Flamboyant Gothic

“ Some Gothic buildings present with their fretted pinnacles, spires, flying buttresses, intersecting and pierced work, in flamboyant tracery, daring vaulting, and inter-penetrating mouldings, a worked-out solution of some intricate mathematical problem. In its complicated phases Gothic construction is more scientific than artistic, however much one may admire the grouping or design of the Gothic pile as a picturesque conception. ”

“ We have no instance of real Flamboyant work in this country, although forms of tracery approaching to it are not uncommon; the moldings are never of the true Flamboyant character, which is quite distinct both from the Decorated and the Perpendicular; it coincided in time with the latter, and therefore does not properly belong to our present subject.
The arch is sometimes cinquefoiled, and ornamented with crockets and bunches of foliage for finials, and with pinnacles also, as in Beverley Minster, where this arch is that of a canopy over a tomb, between two tall piers of a lofty arch. ”

“ The doorways in this style have pointed but depressed arches, and as a rule are enclosed with square-headed mouldings or labels. The spandrels formed by this arrangement are filled with tracery and shields. Towers and cornices have battlements, &c. (Fig. 403) . A general squareness is given to all the ornaments, 368and a more severe and dry character is the chief feature of the Perpendicular decoration.
The Flamboyant Gothic style of the Continent is contemporaneous with the English Perpendicular. The panels at Figs. 404 and 405 are very good examples of Flamboyant panel decoration. ”

“ For here in the twelfth century we find men executing work which, both in design and execution, is so immeasurably in advance of anything that we ever see done now, that it seems almost vain to hope for a revival of the old spirit in our own days: vain it might be in any age to hope for better work, but more than vain in this day, if the flimsy conceit and impudent self-assertion which characterize so much modern (so-called) Gothic is still to be tolerated! ”

“ You cannot make a Goth out of a Greek, nor can you change the blood in my veins by speaking to me of a something vague and gnostic and mystic which you deem superior to all that any Latin mind could conceive.
I grant the existence and the weird charm of the beauty that Gothic minds conceived; but I do not see less beauty in what was conceived by the passion and poetry of other races of mankind. This is a cosmopolitan art era: and you must not judge everything which claims art-merit by a Gothic standard. ”

“ Thus, for instance, in the ages which we are pleased to call dark, to what magnitude and what exactness of beauty did not architecture reach, and that in a particularly inventive style—the Gothic—borrowing not from what had before been, and which had been held perfect, a style upon which we do not now even hope to improve, but content ourselves with admiring and copying. ”

“ Dwarfed trees and crooked serpents, heavy flowers and hunchbacked birds accentuate by the very splendour and contrast of their colour the servility and monotony of their shapes. It is like the vision of a sneering sage, who sees the whole universe as a pattern. Certainly no one ever felt like this about Gothic, even if he happens to dislike it. Or, again, some will say that it is the liberty of the Middle Ages in the use of the comic or even the coarse that makes the Gothic more interesting than the Greek. ”

“ It would have been as absolutely impossible for even himself, had he been born in the daylight of this century, to have built those quaint, Gothic structures of imagination, and tinted them with their peculiar coloring of marvellousness and mystery, as for a modern artist to originate and execute the weird designs of an ancient cathedral. Both Gothic architecture and this perfection of Gothic poetry were the springing and efflorescence of that age, impossible to grow again. They were the forest primeval; other trees may spring in their room, trees as mighty and as fair, but not such trees. ”

“ With greater knowledge of nature, both geographical and scientific, fresh styles of architecture may and will arise, as much more beautiful, and as much more natural, than the Gothic, as Gothic is more beautiful and natural than the Norman. Till then we must take the best models which we have; use them; and, as it were, use them up and exhaust them. By that time we may have learnt to improve on them; and to build churches more Gothic than Gothic itself, more like grot and grove than even a northern cathedral. ”

“ And that the ascetic tendency, here happily absent, is not the inseparable penalty to be paid for a love of the Gothic forms of beauty, is evident enough, when we seen those forms everywhere rightly mingling with the artist's conceptions, as the natural breath of sacred art. With the true daring of genius, he has even introduced a Gothic cathedral in the background of the worshipping group in plate!, as the shape in which the very soul of worship is now for ever embodied for us. ”

“ Perhaps there were many men of the eighteenth century who were thrilled to the heart by the ineffable mystery and beauty of the Gothic work, but they were ashamed to make the confession, to write themselves down as lovers of ignorance and barbarism in art. It was odd, by the way, to note that a sham love, a sham appreciation of the Gothic was a worse foe than blank ignorance and contempt ”

“ There is thus a marked difference between the adapted naturalism which gave life to early Gothic ornament, and the imitative naturalism which marks the decline of Gothic art.
How, it may be asked, are we justified in ascribing to this early Gothic ornament such supreme merit? Why is it, if the influence of nature adds anything of value to art, that direct and complete imitation, so far as possible, is not good? How can there be any such thing as over-naturalism in sculpture? ”

“ There are no spires, but pinnacles and statues, and all the rich detail of Gothic architecture, the whole of a venerable gray line. It is in perfect repair, and has not suffered externally, except by the loss of multitudes of statues, gargoyles, and miscellaneous eccentricities of sculpture, which used to smile, frown, laugh, and weep over the faces of these old fabrics. ”

“ In every branch of art antiquity had proved itself a foe, until at last the Renascence was sufficiently mature to assimilate and overcome the antique inheritance so completely that it became an excellent fertiliser for the new art. The essence of the Gothic style is the dissolution of all that is heavy and material—the victory of spirit over matter. ”

