discussion of which we need not enter, it is now generally assumed that
the Pointed style, properly so called, sprang up first within the limits
of the ancient Ile-de-France, whence it propagated itself by degrees
towards the southern and eastern provinces.
M. Michiels, agreeing on this point with the celebrated architect
Lassus, points out that it would be as difficult to attribute the
creation of this style to Germany as to Spain. It was in the thirteenth
century that the finest Gothic buildings appeared in France; while in
Germany, except the churches built, as it were, on the French frontier,
we find nothing at that period but Norman churches (Fig. 306); and it is
reasonable to suppose that, if we owed the general adoption of the
pointed arch to Spain, the introduction of it would have been gradually
made through that part of the country situated beyond the Loire, where,
however, the Norman style continued to be in great favour when it was
almost entirely abandoned in the north of France.
A century sufficed to bring the Pointed style to its highest perfection.
Notre-Dame (Fig. 307) and the Sainte-Chapelle, in Paris; Notre-Dame,
Chartres; the cathedrals of Amiens (Fig. 308), Sens, Bourges, Coutances,
in France; those of Strasbourg, Fribourg, Altenberg, and Cologne, in
Germany, the dates of whose construction succeed each other at intervals
from the first half of the twelfth to the middle of the thirteenth
century, are so many admirable specimens or types of this art, which we
may here call relatively new.
To know to what marvellous variety of combinations and effects, by
merely modifying it in height and breadth from its original type, this
pointed arch, which, taken by itself, might appear the simplest of
forms, can attain, one must have passed some time in dividing into the
different parts of which it is composed, by an accurate examination of
its _tout ensemble_, such an edifice as Notre-Dame, Paris, or as the
Cathedral of Strasbourg; the first of which attracts attention by the
sustained boldness of its lines, strong as they are graceful; the
second, by its perfectly bold independence, seeming, as it does, to
taper away as by enchantment, in order to bear to a surprising height
the evidence of its incomprehensible temerity.
We must rise in thought above the edifice to grasp the plan of its first
conception; we must, from below, study it on all sides to perceive
[Illustration: Fig. 307.--Notre-Dame, Paris (Twelfth and Thirteenth
Centuries).
View of the principal Façade before the restoration executed by Messrs.
Lassus and Viollet-le-Duc.]
[Illustration: Fig. 308.--Interior of Amiens Cathedral. (Thirteenth
Century.)]
with what art its various parts are arranged, grouped, placed at certain
intervals from each other; we must seek to discover the contrivance by
virtue of which the immense _évidage_ (sloping) of numerous buttresses,
the height of the towers, the retiring of the laterals, and the curve of
the apse are harmonised; we must enter the church and stand in its nave,
with its interminable delicate ribs--how many clusters of small columns
extend above the slender pillars!--we must contemplate the beautiful
fancies of the rose-windows, which by their many-coloured glass sober
down the glare of the light passing through them; we must gain the
summit of those towers, those spires, and from them command the dizzy
extent of aërial
[Illustration: Fig. 309.--Capital of a Column in the Abbey of St.
Geneviève (destroyed), Paris.
(Eleventh Century.)]
[Illustration: Fig. 310.--Capital of a Column in the Church of St.
Julien the Poor (destroyed), Paris.
(Twelfth Century.)]
space, and the landscape stretching out around them below; we must
follow attentively with our eye the strikingly bold outlines which the
turrets, the ornamented gables, the _guivres_, the tops of the
bell-towers trace upon the sky. This done, we should yet have paid but a
brief tribute of attention to these prodigious edifices. What, then, if
we wished to devote sufficient time to the ornamentation of the details
(Figs. 309 to 312)? if we desired to obtain a tolerably exact idea of
the people from the statues which swarm from the porch to the pinnacle,
and of the _flora_ and _fauna_, real or ideal, that give movement to
every projection or animate every wall? if one counted on success in
finding out the key to all the crossings and intersections of the
lines, of the well-adjusted conceptions which, while they deceive the
eye, contribute to the majesty or the solidity of the whole? if,
finally, we were most careful not to lose any one of the multifarious
thoughts that have been fixed in the stones of the gigantic edifice? The
mind becomes confused; and certainly the effect produced by so much
imagination and so much enterprise, by so much skill and taste,
wonderfully elevates the soul, which searches with more love after the
Creator when it sees such a work proceeding from the hands of the
creature.
