Perpendicular Gothic architecture

“ It will thus be seen that the full development of the Gothic system is brought out only where the plan of the building includes a central nave and side aisles. It was in such buildings that the system was evolved. The principle of the prop or brace, which the flying buttress embodies, as contrasted with the inert stay, which the solid Romanesque buttress embodies, is one of the most fecund principles of Gothic construction. By its use, in connection with that of the pointed arch in the ribs of the vault, is the Gothic attenuation of supports rendered possible. ”

“ These shafts are thus only decorative features employed precisely as were the engaged columns in the early arched constructions of the Romans, and the buildings are throughout, notwithstanding their pointed arches, the same in principle as those of round arched Romanesque design. They consist merely of massive walls with timber roofs over their central aisles; hence there are no lateral pressures calling for a Gothic buttress system, and they have no organic framework in which their strength resides. ”

“ This ought to be emphasised, for there is no quality to which more of the impressiveness of such sculpture is owing. Multitudinous as are the details which enter into the design of any great cathedral front, there is rarely any scattered effect in the total impression. An harmonious relationship of mass to mass, from largest things to smallest, is maintained. Such breadth is, indeed, a fundamental quality of all good art; but its manifestation is perhaps more remarkable in Gothic architecture than in any other, because of the multitude of subdivisions through which it has to find expression. ”

“ Thick walls were a necessity in a Romanesque edifice, if it were to be stable, but in a Gothic building the walls could be made a mere shell, since all the work was done by an active skeleton, a bone structure of stone, consisting of piers, arches, and buttresses.
To define shortly, Gothic architecture is the art of erecting buildings with vaults whose ribs intersect (concentration of load) and whose thrusts are stopped by buttresses (the grounding of the thrusts) . ”

“ To make the figure itself an architectural support would not be in accordance with the rational spirit of Gothic art. [7] Nor, in true Gothic, are statues set in niches in walls. For in Gothic the wall spaces are small and contain no more substance than is necessary, leaving nothing to spare for recesses. The places occupied by the statues in the buttresses of the Cathedral of Paris are not niches; they do not diminish the mass of the buttress; they constitute really nothing more than decorative forms of set-offs. ”

“ It is in no sense a development of anything German, but is, in its structural system, strictly an importation from France. It is a copy made in a spirit, not so much of appreciation as of emulation. It shows a faithful study and an intelligent apprehension of the mechanism of Gothic, but it reveals no inventive freedom, no spontaneous exercise of native genius. In the whole range of pointed architecture in Germany there is no evidence of any new growth out of the borrowed forms ”

“ 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. ”

“ The work, whether we like it or not at first 190glance, is obviously something new in Gothic architecture. The whole development of medieval Gothic was in the direction of eliminating the wall surfaces. It achieved this by a sort of skeleton construction of lofty piers, arches, vaulting ribs, and flying buttresses. Great glass windows filled the interstices, and these themselves were articulated by stone mullions and tracery in the same linear way. The resulting structure was an intricate scheme of thrusts and supports. ”

“ Probably, the most interesting feature of the history of Gothic architecture, at this period, is to be found in the circumstance that, while all of the countries erected Gothic structures along the general lines which had been laid down by its great inventors in the North and Center of France, none of the architects and builders of the century, in other countries, slavishly followed the French models. ”

“ The upper church is in one story without aisles, with a transept across the east end, and an apse of segmental form. The vaults, like those of the same period in Germany, are quadripartite in square compartments. They are provided with transverse and diagonal ribs, but are devoid of longitudinal ribs. All the vaulting arches spring from the same level, and hence the lateral cells have not the forms which secure that concentration of thrusts which distinguishes Gothic. ”

“ They are monoliths of slender proportions, though heavy enough for their work, which is considerable. They taper a little and have a slight entasis—a lingering characteristic of ancient art which appears also in several other early Gothic buildings. Their capitals are considerably advanced towards Gothic form by spreading to receive, upon an ample abacus surface, the threefold load of transverse, longitudinal, and diagonal ribs. It is to be regretted that we have now no means of ascertaining what were the forms of the choir vaults and what was their system of supports. ”

“ It should be noticed also that there is in Gothic sculpture a structural fitness wherever occasion calls for it—as, for instance, in the corbelled projections which support the wide abaci of capitals. It is remarkable that a high degree of beauty often appears to result from such structural adaptation. Indeed, the beauty of the finest Gothic capitals is largely due to the forms which adapt them to their functions, and render them to the eye, as well as in reality, strong and efficient working members. ”

“ Unlike the main body of the building, the Gothic façade is largely the result of a mere modification and enrichment of Romanesque forms rather than a growth from new constructive principles. The façade with its towers is, for the most part, simply a storied edifice, which may, indeed, as at Reims, by the width of its openings, the slenderness of their dividing members, and the general upward impulse of its lines, attain a high degree of Gothic expression, but it is not a structure into which any dynamic principle largely enters. ”

