Page:Charles Moore--Development and Character of Gothic Architecture.djvu/43

---

3. The ribs spring from slender shafts, compactly grouped, and often detached, though having their bases and capitals incorporated with the great piers which rise from the pavement, through the successive stories, to the nave cornice. Each one of these piers is a compound member consisting of a central body, with which are incorporated all the vaulting shafts, besides the columns which carry the pier arches on the ground-story, and those above which carry the arches of the triforium, and finally the buttress of the clerestory. Upon the piers are concentrated all the side pressures of the vaults, but these side pressures are so neutralised by the buttressing that the piers require only to be massive enough to bear the weight of the vaults.

4. The clerestory buttresses, which receive the thrusts of the nave vaults, are reinforced by flying buttresses springing over the aisle roofs, and rising from the vast outer buttresses, which are incorporated with the respond piers of the aisles.

5. The walls, required for enclosure only, are reduced to a minimum of thickness, and are confined to the ground-story, and to the spandrels of the arcades. The apertures fill the whole space laterally between the piers.

It will thus be seen that the full development of the Gothic system is brought out only where the plan of the building includes a central nave and side aisles. It was in such buildings that the system was evolved. The principle of the prop or brace, which the flying buttress embodies, as contrasted with the inert stay, which the solid Romanesque buttress embodies, is one of the most fecund principles of Gothic construction. By its use, in connection with that of the pointed arch in the ribs of the vault, is the Gothic attenuation of supports rendered possible. A single-aisled building, like the Sainte Chapelle of Paris, or the Chapel of St. Germer, may, indeed, be strictly Gothic as far as it goes. For it may, as these buildings do, consist of a completely functional skeleton, though not a highly organised one, upon which everything else depends. When the system was once developed in