GOTHIC
672
GOTHIC
ness and precision of chiselling that are unparalleled
in any other schools save those of ancient Greece and
of Italy in the fifteenth century" (Moore, op. cit.,
XIII, 366). The sculptures of 8t- Denis, of Chartres,
of Senlis, and of Paris are perfect examples of an art of
sculpture beyond criticism in itself and exquisitely
adapted to its architectonic function; the statue of
Our Lady in the portal of the north transept of Paris
may be placed for comparison side by side with the
masterpieces of Hellenic sculpture and lose nothing by
the test. Of stained glass enough remains here and
elsewhere to show how marvellous was the wholly new
art brought into being by the genius of medievalism;
and that the painting and gilding of all the interior
surfaces was on a scale of equal perfection, we are
compelled to believe. As the cathedrals and churches
now remain to us — much of the glass destroyed by
savage iconoclasm and brutality, every trace of colour
vanished from the walls, while the original altars
themselves have been swept away together with their
gorgeous hangings and decorations (monstrosities like
that of Chartres, for instance, taking their places);
shrines, screens, and tombs, all wonderfully wrought
and glorious in colour and gold, shattered and cast
into the rubbish heap — they can give but an inade-
quate idea at best of the nature of that Christian art
which in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries came as
the result of a fusion of all the arts, each one of which
had been raised to the highest point of efficiency. Of
the lost colour of C!f)thic art Mr. Prior says, "We can
readily be assured that nothing of crudity found place
in the colour scheme of the Middle Ages — for have we
not their illuminated manuscripts in evidence? For
its pure and delicate harmony, a page of a thirteenth
or fourteenth century manuscript may compete with
the work of the greatest masters of colour that the
world has known, and we cannot doubt that the same
mastery of brilliant and harmonious tints was shown
in the colour scheme of cathedral painting" (op. cit.,
Introd., 19). Some hint of what has been lost may be
obtained from the faded frescoes of Cimabue and the
pamters of Siena, as they may be seen to-day at Assisi
and Florence and Siena itself.
The defects of Paris are almost wholly absent in Chartres, which is the most nearly perfect of all Gothic cathedrals both in conception and in the details of its working out. It is unquestionably the noblest interior in Christendom, even though the lower por- tions of its choir have been ruined by the most aggres- sive vandalism known to the eighteenth century. Its relations of dimension are of the same final and classical type as are those of the west front of Paris, while it .stands at that middle point of achievement when the defects of the Norman system had been eliminated, and those of the too exuberant vitality of the thirteenth century had not yet appeared. As has been said above, Gothic architecture is an impulse and a tendency rather than a perfectly rounded ac- complishment; the element of personality entered into it as into no other of the great styles, and it was therefore subject not only to dazzling flights of spon- taneous genius, but also to the misguided imaginings of daring innovators. The noble calm of the Paris fagade was followed by the nervous complexity and lack of relation of Laon. Only five years after this same masterpiece of Notre-Dame was achieved, the flying buttresses of the chcvet were reconstructed, and in place of the original fine simplicity and logic of the system of doubled arcs, announcing perfectly the fundamental plan, were substituted the present daring and superb, but illogical and ungainly arches soaring from the outer abutments across both aisles .sheer to the spriiig of the high vault. Similarly, when Amiens was built, the just proportions of Chartres were sacri- ficed to the pride of structural ability, and a faultless harmony of parts and proportions yieUled to wire- drawn elegance and awe-inspiring altitudes, destined a
little later, in Beauvais, to be the Nemesis of Gothic art.
Finally, the system of concentrated loads, which made
possible a structure of masonry that was but a skele-
ton of shafts, arches, and buttresses, supporting vaults
of stone and tilled in by walls of glass, was so tempt-
ing to the sense of daring and to the inevitable logic
of the French genius that it led to a recklessness in the
reduction ot solids to a minimum that, however much
it may have justified itself structurally, however mar-
vellous may have been the results it made possible in
the line of glowing antl translucent walls of Apocalyp-
tic colour, must be considered as falling away from the
justice and the grandeur of a classically architectonic
scheme such as that of Chartres. " It was the Logic
of the Parisian that brought to his Gothic both its ex-
treme excellence and its decay: the science of vault
construction fell in with his bent. The idea once hav-
ing attracted him, his logical faculty compelled him to
follow it to the end. His vaults rose higher and
higher; his poise and counterpoise, his hnkage of
thrust and strain grew more complicated and daring,
until material mass disappeared from his design and
his catheilrals were chain-works of articulated stone
pegged to the ground by; pinnacles" (Edward S.
Prior, "A History of Gothic Art in England", I, 9).
The fact must not be ignored, that even in the culmi-
nating monuments of the t hirteenth century in France
the mania for .skeleton construction led to unfortunate
subterfuges. The reduction ot masonry was carried
beyond a possible minimum, and its insufficiency was
supplement etl by hidden bars, ties, and chains of iron.
"The windows were sub-divided by strong grates of
wroiight-iron, some of the horizontal bars ofwhich ran
on through the piers continuously. At the Sainte
Chapelle a chain was imbedded in the walls right
round the building, and the stone vaulting ribs were
reinforced by curved bands of iron placed on each side
and bolted to them" (W. R. Lethaby, "Mediaeval
Art", VII, 161). In spite of these errors of a too-
perfect mastery of the art of building, the great group
of cathedrals that followed during the thirteenth cen-
tury in France must always remain the crowning glory
of Catholic architecture. Bourges, Reims, and
Amiens, with the numberless other examples of a per-
fected art, from the Channel to the Pyrenees, the Alps
to the sea, form the greatest cycle of buildings in a
definite and highly developed style that has ever
been produced by man, and is the most salient expo-
sition in history of human capacity for evolving a ma-
terial perfection and irradiating it with absolute
beauty and spiritual significance, all under the control
and by the impulse of a dominant and undivided re-
ligious faith.
There are three abstruse subjects connected with the nature and growth of Gothic architecture on which much has been written, yet nothing thus far that may be considered finally conclusive: (1) the Commacini, or seventh-century guild of masons; (2) the " struct- ural refinements" to which Professor Goodyear has devoted so much study; (3) the application of certain mystical numbers, and their relations to the solution of the problem of proportion. Of the Commacini, whose name first appears in a mid-fifth-century docu- ment, Mr. Lethaby says, "It is generally held by scholars that the word does not refer to a centre at Como, but should be understood as signifying an asso- ciation or guild of masons, and that the Magistri Com- macini heard of in the seventh century were of no special importance. It does seem probable, however, that the exjiansion of N. Italian art over many parts of Europe, ^^■hich appears to have taken place in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, may be traced to the fact that in Italy the guilds had privileges which made members free to travel at a time when Western masons were attached to manors or monasteries" (W. R. Lethaby, "Mediaeval Art", IV, 114). Professor Goodyear may be assumed to have proved that the
