middle-pointed building; it has a large south-west tower very much of
the same type as the great tower at Ypres, having four windows of two
lights in each stage, and four stages all exactly alike, and above them
an octagonal belfry stage of later date. The first example of this
kind of design is seen in the four belfry windows of the cathedral at
Soest, and still more remarkably in the steeple of Paderborn cathedral,
but here it is developed into even greater regularity. This design,
however, is poor in kind, and only respectable when characterized as
at Soest and Paderborn by massive simplicity. The south door of the
Oberwasser-Kirche is good, being double with square openings within
an arched head. Internally the church is very lofty and light, but of
no great length, and has an eastern apse, and some traces of old wall
painting. A very good brass water vat hung from a small crane by the
north door and served as a stoup for holy water; this is a common plan
in the Münster churches.[80]
This church was being scraped of paint and whitewash; so also in the
cathedral they were removing some trumpery work of the last century,
and indeed generally in this district a good deal is being done to the
finer churches, and in most of them a box is provided for offerings for
the restoration of the fabric: in most, I should say, which are not
“evangelical”:--for in these, save where the government is repairing
the stone work, they seem to be satisfied to put up pews and galleries,
to keep the doors well locked, and to make their interiors look as
cold, miserable, and repulsive as possible. Happily, however, the
“evangelical” church is not very actively mischievous in architectural
matters, and so one sees altars and reredoses still standing with
candles and crucifixes, and curtains of white muslin or silk on each
side, sometimes, as in the Petri-Kirche at Soest, double, first, on
each side of the altar, and then the same height as the altar, and
coming forward the full width of the footpace![81] In the old altars,
there are always arrangements for closets--generally at one end--whilst
in the middle of the back of the altar is often an opening, which I
fancied might have been made for the reception of relics, but which
seldom seems carefully enough fastened; the ends of the super-altars
have also, very frequently, closets; generally speaking, the altars in
this district are solid masses of masonry with a projecting and moulded
mensa. This, however, is a digression, and I must now say somewhat of
the Lamberti-Kirche, which is next to the cathedral the best church
in Münster. Externally it has a western tower[82] of considerable
dimensions dwarfed in appearance by the immense size of the roof
which covers both nave and aisles; this is a not uncommon arrangement
in this district, and has a parallel, as will be remembered, in the
noble choir of S. Laurence at Nuremberg. Its main result is the great
internal effect of height in the aisles and the opportunity it affords
of obtaining what Germans were so fond of--an immense length of window
opening. The entrance to S. Lambert on the south side is by a very
beautiful doorway; the doorway itself is not very large but its jamb
mould runs up to a great height and encloses a fine sculptured tree
of Jesse; the branches of the tree form a series of medallions, in
each of which is a half figure; the whole is very rich in its effect,
and the sculpture quite exquisite. Internally the only remarkable
piece of furniture I noted was a very fine rood. The proportions and
arrangements of the church are very similar to those of the famous
Wiesen-Kirche, at Soest, which I shall have presently to describe, and
mainly noticeable for the great effect of unbroken space, owing to the
large span and great height of the arches, and the small number of
piers supporting the roof.
Two other churches near this afforded little worth notice. One of
them was Protestant, and as a consequence, was elaborately pewed
and galleried; it was seven or eight bays in length, and groined
throughout, and entered by a good double door. The other was very
similar, and had a curious kind of narthex under the western tower.
The Ludgeri-Kirche is of more interest, having a fine octagonal belfry
of late date; this was undergoing repair, as was also the church, whose
nave is of simple Romanesque with a good middle-pointed apse. There
is another church of small size with an eastern apse, and a very low
gabled tower at the north-west angle. This is near the railway station.
For two things besides her domestic buildings Münster is certainly to
be remembered: these are the brass work and the sculpture; the latter
is generally remarkably good, and I think I have seldom seen more
spirited figures than I saw there.
