Édouard Corroyer

“ Paul, Histoire Monumentale de la France.
St. Bernard, in an address to the monks of his day, reproves their degeneracy, and censures the exaggerated dimensions of the abbey churches, the splendour of their ornamentation, and the luxury of the abbots. O vanity of vanities! he exclaims, and folly great as vanity! The Church is bedecked in her walls, but naked in her poor! She overlays her stones with gold, and leaves her children without raiment! The curious are given distractions, and the miserable lack bread! ”

“ The images of wood, ivory, and vermeil, that we figure as illustrating the art of the image-carvers from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, show that the old tradition was still cherished in this community. Their artists were so far swayed by iconographic convention that a certain hieratic [176] sentiment is perceptible in their works; but this is never allowed to outweigh fitness of action and expression, and their masterpieces are so instinct with taste and delicacy, composed with so much skill and executed with such freedom, that they are the admiration of modern artists. ”

“ The main preoccupation of the architects of this period seems to have been the reduction of solid surfaces so as to give full play to the soaring effect of their airy shafts and vaults. The walls disappear, save below the windows, which now occupy the entire space of each bay. The triangular divisions of the vault are concealed by a serried network of supplementary ribs, for the most part useless save as decorations. But it must in justice be remembered that to this exaggeration of the window spaces we owe the growth of the beautiful art of painting on glass. ”

“ In the Middle Ages all the arts were auxiliary to architecture. The architect traced the details of his conception in the workshop, and superintended the construction; he directed stone-carvers, masons, sculptors, illuminators, painters, and glass-stainers, and laid his imprimatur on every branch of the work of which he was the creator.
Thus the connection between the allied arts was very close. The history of sculpture is that of architecture, for the diverse influences which marked their origin and modifications were common to both. ”

“ The one law which governs its construction is expediency. It frankly abandons those rules of classic proportion which are the canons, so to speak, of the round-headed arch. Thus we shall find the pointed approximating to the round-headed form in the twelfth century, only to diverge from it more widely than before, till, towards the close of the thirteenth and throughout the fourteenth century, it took on the acute proportions necessitated by a perilous disposition to prefer loftiness to solidity. ”

“ The flying buttress, in combination with the intersecting arch, gave [49] birth to a new system of construction, a system on which were raised vast buildings which compel our admiration and demand our careful study, but should not invite our imitation. They are monuments to the ingenuity of the twelfth and thirteenth century [50] architect, but no less are they beacons warning against the perils of a rationalism—more apparent than real—which their authors carried to its extreme limits, casting to the winds all traditional principles, and consequently all authority. ”

“ Architecture, that faithful expression of the social state which had its origin in Pagan civilisation, became Christianised by its culture in the abbeys, and in its new development rose to that pre-eminence the marvels of which we have already studied in the first part of this work. But though the successes achieved by the architecture of this period were rapid and dazzling, its decadence was profound, for it was induced by too radical an emancipation from antique principles, the superiority of which had been established in the first centuries of the Middle Ages. ”

“ Lacking that mathematical knowledge which is the mainstay of the modern architect, the experimental skill shown by the thirteenth-century builder in constructing his vaults, and then in neutralising their thrusts by flying buttresses reduced to the legitimate function of permanent struts, was little short of miraculous. For it must be borne in mind that the thrust of these vaults, and the strength of the flying buttresses, varied of necessity according to their span, and the resisting powers of their materials. ”

“ A large number of buildings in England, Normandy, Germany, Northern Italy, Switzerland, the Rhine Provinces, and those of Northern France bear testimony of the highest interest to the transformations consequent on the invention of the groined vault and its universal application.
Architects who had been trained in the great abbey schools, emboldened by the successes of their forerunners and their own individual experience, raised on every hand vast cathedrals, in which every known development of the system was essayed with unequalled daring. ”

“ Throughout the eleventh and twelfth centuries it seems to have been the prolific nursery-ground whence Europe drew not only teachers for other monastic schools, but specialists in every branch of science and of letters, notably architects, who aided in the expansion of Cluny and its dependencies, and further practically contributed to the construction of the numerous abbeys founded by the Benedictines throughout Western Europe, and even in the East, the cradle of Christianity. ”

“ Each reached its apogee in the brilliant manifestations of the thirteenth century, and each followed the same path to decadence less than two centuries later.
Statuary and ornamental sculpture were inseparable, being executed by the same artists in pursuance of the same idea: the study of nature.
In obedience to the law of increasing development they abandoned the hieratic forms imposed by religious tradition, but only to give a new expression to these very traditions, which were still preserved and venerated. ”

“ The mural spaces available for fresco decoration having been gradually suppressed, and decorative painting limited to the illumination of certain subordinate members of the structure, the mediæval artists began to apply themselves to the decoration of the great screens of glass which, with their sculptured framework of stone, now filled the entire spaces between the piers. In this new art, or rather this incarnation of the spirit of decoration under a new form, we find a fresh illustration of that supple assimilative genius which already distinguished the French artist. ”

“ The adventurous builders of the North had eagerly adopted the new division of churches into several aisles, all with groined vaults, the vault of the great central nave relying upon exterior flying buttresses for resistance to its thrust. ”

