoln, and Beaulieu (now destroyed), Tewkesbury, and
Westminster, the chevet gained no hold in England, nor did the
apsidal termination widely commend itself; instead, the square
east end became the established type, and when to this was added a
retro-choir with a still lower Lady Chapel still further to the
east, the result was an independent architectural scheme equally
admirable to that complex glory of the French chevet.

Mr. Prior advances the interesting theory that the square east end
was a fixed feature of both Saxon and Celtic church-buildings,
that it was taken to Burgundy by St. Stephen Harding, the
Englishman, who had been a monk of Sherborne in Dorset, where the
old national tradition had survived the Norman invasion, and that
it came back with the Cistercians, who, by their sheer dynamic
force, were able to impose it at last on Benedictine abbey and
secular cathedral alike, so bringing an originally local device to
its own again. He says further:

In this matter the Canterbury choir of William of Sens was a
survival rather than a pattern for English use. By the end of the
twelfth century the small Keltic sanctuary had imposed itself on
the choirs of our great Norman churches still more decisively than
it had in the basilican introduction of St. Augustine (A History
of Gothic Art in England, II, 79).

In height, as related to breadth, the earlier and more reserved
French relations were never exceeded, while they were often
discounted; until Tudor times the elimination of the wall in
favour of skeleton construction combined with glass screens, found
little following, and a grave and conservative relationship was
preserved between solids and voids. The central tower, the
culmination and concentration of the composition, was almost
invariable, while the west front was usually subordinated to the
design as a whole. The elaborate articulation of piers and
archivolts, until both became compositions of fine lines of light
and shade, was carried further in England than elsewhere, and the
introduction of tiercerons, or accessory vault ribs, with the
ridge ribs to receive them, was in keeping with an instinct that
felt the subtle beauty of these multiplied lines. The logical
sense, that demanded the grounding of every downward thrust of
vault rib either at the pavement or on the abacus of the pier or
column caps, was not operative, and in most cases the vault shafts
were stopped on corbels above the level of nave capitals. >From
the Cistercian aversion to ornament, and perhaps also in part from
the use of turned shafts of dark marble applied to the piers and
bonded in by stone rings or bronze dowels, came the turned and
moulded cap with the circular abacus. In its polygonal chapter
houses England developed a brilliant conception all its own, and
almost the same might be said of the parish church, while in the
designing of tombs, chantries, reredoses, choir-screens, and
chancel-fittings of wood, the delicate fancy of the English had
full play in the creation of a mass of exquisite sculpture and
joinery that has no counterpart elsewhere. If logic and
consistency are the note of French Gothic, personality and daring
are those of the Gothic of England. The west fronts of
Peterborough, Bury St. Edmunds, Wells, Ely, and Lincoln; the
chapter houses of York, Salisbury, Lincoln, and Westminster; the
octagon of Ely, the fan vaulting of Gloucester, Sherborne, Oxford,
and Westminster -- all are examples of a vitality of impulse, a
fertility in conception, a soaring imagination, and a cheerful
disregard of scholastic precedent that give English Gothic a
quality of its own as important in the make-up of the art
expression of Catholic Europe during the Middle Ages as is the
masterly and final structural achievement of the Ile-de-France.

Outside France and England the racial adaptations of the Gothic
impulse are much less vital and distinctive. Wales early evolved a
school which had great influence in the development of style in
the West of England, but it soon became merged therein and did not
long preserve its identity: Ireland shows in its minor monastic
work peculiar and very individual qualities. In Scotland French
influence was more pronounced than in the South, and the Norman of
Jedburgh and Kelso, the Gothic of Dryburgh, Melrose, and Edinburgh
deserve more careful study than has yet been given them. In all
essential particulars, however, they are of the English school,
and show no radical departures from the type established in the
South by the Benedictines, Cluniacs, Cistercians, Augustinians,
and Friars. In Germany the Gothic expression was slow in
establishing itself, few evidences appearing before the Gothic
style had reached perfection in France and England.