In a silversmith’s shop, opposite the Lamberti-Kirche, I found a
magnificent old monstrance, of the fourteenth century, and of very
elaborate detail; it belonged to a church some miles distant, the name
of which I have forgotten; this man was making church plate in very
fair fashion, copying old examples with some care and with a good deal
of feeling and enthusiasm; I need hardly say that such men are as rare
on the Continent as they are here.
From Münster I returned to Hamm, and thence by another branch railway
to Soest, travelling through a country without any feature by which to
remember it save its interminable rows of poplars.
The first view of Soest from the railway is striking; several steeples,
of which that of the cathedral is the grandest, stand up well behind a
bank of trees, and a great extent of picturesque and half-ruined old
town walls.
The town itself is very curious, much more like some large Swiss
village, such as one remembers in the Upper Valais or the Hasli-Thal,
than any other cathedral town that I know in northern Europe. The
streets are all absurdly irregular, bending and twisting about in
every possible direction, and full of half-timbered houses, which
are all corbelled forward and seem generally to be very ancient. I
think, indeed, that I have never seen more picturesque grouping of old
buildings, but it is difficult to imagine how they can have preserved
their old character so intact; there is absolutely, I believe, not one
shop with a shop front or display of its wares of any kind, and hardly
more than one modernized house, and this is a smart little inn with a
nice garden, and a large Speise-Saal whose walls were literally covered
with English prints, many of them old and very good. The population of
the place consists nevertheless of some seven or eight thousand persons.
The churches have some very remarkable features, of which the most
singular is a kind of narthex at the west end, not forming part of the
fabric, but built within the churches, the main groining extending on
over it to the west end, and a large gallery being formed above it.
The best example of this is in S. Peter’s, and I shall leave, for the
present, a detailed description of it.
The cathedral is a great, rude, desolate-looking church with but few
remains of any interest, save at the west end, out of the centre
of which rises a fine simple Romanesque steeple. This has five
single-light windows in the stage above the roof, and four three-light
windows above them. Then above this belfry stage is on each face a
steep gable, filled in with openings of varied shapes--on one side,
a large circular window, with three other small openings, and on
another side three large windows of three lights, and a very small
circular window. These gables are not the full width of the tower, and
from the angles between them rise four tall and massive pinnacles,
slightly ornamented with corbel tables under the eaves, and covered
with steep pyramidal metal roofs. The spire is of metal, octagonal in
section,--the angles of the octagon springing from the apices of the
four gables, and from the internal angles of the four pinnacles. The
size and solidity of this remarkable tower give great grandeur to it,
and whilst in the treatment of its lower part we see the type of so
many of the towers of later date in this district, in that of the spire
we see the precursor of those noble spires rising from simple gabled
towers which are the glory of Lüneburg and Lübeck.
In addition to an internal narthex, the cathedral has, in front of
its tower, another groined sort of passage-way, opening to the west
with six arches, and to the north and south with one arch. There is a
second stage above these arches, and then from behind this mass rises
the steeple. The whole of this part of the building is Romanesque,
as, indeed, is the substance of the entire church though it has been
much mutilated by modern additions and alterations. The interior is
painfully neglected and dirty, though it is, I believe, the only
Catholic church in the place. The eastern apse has upon its groining
some painting, which seems to be ancient and very good, having figures
of saints etc., on a large scale, but it is very much hidden by an
odious modern reredos. There is a good wooden crucifix against one of
the piers, and some fine very early glass in the transepts windows.
Early in the morning, when I went again into the cathedral I found it
full of people singing well and very heartily.
The church of S. Peter stands close to the cathedral; and its choir and
aisles, ending with three apses and steep slated roofs, its windows
filled with middle-pointed traceries, with the old steeple at the west
end capped with a modern bulbous spire, group very picturesquely with
the stern and grand steeple of the cathedral. In plan it consists of
a nave and aisles, of four primary bays (each bay being subdivided
by two arches opening into the aisles), transepts, choir and apsidal
choir-aisles, opening into the transepts. The two western bays of the
nave are again subdivided into three divisions north and south, and
four divisions east and west; all this space being groined over at
a low level, and having a floor above, forming a gallery level with
the triforium, which also is large and spacious. The internal effect
of this low, dark entrance-way is most peculiar. In S. Peter’s, its
length from east to west is nearly 46 feet--just half the whole length
of the nave! The architecture of the church generally is not otherwise
very interesting; though the east end is good, and has some fragments
of fair glass still remaining. I have already mentioned the curious
arrangement of the curtains on each side of the Lutheran altar here.