“ The base also—almost always some modification of the Attic type—is equally admirable in its profile, giving, with artful grace, real and apparent stability to the shaft. Indeed, there is hardly a more beautiful thing in Gothic art than one of these base profiles. The proportions of its parts, the use of contrasting angles, and especially the character of the curve of the lower torus, are unsurpassed, if indeed they are equalled by any of the mouldings of antiquity.
In a definition of Gothic architecture none but the truest form of the art properly concerns us. ”

“ For in one point of view Gothic is not only the best, but the only rational architecture, as being that which can fit itself most easily to all services, vulgar or noble. Undefined in its slope of roof, height of shaft, breadth of arch, or disposition of ground plan, it can shrink into a turret, expand into a hall, coil into a staircase, or spring into a spire, with undegraded grace and unexhausted energy ”

“ The style of the architecture is Gothic in so far as it makes use of the pointed arch, but can hardly be described as such without giving a false impression to those who are accustomed to the Gothic of the north; and who think of that style as one of varied, if somewhat gloomy, masses, of irregular arches, pinnacles, and buttresses; colourless save for the lichen that grows between the grey stones, and owing their beauty more to the unwearied inventiveness of their builders' fancy than to any symmetrical unity of design. ”

“ We are not concerned here with the gradual development of Gothic out of the older Romanesque architectural forms, nor with the Oriental elements that may have helped this great evolution. All that especially concerns us is the fact that the generations of the Thirteenth Century took the Gothic ideas in architecture and applied them so marvelously, that thereafter it could be felt that no problem of structural work had been left unsolved and no feature of ornament or decoration left untried or at least unsuggested. ”

“ This is the style of which we should first treat when attempting to trace the history of Mediæval architecture. It is a mistake to imagine Pointed architecture to be severed by a great gulf from the Romanesque—the Pointed Gothic from the Round: it is its legitimate offspring, or rather itself in a more advanced{51} stage of its development. The change from the round-arched to the pointed-arched Gothic is no change of essential principles ”

“ It is certainly the most remarkable façade that had been erected up to its time; and for dignity, sobriety, and extreme beauty of details it has hardly been surpassed. The general scheme of design is still the same as in the Abbaye-aux-Hommes; but such is the treatment of its elements that the Gothic spirit is manifest in every part. Its large divisions are admirably proportioned and beautifully subdivided. The Romanesque characteristics have completely disappeared from the apertures, arcades, and even from the moulding profiles, while in Senlis the Romanesque profiles are largely retained. ”

“ In its essentials it is Gothic of a late type, with just such touches of Italian detail as have been already mentioned. The structure is of dark red brick, with stone dressings; the detail is of the simplest; the windows are generally small, and have flat-pointed heads. Whatever elaboration there is, is chiefly confined to central features, such as the gateways on the great axial line. The chimneys are of cut and moulded brick; the archways are vaulted with fan tracery vaulting; the large windows of the hall are traceried and cusped; everything in its main outline is Gothic. ”

“ It is impossible for a dome to have any Gothic character. In addition to what has been already said (p. 20) on this point, it may be further remarked that, so long as the surfaces between the ribs remain straight on plan, as in the dome of Florence, or are segments of a hemisphere, or of a dome of pointed form on a circular base, like the dome of St. Peter’s, no ribs can be made to act in a Gothic way. A circular vault on Gothic principles would necessarily be a celled vault, more or less like the small vault of the Pazzi already described (p. 27) . ”

“ There are hardly any of the magnificent and serene constructions of the early Gothic which have not, in the course of time, been gradually thinned and pared away into these skeletons, which sometimes indeed, when their lines truly follow the structure of the original masses, have an interest like that of the fibrous framework of leaves from which the substance has been dissolved, but which are usually distorted as well as emaciated, and remain but the sickly phantoms and mockeries of things that were; they are to true architecture what the Greek ghost was to the armed and living frame ”

“ Pointed architecture is not, in the strict sense, a style distinct from that which is round arched; for pointed arches in apertures do not much differ structurally from round ones. Gothic architecture differs from Romanesque far more fundamentally than by the use of pointed arches in place of round arches, or by the substitution of one decorative system for another. ”

“ It might be thought, that while Gothic architecture was a great invention in its time and extremely suitable for ecclesiastical or even educational edifices of various kinds, its time of usefulness has passed and that men's widening experience in structural work, ever since, has carried him far away from it. As a matter of fact, most of our ecclesiastical buildings are still built on purely Gothic lines, and a definite effort is made, as a rule, to have the completed religious edifice combine a number of the best features of Thirteenth Century Gothic. ”

“ When a change or revolution in the order of things sets in, we find generally the style of architecture changing also to adapt itself to the new laws and new thought. This illustrates, to a certain degree, the reason why the so-called Victorian Gothic has not developed to any great extent in England, although some of our best architects sought to revive the earlier Gothic some years ago. ”

“ Classic architecture is that of the lintel and impost, involving the idea of rest: Gothic is that of the arch and the flying buttress, involving the idea of life and motion. The two ideas are absolutely opposed to each other. Classic architecture, directly it admits the arch, ceases to be true to itself in any real artistic sense; yet if it refuses to use, and to exhibit the use of the arch, it denies itself wilfully the use of the best known mode of construction. Gothic architects may still, on the other hand, as they always have done, gain much from the teachings of Classic buildings. ”