[Illustration: Fig. 311.--Vestige of the Architecture of the Goths at
Toledo. (Seventh Century.)]
[Illustration: Fig. 312.--Capital in the Church of the Célestins
(destroyed), Paris. (Fourteenth Century.)]
When you approach the Gothic church, when you stand beneath its lofty
roof, it is as if a new country were receiving you, possessing you,
casting around you an atmosphere of subduing reverie in which you feel
your wretched servitude to worldly interests vanishing away, and you
become conscious of more solid, more important ties, springing up in
you. The Deity whom our finite nature can figure to ourselves seems in
fact to inhabit this immense building, to be willing to put himself in
direct communion with the humble Christian who approaches to bow down
before Him. There is nothing in it of the human dwelling-place--all
relating to our poor and miserable existence is here forgotten; He for
whom this residence was constructed is the Strong, the Great, the
Magnificent, and it is from a paternal condescension that He receives us
into His holy habitation, as weak, little, miserable. It is the ideal of
the faith which is realised; all the articles of the belief in which we
have been brought up are here embodied before our eyes; it is, lastly,
the chosen spot where the meeting of mortal nothingness and Divine
Majesty is quietly accomplished.
The Christianity of the Middle Ages had then been able to find in the
Gothic style a tongue as tractable as it was energetic, as simple as it
was ingenious, which, for the pious excitement of souls, was to declare
to the senses all its ineffable poetry. But as the unbounded faith, of
which it was the faithful organ, was on the next dawn of its most ardent
aspirations about to decline, so this splendid style was almost as soon
to lose its vigour, and to exhaust itself in the unrestrained
manifestation of its power.
Springing into existence with the warm enthusiasm of the first Crusades,
the Pointed style seems to follow in its different phases the decline of
faith in the time of these adventurous enterprises. It began by a
sincere outburst, and was produced by a bold, unshackled genius; then a
factitious or reflected ardour gave birth to elaborateness and
mannerism; then the fervent zeal and the artistic sentiment dwindled
away: this is the decadency.
Gothic art raised itself in less than a century to its culminating
point; within two centuries more it was to reach the fatal point where
it would begin to decline. The thirteenth century saw it in all its
glory, with the edifices we have mentioned; in the fourteenth it had
become the Florid or _Rayonnant_ Gothic, which produced the churches of
St. Ouen at Rouen, and of St. Etienne at Metz. “Then,” says M. A.
Lefèvre, one of the latest historians of architecture, “no more walls;
everywhere open screen-work supported by slender arcades; no more
capitals, rows of foliage imitated directly from nature; no more
columns, lofty pillars ornamented with round or bevelled mouldings. As
yet, however, there was nothing weakly in its extreme elegance; slim and
delicate without being gaunt, the Florid style did not in the least
disfigure the churches of the thirteenth century, which it bounded and
decorated.
“But after the _Rayonnant_ Gothic came the _Flamboyant_, which, always
under the pretext of lightness and grace, denaturalises the ornaments,
the forms, and even the proportions of the architectural members. It
effaces the horizontal lines which used to give two stories to the
windows of the nave, fills up the nave with irregular compartments,
_cœurs_, _soufflets_, and _flammes_; suppresses the angles of the
pillars and sharpens the mouldings; leaves even to the most massive
supports nothing but an undulating, vanishing, impalpable form, where
shadow cannot fix itself; changes the lancet-arches into braces, or into
flat-arched vaults more or less depressed, and the florid ornamentation
of the pinnacles into whimsical scrolls. It reserved all its riches for
accessory or exterior decorations, stalls, pulpits, hanging key-stones,
running friezes, rood-screens, and bell-towers. Visible decadency of the
whole corresponds with great progress in details.” (Fig. 313.)
The churches of St. Wulfran, Abbeville; of Notre-Dame, Cléry-sur-Loire;
of St. Riquier; of Corbeil; and the cathedrals of Orleans and of Nantes,
may be cited as the principal specimens of the _Flamboyant_ style, and
as the last notable manifestations of an art which thenceforward
diverged more and more from its original inspiration. The middle of the
fifteenth century is generally fixed as the limit beyond which the
handsome Gothic buildings that still rose were no longer, in any degree,
the normal productions of their period, but were felicitous copies or
imitations of works already consecrated by the history of the art.