S. Paul’s is another church of precisely the same type. It has a good
western steeple, with a very steep square roof, or rather, I should
say, a low spire. The stages of the tower are repetitions of each
other. Both this church and S. Peter’s are disfigured by a wonderful
accumulation of pews and galleries; there is still, however, in the
sacristy, a very good press, of three divisions in width and two in
height.
I come, last, to the Wiesen-Kirche, a most remarkable building, of
whose history, I am sorry to say, I know absolutely nothing. It
appears, however, to have been all erected at one period--in the first
half of the fourteenth century,--and its scale is so fine, and its
character throughout so good, that it is certainly one of the most
noticeable churches in the north of Germany. Moreover, in internal
effect, I think I know no church of the same size which can vie with it
for exquisite grace and elegance and, at the same time, boldness and
grandeur of conception.
The plan may be described as a nave and aisles, of only three bays in
length, about 76 feet in width, and 100 feet in length; the nave and
aisles each terminating in an apse at the east, whilst at the west
end there is an unfinished front, which seems to have been intended
to have two towers. It is difficult to conceive how such a west front
could ever have been suitable for a building which was in no other
respect more than a mere chapel. It was never, however, at all nearly
completed; and now a tall slated spire finishes one of the stunted
towers in a fashion which is picturesque in the distant view, but
very unsatisfactory when seen close at hand. The nave and aisles are
covered with one great roof, and groined at the same level. The four
nave columns are very lofty, and without any capitals; the mouldings
being continuous to the groining; there being no more than four points
of support in a square of about 76 by 120 feet, it may be imagined that
from every point the whole interior is visible. The windows are of
immense height, but judiciously treated, as in the clerestory windows
at Cologne, by the arrangement of colour in the glass; besides which,
a kind of transom of quatrefoils runs through all the windows at about
one-fourth of the whole height. Below this transom, the glass is very
rich and dark in colour; above the transom, for about half its height,
there are figures under canopies, also dark with colour, and then a
long sweep of beautiful grisaille runs up to the head of the windows,
the patterns being all geometrical, and defined by delicate lines
of colour: the whole is very jewelly and brilliant, and fortunately
a good deal remains. This is, indeed, just one of those buildings
which depends very much for its proper effect upon all its windows
being filled with coloured glass. All the old altars remain, though
the church is Protestant. There is one in each apse, and one against
the west side of the two easternmost of the nave columns. All the
altars have closets in their ends, and the one against the south-east
column of the nave has a portion of a very good middle-pointed stone
reredos and is itself richly panelled below the mensa. Behind another
altar in the north-eastern apse, there is the remnant of a very fine
middle-pointed rood of wood, which is now nailed up behind a late
triptych. There is a very good early _Sakraments-Häuslein_ in the
north wall, and a good locker in the south wall of the principal apse,
both with old iron doors. On two side altars in the nave, there have
been erected some very fine pieces of late tabernacle-work. They have
been brought from elsewhere; and I saw no place in the church from
which they can have been taken. Another similar piece of stone work
has been set up in the midst of the choir, and a door pierced through
it leads into a pulpit, which grows out of and rests on the Lutheran
altar! The north and south doorways are very fine; the latter having
a window above it within the same arch, in the common German fashion.
The whole church has an open parapet and lofty buttresses, with rather
small pinnacles. The view from the east is certainly very striking;
and though the idea is completely that of a chapel, rather than of a
more ambitious church, it is certainly one of the finest chapels of its
size that I have ever seen. The whole building is being restored at
the expense of the King of Prussia, and at, I should think, very great
cost, as it had suffered much from decay.