“ Never were lines better chosen or colours better combined; even those found in the most capricious and delicate specimens of Gothic architecture have something poor, weakly and emaciated about them which betrays the infancy of the art. ”

“ I understand this to be a similar judgment to that which I have been passing on the cultivation of Painting and Music. For myself, certainly I think that that style which, whatever be its origin, is called Gothic, is endowed with a profound and a commanding beauty, such as no other style possesses with which we are acquainted, and which probably the Church will not see surpassed till it attain to the Celestial City. No other architecture, now used for sacred purposes, seems to be the growth of an idea, whereas the Gothic style is as harmonious and as intellectual as it is graceful. ”

“ All these influences working together, and with them that of classical example and tradition, induced a delicacy of expression, a slightness of salience, a carefulness of touch, and refinement of invention, in all, even the rudest, Italian decorations, utterly unrecognized in those of Northern Gothic: which, however picturesquely adapted to their place and purpose, depend for most of their effect upon bold undercutting, accomplish little beyond graceful embarrassment of the eye, and cannot for an instant be separately regarded as works of accomplished art. ”

“ By cleverly developing a system of balanced thrusts, the sheer bulk of masonry was reduced by half, while attention was drawn away from the fast-increasing ornamentation to the shell itself, whereby a great gain was effected, and architecture became once more a study in organism, in composition, and in proportion. Gothic is primarily the perfection of exquisite organism, almost living in its consummate integrity and its sensitive interplay of forces. ”

“ The evils that beset the lives and tempt the souls of men had to be in some way set forth, no less than the good things which he is permitted to enjoy. The unhappy lot of the wicked had to be figured as well as the felicities of the good. Hence conspicuous elements in Gothic sculpture, especially after the beginning of the thirteenth century, are the monstrous and the grotesque. Elements which, in true Gothic—though sometimes, perhaps, introduced in a playful spirit,—have, in the main, a serious purpose. ”

“ But before the wonderful development of art through the reversion to classic lines, came a high perfection of the style called Gothic, and with that we are pleased to deal first. It is so full of beauty to the eye and interest to the intellect that sometimes we must be dragged away from it to regard the softer lines of later art, with the ingratitude and reluctance of childhood when torn from its fairy tales to read of real people in the commonplace of every day. ”

“ I believe the masters of Gothic art got their ideas of molding through their understanding of the human body, and perhaps above all of the body of woman. The body, that human column, seen in profile is a line of projections and protuberances, of the nose, the chin, the breast, the flank. Thence springs the beautiful undulating line which is the outline of Gothic molding. For Gothic molding, like the Greek, is soft and swelling. The "doucine" (a molding, concave above, convex below) , a term of the trade, tender as the name of a woman, well expresses the charm of the beautiful French molding. ”

“ 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 well-educated traveller is now without some consciousness of the meaning of what is commonly and rightly called "purity of style," in the modes of art which have been practised by civilized nations; and few are unaware of the distinctive aims and character of Gothic. The purpose of a good Gothic builder was to raise, with the native stone of the place he had to build in, an edifice as high and as spacious as he could, with calculable and visible security, in no protracted and wearisome time, and with no monstrous or oppressive compulsion of human labour. ”

“ Early in the twelfth century was brought about in Northern Gaul that fine balance of ethnologic, religious, social, and political influences of which the development of Gothic architecture is among the happiest results. But with the quickly succeeding disturbance of this nice adjustment of conditions the character of the art gradually changed, and a course of decline became inevitable and rapid. If we would truly know Gothic art we must study it in the vigour of its early life. ”

“ Rugged mountains with their concealed valleys, whispering forests which the eye cannot penetrate, Gothic ruins with vaulted chambers and subterranean passages, are the scenes of her stories; while event after event of her complicated plot happens either just as the mists of evening are obscuring the sun, or while the moonlight is throwing fantastic shadows over the landscape. It is an atmosphere of mystery in which one feels the weird presence of the supernatural. ”

“ Logically, therefore, the entire art of the Renaissance should be wanting in the physiognomic traits. And yet the strong undercurrent of Faustian art-will kept alive, not only in the smaller towns and schools of middle Italy, but also in the instincts of the great masters themselves, a Gothic tradition that was never interrupted. Nay, the physiognomic of Gothic art even made itself master of the Southern nude body, alien as this element was. Its creations are not bodies that speak to us through static definition of their bounding surfaces. ”

“ But we Northerns are not so easily to be talked out of the powerful, solemn impressions which seize upon the mind at entering a Gothic cathedral. We feel, on the contrary, a strong desire to investigate and to justify the source of this impression. A very slight attention will convince us, that the Gothic architecture displays not only an extraordinary degree of mechanical skill, but also a marvellous power of invention; and, on a closer examination, we recognize its profound significance, and perceive that as well as the Grecian it constitutes in itself a complete and finished system. ”

“ Gothic art is not an art of barbarians, as the pseudo-classicists of the Renaissance would have us suppose. It is far otherwise. It is the art of that civilised people which grew up, through generations of conflict and mutual interchange of thought, out of the fusion of Northern and Southern blood. ”

“ They are agreeable to every change in the wind that blows about the world. It blows Gothic, and they say 'By all means' - and there is your Gothic - a thing dreamt of and done! It suddenly veers south again and blows from the Mediterranean. The jolly little fellows are equal to the strain, and up goes Amboise, and Anet, and the Louvre, and all the Renaissance. It blows everyhow and at random as though in anger at seeing them so ready. ”