“ By a strange irony of fate the term Gothic, used in the last century merely as the opprobrious synonym of barbaric, has been specialised within the last sixty years in connection with that polished epoch of the Middle Ages which sheds most lustre upon our national art. ”

“ No finer combination of religious, monastic, military, and civil types could be desired in illustration of the art we have agreed to term Gothic Architecture, but which might be more truly entitled: Our National Architecture in the Middle Ages.
Justice indeed demands this tardy homage. Our vast churches, our superb cathedrals, our mighty castles and palace fortresses, the masterpieces that [388] fill our museums—manifestations of artistic power which should move us, not to servile imitation but to fruitful study,—all were the creations of native architects. ”

“ He travels along the line of evolution, pointing out how material conditions and discoveries, and their consequent social changes, brought about one development after another in the forms and methods of the architect. In a treatise so conceived, the fact that the field of observation is practically restricted to France, the few excursions beyond her frontier being made rather with a view to displaying the extent of her influence than with any desire for catholicity of grasp, is of no great moment. ”

“ Like a mural mosaic, an Eastern carpet, or the enamelled goldsmith's work of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a truly decorative window has no affinities with a picture, a scene or landscape gazed at from an open window, where the interest concentrates itself upon a particular point, and where the illumination is not equally diffused throughout. ”

“ It is worthy of note that, in spite of the importance given to these buildings, the space allotted to the bells themselves was comparatively limited, which seems to indicate that the towers were destined for other purposes than the reception of bells. In the eleventh century the tower bore the same relation to the cathedral or abbey as did the donjon to the feudal castle. It was, in fact, the symbol of power. As abbots and bishops enjoyed the same rights as the nobles, it will be readily understood that the costliness of such emblems would be governed solely by the resources of their authors. ”

“ ABBEY OF MONT ST. MICHEL. GATE-HOUSE
It is a curious and disheartening phenomenon that such a direct contravention of the principles of mediæval art as the modern system of divided responsibility implies, should obtain only among the French, the very people to whom Western Europe owes its initiation into those principles. In England, in Belgium, in Holland, Switzerland, and Germany the architect is also the engineer; the science and the art of his craft are inseparable. ”

“ Benedict soon added to his Rule a decree providing for the teaching and study of architecture, painting, mosaic, sculpture, and all branches of art; and it became one of the most important duties of abbots, priors, and deans to make designs for the churches and auxiliary buildings of the communities they ruled. From the early centuries of the Christian era down to the thirteenth century, therefore, architecture was practised only by the clergy, and came to be regarded as a sacred science. ”

“ The thrusts of the interior vaulting are met on the exterior by massive buttresses, the vigorous profiles of which contribute greatly to the nobility of the general effect.
These formidable façades were practically fortifications, but the Merveille was further defended to the north by an embattled wall, flanked by a tower which served as a post for watchmen, to which the covered ways running round the base of the western buildings converged. ”

“ The priceless fragments which illustrate these offshoots of an art essentially French are now the chief ornaments not only of French, but of all European museums. They take rank as factors of the first importance in art education, pointing the way to fresh masterpieces of French genius. ”

“ Sculpture was at its zenith. We are astounded by the activity and fertility of thirteenth-century artists, who peopled façades and embrasures with figures from seven to ten feet in height, and animated every tympanum with countless statuettes. The façade of Notre Dame, by no means one of the richest, has [165] sixty-eight colossal statues, for the most part of the highest excellence; at Chartres and at Amiens there are over a hundred to each porch. The famous figure of Christ at Amiens is a masterpiece ”

“ It is derived from the mediæval term engigneur, which was very differently applied.
The architect and the engineer of our own day are both constructors, but with a difference. The architect loves and cultivates his art; the engineer, with few exceptions, despises, or affects to despise, his.
In the Middle Ages their functions were perfectly distinct. The architect constructed what the engigneur used his utmost cunning to destroy. The architect built ramparts and strengthened them with towers ”

“ At Rhodes there are a number of churches built in the fifteenth century after French models, which had no less a vogue for dwelling-houses than for religious and military architecture; in a word, architecture—civil, religious, or military—was French in all its manifestations. "The guns of the order still point from the embrasures of the towers, Soliman's [127] stone cannon balls strew the neighbouring ground; sculptured on the house fronts are the blazons, and in many cases the French names, of their bygone owners. ”

“ The abuse of equilibrium, the excessive diminution of points of support—defects often aggravated by insecurity of foundation and exaggerated loftiness of structure—the poor quality of materials, and the faulty setting thereof due to empirical methods, the over-rapidity of execution caused by mistaken emulation, the dearth of funds consequent on social and political convulsions complicated by the miseries of war,—all these things joined hands for the extinction of a once resplendent art. ”

“ While this struggle of intelligence against ignorance was in progress, a social revolution had accomplished itself by the enfranchisement of the communes, a development of the utmost importance in its relation to science, art, and material existence, in a word, to the whole social system. ”

“ And though the foreign evolution, which marked the sixteenth century, did indeed exercise a transient influence in France, it must be remembered that the way had been prepared for this apparently novel movement by those French artists who have carried the fame of our beloved country throughout the civilised world. ”

“ Gothic architecture, more especially in its religious manifestations from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, made its prolific influence felt, not only by the structural qualities of its vast and numerous buildings, but by those various arts created, perfected, or at least developed, for their decoration. ”