V
GERMAN POINTED ARCHITECTURE
Some apology is necessary for venturing to attempt to grapple with so
large a subject as is that of pointed architecture in Germany. My only
excuse for making such an attempt must be the vivid recollection of the
journeys I have at different times made in that country, and the desire
to help cordially in explaining to those who have still the journey
before them, the features which characterize its architecture.
I have unfortunately been unable to hear what Mr. Parker has told you
of pointed architecture in France; but no doubt he has dilated with
sufficient enthusiasm upon the exquisite art there seen, upon the skill
in the disposition of the ground plans--never equalled elsewhere--upon
the beauty and vigour of the sculpture, and upon the nervous manliness
and at the same time delicacy of the art in nearly all the buildings
of the best period, at least in the old Île-de-France, in Picardy,
and in Normandy. I grieve to say that I shall be able to give no such
commendation to German architecture, and that, delightful as the
recollections of what I have seen there are, I cannot nevertheless shut
my eyes to the fact that in most respects it is entirely inferior to
the development of the same style in France and England.
There are at the same time some peculiarities in the dates of old
German work which are rather striking in comparison with English and
French works.
You have, then, first of all, a few buildings, such as the convent at
Lörsch, which are said to be and perhaps are of Roman design. Then
next there is an immense group of churches of which those of Cologne
and the Rhineland are the most distinguished examples, which, whilst
it is entirely unlike anything in the rest of northern Europe, has a
most remarkable affinity to the Lombard churches in the north of Italy,
at Pavia, Bergamo, and elsewhere. These churches date from the early
part or the middle of the twelfth century and continue with but little
alteration of importance down to the end of the thirteenth, when the
strange spectacle is seen of a style almost completely Romanesque in
its character suddenly supplanted by another style which, so far as I
can see, in no way grew out of it, and which is distinguished from the
first by peculiarities of a most marked kind, and by the perfect and
complete form which it at once assumed. Then after this style, which
again in its turn retained its hold longer than our styles ever did,
and which to a late period is altered only slightly in its detail,
you will find another essentially German style answering in point of
date to our later third-pointed and to French flamboyant. The Germans
have therefore less natural growth to show in their architecture
than we have. Instead of our beautiful gradations from Romanesque to
third-pointed in which the germ of each development is to be discovered
in the antecedent work, you have there a series of breaks or gaps in
the chain which it is very difficult to account for, and which make the
study of the style highly interesting, and at the same time somewhat
perplexing.
The question seems naturally to arise whether each of these new styles,
thus wanting in evidence of natural growth one out of the other, is to
be looked at as a German invention in the true sense of the word, or
as the result of the sudden conversion of a slow and sluggish people
to the beauties of foreign work, and then their resolute and hearty
earnestness in the attempt to make the style their own by some infusion
of national peculiarities.
I incline to this last opinion because I believe that no style was ever
invented. Architecture has always grown gradually and systematically,
and it is quite possible to imagine that Germany may have refused to
follow the lead of France and England in art until their superiority
was so great as to make it an absolute matter of necessity, and that
then an attempt would be made to give a national character to what they
had in the first place borrowed.
A slight comparison of dates of a few buildings will explain my grounds
for speaking as I do of German architecture.
Of the Rhine churches the most remarkable are the work of the
thirteenth century. S. Gereon at Cologne was commenced A.D. 1200 and
vaulted in A.D. 1227. S. Cunibert was in building from A.D. 1205 to
A.D. 1248, when it was consecrated. Naumburg has a nave of A.D. 1200.