A reason for this, may perhaps be found in the fact that Germany
in the twelfth century possessed a Romanesque architecture which,
especially in the important churches along the Rhine, was of a
very admirable character and was well suited to the tastes of the
German people (Moore, op. cit., VII, 237).

Another reason may also be discovered in the further fact that the
pressure of Cistercian influence during its great formative period
was towards France and England rather than in the direction of
Germany, wile the impulse of creative civilization in the twelfth
century was from Norman and Frankish rather than Teutonic blood.
When, about the middle of the thirteenth century, French
architects began the construction of the cathedral of Cologne
after the exaggerated manner of Beauvais, they might almost have
claimed that theirs was the first Gothic structure in Germany.
Pointed arches and ribbed vaults had appeared sporadically in some
of the larger churches at the end of the twelfth century, such as
Worms, Mainz, and Bamberg, but the lateral arches are not stilted,
and so far as proportion, design, exterior treatment and detail
are concerned, these churches are strictly of the Rhenish
Romanesque type, as are indeed, awkwardly, the internally more
Gothic Magdeburg and Limburg, St. Gereon, Cologne, and the
Liebfrauenkirche, Trier, the first completed in 1227, the second
begun in the same year, are churches of novel plan, each
apparently having resulted from an effort, to turn a French chevet
into a church by repeating its design, so producing a plan
approximating a circle, and harking back in an indeterminate sort
of way to the polygonal, domed churches of Charlemagne; in both
cases French schemes and forms have been used rather superficially
and with little appreciation. Cologne remains, in spite of these
examples, the first church in Germany that is strictly Gothic in
its idea and its setting out, but even here its detail and
ornament are German rather than French. It had a considerable
influence on the superficial development of style, and towards the
end of the century such works as St. Elizabeth, Marburg, and the
cathedrals of Strasburg and Freiburg show the spreading of a style
that had come too late to reach any very complete fruition. Until
the end of the Middle Ages, when curious fantasies in design and
decoration gave to German Gothic a certain unquestioned
individuality, the contributions to the development of this phase
of art were not notable; the most conspicuous is the Hallenbau
scheme which consists in raising one or more aisles on either side
of the nave to an equal height therewith, or rather in building a
great hall roofed with level vaulting supported on rows of slender
shafts dividing it in aisles. L�beck has five of these churches,
others no less than seven. The Hallenbau church, whatever its
width, was usually covered by one enormous roof, and the result,
both internally and externally, is as far as possible from the
Gothic idea of a logical assemblage of parts, each bearing a just
and beautiful proportion to the others, all interrelated and
forming a highly articulated organism, the exterior of which
announced explicitly every structural form of plan and ordonance.
The "open-work" spire, such as that of Freiburg, is a German
development of a Flamboyant idea, which had much aesthetically to
commend it, its lacelike surfaces being often treated with great
effectiveness.

Flemish Gothic is distinctly a sub-school of that of France rather
than of Germany. The nave of Tournai, built in 1060 is still
Rhenish Romanesque, though pointed arches and certain Burgundian
qualities are creeping in; its proportions, however, partake of
the finer feeling of the Franks, even though its general
conception is Rhenish. During the first half of the thirteenth
century such thoroughly strong and refined examples of true Gothic
as St. Martin, Ypres, St. Bavon and St. Michael, Ghent, appear,
widely divided in the quality from the halting efforts of Germany
proper. The civic work of Flanders is perhaps its most
distinctively national creation, and the Cloth Hall, Ypres, with
the great group of fourteenth-century town halls -- Bruges,
Brussels, Louvain, Oudenarde, Alost, and Ghent -- while excessive
in their flamboyant detail, yet retain the essential elements of
fine composition and vigorous design.

