work of Donatello or Ghiberti, are scarcely inferior to that of their Italian predecessors. The restraint of the figure is apparently self-imposed in obedience to the demands of its architectural position. The rigidity of the example from St. Trophime appears, on the other hand, to be inherent in its nature.
It is worthy of notice that the mediæval architect did not employ the human figure in the manner of a caryatid. The ranges of statues, which form such conspicuous and characteristic features of the vast receding jambs of the portals of French churches are placed each against a shaft which bears its archivolt. To make the figure itself an architectural support would not be in accordance with the rational spirit of Gothic art.[1] Nor, in true Gothic, are statues set in niches in walls. For in Gothic the wall spaces are small and contain no more substance than is necessary, leaving nothing to spare for recesses. The places occupied by the statues in the buttresses of the Cathedral of Paris are not niches; they do not diminish the mass of the buttress; they constitute really nothing more than decorative forms of set-offs. The true set-off is the level ledge from the corners of which shafts rise to support the sloping water table, thus forming a canopy within which the statue is placed. Nor can the canopies of the pinnacles of buttresses, in which statues occur, as at Reims, be properly termed niches. The nearest approach to niches in pure Gothic are those spaces between the mouldings of the archivolts in which canopies are set over statues, as in the portal of the Virgin at Paris. It is only after the beginning of the decline of Gothic that real niches occur, as in the façades of the transepts of Paris.[2]
Sculptured statues in Gothic art are thus so far independent of the construction as not to have any real mechanical office, and yet they are not independent in expression as are the statues placed in niches of walls in Roman and Renaissance buildings. They are, especially when occurring
- ↑ It is true that corbels are often carved into the forms of crouching figures, as at Amiens; but these are on a small scale, and are never treated like the caryatid, where the weight rests on the head.
- ↑ "The real niches that occur in the gable of the central portal of the west front of Bourges are exceptions to the general rule. See Viollet-le-Duc, s.v. Niche, p. 414, et seq.