A remark may here be made showing to what extent religious feeling
predominated in the Middle Ages; it is that at the very moment when the
Norman and Gothic architects were designing and producing so many
marvellous habitations for the Deity, they seemed to bestow scarcely any
attention on the construction of comfortable or luxurious dwellings for
man, even those destined for the most exalted personages of the State.
In proportion as this sentiment of original faith lost its intensity,
Art occupied itself more and more with princely and lordly habitations.
The middle class was the last favoured by this progress, and the feeling
of their position as citizens had taken the place of a zeal exclusively
pious; so we find the “town-halls” absorbing the splendour and elegance
of which private houses remained destitute; these being generally built
of wood and plaster, and in the heart of the towns, so close together
that they seemed to be disputing for light and air.
[Illustration: Fig. 313.--Saloon of the Schools, Oxford. (Fourteenth
Century.)]
Everywhere, during the Middle Ages, rose the church--the home of peace;
but everywhere also towered up at the same time the castle, that
characterised the permanent state of war in which feudal society lived,
delighted, and gloried.
“The castles of the richest and most powerful nobles,” says M. Vaudoyer,
“consisted of irregular, uncomfortable buildings, pierced with a few
narrow windows, standing within one or two fortified enclosures, and
surrounded by moats. The donjon, a large high tower, generally occupied
the centre, and other towers, more or less numerous, flanked the walls,
and served for the defence of the place.” (Fig. 314). “These castles,”
adds M. Mérimée, “generally present the same characteristics as the
ancient _castellum_; but a certain ruggedness, a striking quaintness in
plan and execution, bear witness to a personal will, and that tendency
to isolation which is the instinctive sentiment of the feudal system.”
[Illustration: Fig. 314.--Ancient Castle of Marcoussis, near
Rambouillet. (Thirteenth Century.)]
In most of the buildings destined for the privileged classes, it seems
as if it were deemed unnecessary that care should be taken to secure
harmony of form. The decorative style of the period showed itself
chiefly in the interior of some of the principal apartments, the
habitable quarters of the lord of the castle and of his family. There
were vast fireplaces with enormous chimney-corners surmounted by
projecting mantelpieces; the vaulted roof was ornamented with pendents
of various devices, and with painted or carved escutcheons. Narrow
closets, contrived in the walls, served as sleeping places. The
embrasures of the windows pierced in the excessively thick walls formed
so many little chambers, raised a few steps above the floor of the room
to which they admitted light. Stone seats ran along each side of these
embrasures. Here the inmates of the tower generally sat when the cold
did not oblige them to draw near to the fireplaces. (Figs. 315 and 316.)
[Illustration: Fig. 315.--Staircase of a Tower.]
[Illustration: Fig. 316.--Pointed Window with Stone Seats.
(Thirteenth Century.)]
With the exception of these slight sacrifices made to the comforts of
life, everything in the castle was arranged, contrived, and disposed
with a view to strength and resistance; and yet it cannot be denied
that, unintentionally, the builders of these silent (_taciturnes_)
edifices have many a time--aided often, it is true, by the picturesque
sites which encircle their works--attained to a majesty of height and a
grandeur of form truly extraordinary.
If the Norman church expresses with gentle severity, and the Gothic
church with sumptuous fancy, the important and sublime doctrines of the
Gospel, we must equally allow that the castle, in some sort, loudly
proclaims the stern and uncivilised notions of the feudal authority of
which it was at once the instrument and the symbol.
[Illustration: Fig. 317.--The Castle of Coucy in its ancient state.
(From a Miniature taken from a Manuscript of the Thirteenth Century.)]
Placed, in most cases, on natural or artificial eminences, it is not
without a sort of eloquent boldness that the towers and the donjons
shoot into the air, succeed each other at intervals, command and support
each other. It is frequently not without a sort of fantastic grace that
the walls scale the rising ground, making an infinity of the strangest
bends, or coiling themselves about with the supple ease of a serpent.
[Illustration: Fig. 318.--The Castle of Vincennes, as it was in the
Seventeenth Century.]