In Italy the introduction of Gothic forms was as long delayed as
in Germany, while, so far as native work is concerned, the
fundamental principles of Gothic construction were never accepted
at all. It was essentially a northern art, and in Italy neither
the mental disposition of the people nor the spiritual and
temporal conditions put a premium on ideas in themselves racially
foreign. Nevertheless, once introduced, they produced in many
cases very beautiful results, particularly in decoration and
design, and Italian Gothic certainly contributes valuable elements
to the total of medieval art. During the eleventh century one
school after another had come into existence in almost every part
of Italy, all based more or less on some local modification of the
primitive basilican idea, yet varying in different directions as
the peculiar influences of each section might direct. In Torcello,
Murano, and Venice these were naturally Byzantine, more or less
modified by the variations at Ravenna. In Sicily, Byzantine
influence was mingled with strains from Mohammedan sources and
with a strong influence brought in by King Roger and his Norman
followers. Pisa and Florence worked on their own lines with some
slight Lombardic admixture, while those portions of the peninsula
under Lombard control developed their vital and inspiring style
from the persisting Carolingian tradition. The abstract beauty
much of this Italian product of the eleventh century is very
pronounced, St. Mark's at Venice, San Miniato at Florence, Cefalu,
Monreale, and the Capella Palatina in Sicily; Troja, Toscanella,
San Michele at Pavia, San Zeno at Verona -- all possess elements
of great art, but no one of the styles indicated by any of these
buildings was destined to a final working-out under cultural
conditions that made such a result inevitable. Development during
the twelfth century was almost wholly local in its extent and
decorative in its scope, and it was not until the coming of the
Cistercians, with their Gothic of Burgundy, at the opening of the
thirteenth century, that the incipient or reminiscent local modes
were extinguished, and an attempt made at a general unification of
style.

Apparently the Gothic influence had come too late. The era when
architecture was to be the favourite mode for the artistic voicing
of a civilization was, at least in the South, nearly at an end;
painting and sculpture were to take its place, and therefore the
Gothic architecture of Italy was to remain both racially alien and
in its nature episodical. In the former class are those churches
the designs of which were apparently imported almost bodily from
Burgundy by the Cistercian monks, such as Fossanova, Casmari, and
San Galgano, all works of great beauty of form and proportion, all
vaulted in stone, the two former having fully developed rib vaults
with stilted lateral arches in good Gothic form, though in none is
the buttress system well developed. A little later come Sant'
Andrea, Vercelli (1219-24), said to be the work of an English
architect, but manifestly French, with a full system of flying
buttresses, San Francesco at Assisi (1228-53), attributed by
Vasari to a German architect, but also unmistakably French in its
first inspiration, though considerably modified by what may well
be local Franciscan influence, and San Francesco at Bologna, of
which much the same may be said.

