In the Divinity Schools (Fig. 398) these great arches show themselves
throughout as the supports of the otherwise helpless vault; in Henry
VII.’s Chapel they are visible only in the side vaults, which are
strutted up from them with strong tracery, but their upper portions
penetrate the central vault, and become concealed from view.
The same system is carried into the apse (Fig. 399), and that with the
most surprising skill. The apse is supposed to be a portion of an entire
octagon, with an aisle supported by eight small columns, of which two
are lost by its conjunction with the straight part of the chapel. These
columns being converted into pendants, the structural arches supply, as
before described, the support demanded, but in this case they converge
to the central part of the octagon.
[Illustration: Fig. 399. Henry VII.’s Chapel, Westminster Abbey, Plan of
Apse.]
The treatment of this point in detail cannot intelligibly be described
in words. It is, perhaps, the most consummately skilled piece of
designing to be found in the whole range of Mediæval vaulting.
I have now completed my running (and all too rapid) sketch of the arched
and vaulted systems of Mediæval architecture, though purposely leaving
to another occasion the subject of domes. The limits of three lectures
have only sufficed to give a somewhat cursory glance at its salient
points, leaving the treasures of its detail to be searched out by the
zealous student.
No subject in the whole history of architecture is so remarkable, or
would more richly repay the investigator. I commend it to your
individual study, and will only add that our own country is more rich in
the variety of its vaulting than any other, and that London is
especially well supplied with objects of study, containing, as it does,
excellent examples of nearly every variety of vaulting, from the stern
severity of the work of King Edward the Confessor in the substructures
of his monastic buildings at Westminster, to that gorgeous and
astonishing work which I have just been describing, and of which we may
boldly assert (whatever may be our individual preferences), that _the
world does not contain its equal_.