CHAPTER V
GOTHIC PROFILES IN FRANCE
Having examined the larger structural features of Gothic and other pointed architecture, we may now examine the forms of the lesser members—such as capitals, bases, string-courses, arch-sections, and tracery. The profiles which these members assume are determined largely by functional exigencies, though in their development the exercise of artistic feeling was so intimately connected with obedience to these exigencies that the elements of functional fitness and artistic expression can hardly be separated. I shall not, therefore, attempt to consider them separately.
We have already, in the course of the second chapter, had occasion to notice some of the conditions which partially determined the forms of the capitals in the great piers of Paris, Chartres, Reims, and other churches. We may now take up the further consideration of their development, more especially with regard to their profiles.
The Roman and the early Romanesque builders did not consistently recognise the mechanical function of the capital as a member by means of which a bulky load may be safely and agreeably adjusted to a slender column. In the arcades of many Roman buildings the superincumbent load at the impost does not exceed in diameter the diameter of the sustaining column, as is shown in Fig. 110, a shaft with its capital and load, from the palace of Diocletian at Spalato. In this case the capital is comparatively useless, since the load would be almost as well adjusted to the column without its interposition. But in Christian Roman buildings usually, as in the gallery of Sta. Agnese at Rome, the