The first really local development of Gothic seems to have been at
the hands of the friars, Sta. Croce and Sta. Maria Novella at
Florence, dating from the end of the century, varying so widely
from any contemporary form of Gothic that their peculiarities must
be assigned either to the friars themselves or to the influx of
Italian personality. One of the fundamental characteristics of
Gothic is a sense of just proportion and a fine relationship of
parts, combined with a passion for beauty of line, form, light and
shade colour, and their relationships, not invariably achieved but
always sought for with a consuming eagerness. These qualities are
almost wholly lacking in the churches above named, as well as in
the cathedral itself, which partakes of nearly all of their
peculiarities. We know that in England, when the Franciscans and
Dominicans built their own great, popular churches, while they
worked for the same large open spaces and economy of material,
they nevertheless regarded these considerations of proportion and
pure beauty, therefore the conclusion seems inevitable that it is
not to the nature of the Mendicant Orders, but to some incapacity
in the race, as it then was, that we owe the radical shortcomings
of the work of Arnolfo and his fellows in Italy. The fact remains,
however, that the great churches of the friars are the chief
offenders. San Giovanni e Paolo and the Frari at Venice, the
cathedral of Arezzo, San Petronio, Bologna, and the cathedral of
Florence are, with the friars' churches in the city last named,
brilliant examples of the lamentable results that may be obtained
when the structural and aesthetic laws of a great style are
ignored or misunderstood. Siena and Orvieto cathedrals avoid the
bald ugliness of this class of work, but in their structure they
have no kinship with Gothic, while in respect to their fa�ade the
only quality they possess which is Gothic in any degree is a
certain sense of beauty in ornament, itself derived from a
recurrence to the forms of nature for inspiration, combined with
an intense refinement of line and modelling and a blending of the
arts of sculpture and colour in a poetic and lovely composition.
Perhaps the nearest approach to true Gothic feeling and
accomplishment is to be found in the unfinished front of Genoa
cathedral; being of the twelfth century, it is sufficiently early
to have received something of the first great Gothic impulse, and
is a masterpiece of delicate relations and exquisite detail. The
best Gothic work in Italy is not ecclesiastical, but secular, and
is to be found in the palaces of Venice, Siena, Florence, and
Bologna. The Doge's Palace and the innumerable private structures
of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in the first-named city
have all the qualities of pure beauty of design and detail, as
well as the unerring sense of proportion and relationship, that
are characteristic of Gothic art, while the forms through which
these are expressed are wholly medieval, yet with a complete
racial note that raises them almost to the dignity of a national
school of Gothic design.

Spain, as a Christian State, was non-existent except as a small
area of still unconquered territory near the Pyrenees, until the
middle of the thirteenth century, when Ferdinand III, afterwards
canonized, united the crowns of Castile and Leon, won back Seville
and Cordova, and established the final victory of the Cross over
the Crescent in the Iberian Peninsula. Until this time the Gothic
spirit had hardly more than crossed the mountains and always as a
direct importation from Burgundy and Aquitaine; Salamanca
cathedral, St. Vincent of Avila, the cathedrals of Lerida, Tudela,
and Tarragona, the Abbey of Verula, and the church of Las Huelgas
at Burgos, all built between 1120 and 1180, show a very
undeveloped type of early Gothic construction, combined with a
rich and imaginative treatment of Southern Romanesque design in
the exterior. Salamanca and St. Isidoro at Leon both possess domes
or lanterns over the crossing, remarkable in point of structural
ingenuity and beauty of design both internally and externally. If
the scheme was borrowed from the other side of the Pyrenees, it
has been wholly transformed and glorified, and this brilliant
innovation, containing such possibilities of development that were
never carried further, may justly be attributed to native Spanish
genius. No progressive growth occurred, however, during the next
fifty years, and it was not until the definitive victories of St.
Ferdinand made Spanish nationality possible, and the coming of the
Cistercians gave the necessary spiritual impulse, that Gothic
architecture in any true sense appeared in Spain, and then as
another direct importation from France rather than as a
development of the latent racial qualities inherent in Salamanca.
Burgos, Barcelona, Toledo, and Leon are closely French in their
setting-out and ordonance, but in detail they vary widely from all
French precedents. There is a southern richness and romance both
in the exterior and interior design and detail of Burgos, for
example, as well as in the other Spanish work from the middle of
the thirteenth century onward, that gives it a certain personality
quite distinct from that of any other school of Gothic. This
sumptuousness of detail and colour, and composition of light and
shade, enters into every detail; altars and reredoses, the latter
often vast in size and of the richest materials; grilles of
intricately wrought and chiselled metal; sculptured tombs; stalls
of the most elaborate carving; great pictures, tapestries, and
statutes innumerable, together with a Flemish type of stained
glass in the most brilliant colouring, were lavished on every
church; and since Spain has escaped the pillage and destruction of
religious revolutions, much of medieval completeness remains,
though considerably overlaid with a thick coating of Renaissance,
and therefore it is only in Spanish churches that one may obtain
some idea of the general effect of a medieval church as it once
was before it became subjected to the mishandling of
revolutionists, iconoclasts, and restorers.