Evidently, if the castle raises its gloomy head high into the air, it
has no other object in doing so than to secure to itself the advantages
of distance and height; but not the less on that account does it stand
out on the sky a grand object. The masses of its walls unsymmetrically
pierced with sombre loop-holes present an abrupt and naked appearance;
but the monotony of their lines is picturesquely broken by the
projection of overhanging turrets, by the corbels of the machicolated
arches, and by the embrasures of the battlements.
A vast amount of civilisation still exists for him who recalls the past
in the multitude of ruins which were the witnesses of bloody feudal
divisions; and we must add to the system of isolated castles that often
commanded the most deserted valleys, the apparatus of strength and
defence of cities and towns--gates, ramparts, towers, citadels, &c.,
immense works which, although inspired solely by the genius of strife
and dissension, did not fail nevertheless, in many instances, to combine
harmony and variety of detail with the general grandeur of the whole.
[Illustration: Fig. 319.--Tour de Nesle, which occupied the site of the
Exchange on the banks of the Seine, Paris.
(From an Engraving of the Seventeenth Century.)]
We may cite, as examples of architecture purely feudal, the castles of
Coucy (Fig. 317), Vincennes (Fig. 318), Pierrefonds, the old Louvre, the
Bastille, the Tour de Nesle (Fig. 319), the Palais de Justice,
Plessis-les-Tours, &c.; and as specimens of the fortified town in the
Middle Ages, Avignon and the city of Carcassonne. Let us add that
Aigues-Mortes, in Provence; Narbonne, Thann (Haut-Rhin), Vendôme,
Villeneuve-le-Roi, Moulins, Moret (Fig. 320), Provins (Fig. 321), afford
yet again the most characteristic remains of analogous fortifications.
[Illustration: Fig. 320.--Gate of Moret. (Twelfth Century.)]
While the nobles, jealous and suspicious, sheltered themselves in the
shadow of their donjons built with many strategical contrivances and of
substantial materials; while the large and small towns were surrounded
with deep moats, high walls, impregnable towers, the most primitive
simplicity presided over the construction of private dwellings. Stone
hardly ever, and brick but seldom, figured among the number of the
materials employed. Sawed or squared timbers serving as ribs, mud or
clay filling up the interstices, were all that was at first required for
the erection of houses as small as they were comfortless, and following
each other in irregular lines along the narrow streets. The beams of
the corbels, it is true, began to be adorned with carvings and
paintings, the façades with panes (glass) of different colours; but we
must reach the last half of the fifteenth century before we see the
resources of architecture applied to the erection and ornamentation of
private houses. Moreover, faith was already growing weak; and no longer
was it possible to direct all the resources of an entire province to the
honour of the Deity by the erection of a church; the use of gunpowder,
by revolutionising the art of war, came to lessen, if it did not
annihilate, the vast strength of walls; the decline of feudalism itself
had commenced; and, lastly, the enfranchisement of corporations gave
rise to a perfectly new order of individuals who took their place in
history. We must refer to this period the house of Jacques Cœur,
Bourges; the Hôtel de Sens, Paris (Fig. 322); the Palais de Justice,
Rouen; and those town-halls in which the belfry was then considered as a
sort of palladium, in whose shade the sacred rights of the community
sheltered themselves. It is in our (French) northern towns--St. Quentin,
Arras, Noyon; and in the ancient cities of Belgium--Brussels (Fig. 323),
Louvain, Ypres, that these edifices assume the most sumptuous character.
[Illustration: Fig. 321.--Gate of St. John, with Drawbridge, Provins.
(Fourteenth Century.)]
In Germany, where for a time it reigned almost exclusively, Gothic art
established the cathedrals of Erfurt, of Cologne, Fribourg, and of
Vienna; then it died away in the growth of the _Flamboyant_ style. In
England, after having left some magnificent examples of pure
inspiration, it found its decline in the attenuated meagreness and the
complicated ornamentation of the style called _Perpendicular ogival_. If
it penetrated also into Spain, it was to contend with difficulty against
the mighty Moorish school, which had too many imposing _chefs-d’œuvre_
in the past to surrender without resistance the country of its former
triumphs (Fig. 324). In Italy it clashed not only with the Latin and
Byzantine schools, but also with a style that, just beginning to form
itself, was soon to dispute with it the empire of taste, and to dethrone
it in that very land which had been its cradle. The cathedrals of
Assisi, of Siena, of Milan, are the splendid works in which its
influence triumphed over local traditions and over the _Renaissance_
that was preparing to follow; yet we must not think that it succeeded
even there in rendering itself absolutely the master, as it had done on
the Rhenish or British territories. Sacrifices were made in its favour;
but these sacrifices did not amount to an entire immolation.