Limburg is early in the thirteenth century; and Bamberg the same;
whilst Gelnhausen was in building from A.D. 1250 to A.D. 1370. Now
all these churches are of such a character that were we to see them
in France we should at once put them down as the work of the end of
the twelfth century, and we should look for another class to fill up
the period between A.D. 1200 and A.D. 1270, when Cologne was commenced
or the nave of Strasburg completed. You will see how important these
dates are when you consider that at the same time that S. Gereon and
S. Cunibert at Cologne, the choir of Magdeburg, and Gelnhausen, were
being built, Amiens cathedral, S. Denis and other churches of the same
kind were rising throughout France, whilst in England Westminster and
a host of other churches of late first-pointed were built at the same
time. I do not mean to say absolutely that no transitional buildings
are to be found, but only that they were of extraordinary rarity and do
not afford the same evidence of natural growth that our own do.
Of work really similar to our own first-pointed I can hardly give you
more than one example, and that at Lübeck in the north porch of the
cathedral, where--to say the least--the paternity of the work may well
be doubtful. Of a later style and almost unique in its character,
is the fine church of S. Elizabeth, at Marburg, a church whose date
is well known (A.D. 1235 to A.D. 1283), and which affords us one of
the few German examples of a style intermediate between the work at
S. Gereon and that of Cologne cathedral. This will be seen by the
sketches[83] which I have here, in which, however, it is to be observed
that the design of the nave and apsidal terminations of the choir and
transepts are the early portions of the work, and that the fittings and
west front date nearer the end of the century. In the still beautiful
reredos I think we may see the traces of an incipient departure from
the style of the earlier work, and an approach to identity with what I
must consider as the inferior art of the thorough German Gothic, as it
is seen in its perfection in the cathedral at Cologne.
The aisles of the nave of Magdeburg cathedral seem also to me to be
vastly superior to any other German work of the date that I know,
whilst the western rood-screen and some of the details of the western
choir at Naumburg are also of a degree of beauty which it would be very
difficult to surpass elsewhere. The aisles of Paderborn cathedral, too,
are of a peculiar but exceedingly good character. But these are, as I
think, only exceptions which serve to prove the rule, and cannot in
any degree be taken as evidence of the same kind of growth and gradual
development that we trace with so much interest in every church and
building of the Middle Ages in England. It was an architecture of fits
and starts and conceits, not of growth, and full therefore of the
contradictions and eccentricities which such a condition necessarily
involves. And now having so far paved the way by a short statement of
what is really the great peculiarity of German architecture, I will go
on to consider and describe the several varieties of the style rather
more in detail.
And first of all, as to the ground-plan. It is a curious fact, that
each national style of pointed architecture has been distinguished by
its adherence to some peculiarity of ground-plan, as well as by other
distinctive features. In England, we all know how great was the love
for the square east end, and how strong the desire to extend the length
of the nave to a sometimes almost unreasonable extent. In France, you
know how steadily the apsidal termination was adhered to, and how
completely it was the rule to have an aisle and chapels round the apse,
making, in some of the finer French churches, an approach to absolute
perfection of effect. You know, too, how very rare the square east end
was in France, and yet how equally rare was any but a square end to the
transepts. In Italy, again, there are peculiarities. Either you have
immense halls, wide and long beyond all other examples, and borrowed,
no doubt, from the ancient basilica; or apsidal churches, in which the
aisles do not extend round the apse, and a series of apsidal chapels
are sometimes added to the east of the transepts.
In Germany, as I shall show, we have an equally distinct class of
ground-plans. The apsidal termination, though most general, does not
altogether supplant the square end; but it is remarkable, that unlike
the beautiful chevets of the French churches, the German apses are
rarely surrounded with aisles or chapels. They are either simply
apsidal, or parallel triapsidal, or transverse triapsidal, and the
main difference between early and late examples, is to be found in
the introduction of that angularity which gradually became the great
feature of all German work. The early apsidal terminations were all
circular: as, for instance, in the Apostles’ church, at Cologne; whilst
in Marburg, and later, in the little chapel of S. Werner, at Bacharach,
though the transverse triapsidal plan is identical in other respects,
it differs in that the apses are polygonal, instead of circular. At
Bonn, the eastern apse is circular, the transeptal apse polygonal; and
you may always take this as one of the certain evidences of later date,
in works which may otherwise very nearly correspond.