The end of Gothic architecture and of all Catholic art came with
varying degrees of rapidity and at different times as between the
several schools of Europe. Generally speaking, its death-knell was
sounded when the work of St. Gregory the Great, St. Gregory VII,
and St. Innocent III was temporarily undone, and the French Crown
established a temporal control over the papacy. The exile at
Avignon, begun in 1305, followed as it was by the Great Schism,
broke the links that bound kings and peoples to the hitherto
dominant Church, opened the doors of Italy to the influx of the
neo-paganism that came from the East with the fall of
Constantinople in 1453, permitted the uprising of heresy in all
parts of Europe, and made possible the supremacy in Italy of the
tyrants of the fourteenth century -- Visconti, Sforza, Medici. The
Black Death, which scourged all Europe, and the Hundred Years War
in France brought down from its high estate the civilization that
had flowered at Chartres, and Reims, and Amiens, and when
architecture began to recover itself in France after the return of
peace, its advance was on lines suggested by the fourteenth
century Gothic of England, which had continued to grow rich and
fertile, the most vital school of Gothic art of the time. The
seeds were sown during the war itself, the chapel of St. John
Baptist of the cathedral of Amines, built in 1375, being of a
fully developed Flamboyant style. From now on the substitution was
complete; whatever building there was, was explicitly Flamboyant;
the old logical system, the old breadth and nobility of design,
detail always duly subordinated to just composition, were gone
almost in a night. Says Enlart:

Ce style, qui est l'exageration et la decadence de l'art gothique,
n'apporte presque aucun perfectionnement a l'art de b�tir ou de
dessiner, mais seulement un syst�me decoratif tr�s particulier et
plus ou moins arbitraire, qui, applique sans exception dans les
moindres details, produit beaucoup d'effet et beaucoup d'harmonie
d'ensemble ("This style, which is the exaggeration and decadence
of Gothic art, adds hardly any perfecting to the art of building
or of designing, but only a very peculiar and more or less
arbitrary system of decoration, which, when applied with thorough
consistency to the minutest details, is very effective and
produces a very harmonious general effect." -- "Manuel
d'archeologie fran�ais", I, 586).

The delicate and fantastic beauty of Flamboyant detail is
unquestionable, and, as decoration, the lacelike webs of thinness,
graceful curving forms, and craftily spotted lights and shades, as
they appear in Rouen, Troyes, and Abbeville west fronts and the
transepts of Beauvais, in Louviers, Caudebec, Notre-Dame de
l'Epine, St. Maclou, Rouen, St-Michel, and St-Germain, Amiens, are
amongst the most charming creations of artistic fancy. It must be
remembered, however, that it is all strictly a form of decoration,
not an architectonic style, nor even a sub-school thereof, unless
in such peculiarly admirable examples as the very Troyes ifa�ade,
the chevet of Mt. St-Michel, and the very wonderful St-Germain at
Amiens, the still persisting quality of structural integrity
combined with just proportions and a certain unusual restraint in
the placing of decoration justify a dignity hardly argued by the
unparalleled license of the general output of the Flamboyant
period. To a certain extent it is an architectural mystery, for it
is an excessive refinement of art appearing after the close of a
period of sound and vigorous civilization, in the midst of war and
anarchy, contemporaneously with religious degradation, growing
side by side with tendencies that in a few years were to bring the
civilization it connotes forever to an end. In this it was not
alone, however. Similar conditions in Italy surrounded the
culmination of the great arts of painting and sculpture, while in
England the delicate and exquisite Perpendicular Gothic reached
its highest development in the reign of Henry VIII. Says Mr.
Porter, in considering this phenomenon:

Thus in the hour of political and economic misfortune, in the
midst of the financial ruin and degradation of the Church, was
born flamboyant architecture -- the last frail blossom of medieval
genius. Did this art come into being as a prophetic manifestation
of the great national awakening that was to produce Jeanne d'Arc
and shake off the English yoke? I should hardly dare affirm it,
for the history of architecture ever reflects, rather than
presages, economic developments (op. cit., II, X, 368).