[Illustration: Fig. 322.--Doorways of the Hôtel de Sens, at Paris; the
last remaining portion of the Hôtel Royal de
Saint-Pol, built in the reign of Charles V. (Fourteenth Century.)]
When we use the word _Renaissance_, we seem to be speaking of a return
to an age already gone by, of the resurrection of a period that had
passed away. It is not strictly in this sense that the word must be
understood in the present instance.
[Illustration: Fig. 323.--Belfry of Brussels (Fifteenth Century), from
an engraving of the Seventeenth Century.]
Inheriting from of old the artistic temperament of Greece, rather than
spontaneously creating of herself any style, Italy, among all the
nations of Europe, was the country which had most successfully resisted
the profound
[Illustration: Fig. 324.--Interior of the Palace of the Alhambra, at
Granada.--(Thirteenth Century.)]
darkness of barbarism, and the first on which the light of modern
civilisation shone.
At the period of this new dawn of genius, Italy had only to ransack the
ruins its first magnificence had bequeathed it to find among them
examples it might follow; moreover, it was the time when the active
rivalry of its republics caused all the treasures of ancient Greece to
flow into it. But while it derived inspiration from these abundant
manifestations of another age, it never entertained the idea of
abandoning itself exclusively to a servile imitation; it had--and in
this consists its chief title to glory--while giving a peculiar
direction to the revivals of the antique, the good sense to remain under
the poetic influence of that simple and congenial art which had consoled
the world during the whole continuance of that protracted infancy of a
civilisation which was at last advancing with rapid strides towards
perfect manhood.
From the twelfth century, Pisa gave an impetus to the art by building
its Duomo, its Baptistery, its Leaning Tower, and the cloisters of its
famous Campo Santo; so many admirable works forming an era in the
history of modern art, and in a brilliant manner opening the career on
which so many distinguished men were to enter, rivalling each other in
invention, in science, and in genius. In these monuments the union of
Oriental taste with the traditions of ages gone by created an
originality as grand as it was graceful. “It is,” as M. A. Lefèvre
points out, “the Antique without its nudity, the Byzantine without its
heaviness, the fervour of the Western Gothic without its ghastliness”
(_effroi_).
In 1294 the magistrates of Florence passed the following decree,
charging the architect, Arnolfo di Cambio, to convert into a cathedral
the church, till then of little importance, of Santa Maria de’
Fiori:--“Forasmuch,” they said, “as it is in the highest degree prudent
for a people of illustrious origin to proceed in their affairs in such
manner that their public works may cause their grandeur and wisdom to be
acknowledged, the order is given to Arnolfo, master-architect of our
town, to make plans for repairing the Church of Santa Maria with the
greatest and most lavish magnificence, so that the skill and prudence of
men may never invent, nor ever be able to undertake, anything more
important or more beautiful.”
Arnolfo applied himself to his task, and conceived a plan which the
shortness of human life did not allow him to carry out; but Giotto
succeeded
[Illustration: Fig. 325.--Interior of the Basilica of St. Peter’s,
Rome.]
him, and to Giotto succeeded Orcagna, and to Orcagna, Brunelleschi, who
designed and almost completed that Duomo, of which Michael Angelo said
it would be difficult to equal, and impossible to surpass, it.
Arnolfo, Giotto, Orcagna, Brunelleschi--does it not suffice to cite
these great names for us to form an idea of the movement going on at
this period? and which was soon to produce Alberti, Bramante, Michael
Angelo, Jacques della Porta, Baldassare Peruzzi, Antonio and Juliano de
Sangallo, Giocondo, Vignola, Serlio, and even Raphael, who, when he
liked, was as mighty an architect as he was a marvellous painter. It was
in Rome that these princes of the art congregated together, as the
splendours of St. Peter’s (Fig. 325), to mention only one of their grand
creations, still attest; so, it is from this city that henceforward
light and example are to come.