Gothic architecture

When the chevet of Le Mans was finished, in 1254, the beginnings recorded in Jumiиges 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 Jumiиges 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, Dorй, 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 faзade, 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. Lьbeck 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, Cefalщ, 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 жsthetic 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 faзade 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 Lйrida, 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 statues 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 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 Amiens, 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'exagйration et la dйcadence de l'art gothique, n'apporte presque aucun perfectionnement а l'art de bвtir ou de dessiner, mais seulement un systиme dйcoratif trиs particulier et plus ou moins arbitraire, qui, appliquй sans exception dans les moindres dйtails, 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'archйologie franзais", 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 ifaзade, 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 dйbвcle. 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 chвteaux, 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.