One may go further even than this, and say that the flowering of
art is always a generation or more later than the causes of its
being. Dante and Giotto are the last of the medieval epoch, rather
than the forerunners of the Renaissance. Shakespeare is
Elizabethan by accident of birth, but essentially he is the fruit
of pre-Reformation England. The early Renaissance in Italy is the
flowering of medievalism, rather than the germinating seed of the
Renaissance, and similarly the poetic, if inorganic, Flamboyant
art of France takes its colour not from the downfall of Catholic
civilization in fifteenth-century France, but from the better days
that preceded the great deb�cle. The magic of fifteenth-century
art is neither the unwholesome iridescence of decay nor the first
brightening towards the dawn of a Renaissance, but the afterglow
of a great day, in the brightness of which stood the creative
personalities of Sts. Odo of Cluny and Robert of Molesme, Bernard
and Norbert, Gregory VII and Innocent III, Philip Augustus, and
King Louis IX.

Generally speaking, fifteenth-century architecture throughout
Europe is secular as opposed to the Cluniac Romanesque and Norman,
and the Cistercian Gothic of the three preceding centuries.
Perpendicular Gothic in England and its derivative, Tudor, is
largely the product of guilds of architects, sculptors, and masons
working primarily for great merchants and the friars, the latter
being the dominant religious influence of the time. In France and
Flanders the Flamboyant style is peculiarly the product of the
individualistic architect and the purveyor of artistic luxuries,
and during the entire period the best and most significant work is
to be sought amongst guild-halls, palaces, castles, manors, and
colleges, and in the towers, chapels, tombs and other memorials
paid for by the new orders of rich merchants and affluent
courtiers.

The end now came rapidly. In Italy Gothic feeling as well as
Gothic forms had disappeared altogether by the end of the
fifteenth century, the last flicker of the instinctive art of
medievalism, as distinguished from the premeditated artifice of
the Renaissance, appearing in the work of the Lombardi in Venice,
and in such structures as the church of Sta Maria dei Miracoli and
the Scuola di San Marco (1480- 95). In France something of Gothic
romance and intrinsic beauty continued down to 1550 in the manoirs
and ch�teaux, while in Germany it dragged along a few decades
longer in some isolated instances. In Spain the superb central
tower of Burgos was built as late as 1567, though already full-
fledged Renaissance work was in process in other parts of the
Peninsula. In England the sumptuous Perpendicular of the Chapel of
Henry VII at Westminster hardened rapidly into the formalities of
later Tudor when, and ceased wholly as a definite style when the
suppression of the monasteries, the separation of the English
Church from the Roman obedience and the imposition of the
principles of the dogmatic Reformation of Germany on the English
people brought church-building to an end. With the final
submission of the English during the reign of Elizabeth to a
dogmatic revolution they had not invited, but were powerless to
resist, came an influx of German influence that rapidly wiped out
the very tradition of Gothic, except in the case of the
universities and in that of the minor domestic building,
substituting in its place the most unintelligent used classical
forms anywhere to be found in the history of the Renaissance. At
Oxford and Cambridge the cultural tradition was strong enough to
withstand for a century the complete acceptance of the new
fashion, and down to the middle of the seventeenth century the
elder tradition persisted in such work as St. John's, Cambridge,
and Wadham, Oxford, while its compulsion was so strong as to
coerce even Inigo Jones into building the fine garden front of St.
John's, Oxford, in a style at least reminiscent of what had been
universal two centuries before. The same instinctive impulse
continued in the case of manors and farmsteads even to a later
date, and to this day in certain portions of England the stone-
mason, carpenter, and tile layer preserve the old rules and
traditions of the craft that have been handed down from father to
son for centuries.

From the year 1000 to the year 1500, Catholic Europe had slowly
worked out its own form of artistic expression, largely through
"the most consummate art of building which the world has achieved"
(Prior, "History of Gothic Art in England", I, 7). As paganism had
done in Greece, so, and equally, Christianity wrought in the
North. Primarily it was an art of church-building and adornment
for the Church was the one concrete and unmistakable fact in life.
"While all else was unstable and changeful, she, with her unbroken
tradition and her uninterrupted services vindicated the principle
of order and the moral continuity of the race . . . . . . The
services of monastic and secular clergy alike, their offices of
faith, charity and labour in the field and the hovel, in the
school and the hospital as well as in the church were for
centuries, the chief witness of the spirit of human brotherhood
(Norton, "Historical Studies of Church Building in the Middle
Ages", I, 16). Therefore, on the heels of the tenth-century
triumph of the Church came the eleventh-century passion for
church-building; as says Rudolphus, the monk of Cluny, writing in
the midst of it all, "Erat enim instar ac si mundus ipse
excutiendo semet, rejecta vetustate, passim candidam ecclesiarum
vestem indueret" (It was as if the world, shaking itself and
putting off the old things, were putting on the white robe of
churches). The old vesture was indeed cast away and the new "white
robe of churches" was of other make. The underlying laws of the
new style were identical with those of all other great styles, the
vision of beauty was no different in any respect, the forms alone
were absolutely new. For five centuries the artistic mode of
Western Europe went on its way without a pause, one in spirit
wherever it was found.

The motives which inspired these great buildings of this period,
the principles which underlay their forms, the general character
of the forms themselves were in their essential nature the same
throughout Western Europe from Italy to England. The differences
in the works of different lands are but local and external
varieties (Norton, op. cit., I, 10).

This universal mode was universally destroyed, and in the space of
a few years. With the opening of the fifteenth century the victory
of the Renaissance was definitely assured, while it was brought to
its completion just a century later. Of the product of these five
centuries of activity comparatively little remains intact. As Mr.
Prior says, "Western Europe up to the middle of the sixteenth
century might be called a treasure house filled with gems of
Gothic genius. The desecrations and revolutions of two centuries
wrecked one half, swept Gothic churches clear of their ornaments
and then levelled to the ground many of the fabrics which they
furnished. Of much that was not actually destroyed, carelessness
and neglect and the necessities of rebuilding have since made
equal havoc . . . . At its worst this re-building, re-painting re-
carving has been wanton and causeless substitution . . . . For the
next generation to us any direct acquaintance with the great
comprehensive Gothic genius, except by means of parodies, will be
difficult" (A History of Gothic Art in England, I, 3, 4). Enough
remains, however, to enable us to reconstruct, at least in
imagination, an unique artistic product of Christian civilization
of which it is possible for Professor Norton to say that "it
advanced with constant increase of power of expression, of
pliability and variety of adaptation, of beauty in design and
skill in construction until at last, in the consummate splendour
of such a cathedral as that of Our Lady of Chartres or of Amiens,
it reached a height of achievement that has never been surpassed"
(op. cit., I, 13).

RALPH ADAMS CRAM
Transcribed by Michael C. Tinkler

From the Catholic Encyclopedia, copyright � 1913 by the
Encyclopedia Press, Inc. Electronic version copyright � 1996 by
New Advent, Inc.

Taken from the New Advent Web Page (www.knight.org/advent).

This article is part of the Catholic Encyclopedia Project, an
effort aimed at placing the  entire Catholic Encyclopedia 1913
edition on the World Wide Web. The coordinator is Kevin Knight,
editor of the New Advent Catholic Website. If you would like to
contribute to this  worthwhile project, you can contact him by e-
mail at (knight.org/advent). For  more information please download
the file cathen.txt/.zip.

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