by Will Durant
Almost a century after the foundation of its duomo, Pisa commissioned Diotisalvi to erect a baptistery across a square from the cathedral (1152). He adopted a circular plan, faced the structure with marble, disfigured it with blank arcades, encompassed it with colonnades, and crowned it with a dome that might have been perfect but for its conical cupola. Behind the cathedral Bonanno of Pisa and William of Innsbruck raised the Leaning Tower as a campanile (1174). It repeated the style of the cathedral façade—a series of superimposed Romanesque arcades, with the eighth story housing the bells. The Tower sank on the south side after three stages had been built upon a foundation only ten feet deep, and the architects tried to offset this by inclining the later stories toward the north. In a height of 179 feet the Tower now deviates 16½ feet from the perpendicular—an increase of one foot between 1828 and 1910.
Italian monks migrating into France, Germany, and England brought Romanesque fashions in their train. Perhaps because of them most French monasteries were Romanesque, so that in France Romanesque has the second name of the monastic style. The Benedictines of Cluny built a magnificent abbey there (1089–1131), with four side aisles, seven towers, and such an array of zoological sculpture as roused St. Bernard’s ire.
In the cloisters, under the eyes of the monks who read, what do these ridiculous monsters seek to do? What do these unclean monkeys mean, these dragons, centaurs, tigers, and lions … these soldiers fighting, these hunting scenes? … What business here have these creatures who are half beast and half man? … We can see here several bodies under one head, and several heads on one body. Here we observe a quadruped with the head of a serpent, there a fish with the head of a quadruped; here an animal is a horse in front and a goat behind.4
The abbey of Cluny was destroyed in the Jacqueries of the Revolution, but its architectural influence spread to its 2000 affiliated monasteries. Southern France is still rich in Romanesque churches; the Roman tradition was strong there in art as in law, and long resisted the “barbaric” Gothic that came down from the North. Marble was rare in France, and the cathedrals atoned for lack of external brilliance by a profusion of sculpture. Startling, in the churches of southern France, is the expressionism of the statuary—the resolve to convey a feeling instead of copying a scene; so the figure of St. Peter on a portal of the abbey of Moissac (1150), with its tortured face and arachnid legs, must have aimed not so much to accentuate structural lines as to impress and terrify the imagination. That the sculptors deliberately distorted such figures appears from the minute realism of the foliage in the Moissac capitals. The best of these French Romanesque façades is the west portal of St. Trophime’s at Aries (1152), crowded with animals and saints.
Spain raised a lordly Romanesque shrine in the church of Santiago de Compostela (1078–1211), whose Portico de la Gloria contains the finest Romanesque sculpture in Europe. Coimbra, soon to be the university city of Portugal, built a handsome Romanesque cathedral in the twelfth century. But it was in its more northern migrations that Romanesque reached its apogee. The Île de France rejected it, but Normandy welcomed it; its rough power accorded well with a people recently Viking and still buccaneers. As early as 1048 the Benedictine monks of Jumièges, near Rouen, built an abbey reputedly larger than any edifice that had been raised in Western Europe since Constantine; the Middle Ages too were proud of size. It was half destroyed by the fanatics of the Revolution, but its surviving façade and towers preserve a bold and virile design. There, indeed, was formed the Norman style of Romanesque, relying for its effect on mass and structural form rather than on ornament.
In 1066 William the Conqueror, to expiate the sin of marrying Matilda of Flanders, provided funds for a church of St. Étienne at Caen, known as the Abbaye aux Hommes; and Matilda, perhaps with like motives, financed there the church of La Trinité, known as the Abbaye aux Dames. About 1135, in a restoration of the Abbaye aux Hommes, each bay of the nave was divided with an extra column on each side, bound with a transverse arch; in this way the usual “quadripartite” became a “sexpartite” vault, a form that proved popular throughout the twelfth century.
From France the Romanesque style passed into Flanders, raising a handsome cathedral at Tournai (1066); and from Flanders, France, and Italy it entered Germany. Mainz had begun its cathedral in 1009, Trier in 1016, Speyer in 1030; these were rebuilt before 1300, still in the rounded style. Cologne built in this period the church of St. Maria im Kapitol, famous for its interior, and the church of St. Maria, famous for its towers; both buildings were destroyed in the Second World War. The cathedral of Worms, dedicated in 1171 and restored in the nineteenth century, is still a monument of Rhenish Romanesque. These churches had an apse at each end, and cared little for sculptured façades; they adorned their exterior with colonnades, and buttressed the towers with slender turrets of very pleasing form. The non-German critic praises these Rhenish shrines with patriotic moderation, but they have a charming gemütlich beauty quite in harmony with the inviting loveliness of the Rhine.
III. THE NORMAN STYLE IN ENGLAND: 1066–1200
When Edward the Confessor came to the throne in 1042 he brought with him many friends and ideas from the Normandy in which he had spent his youth. Westminster Abbey began in his reign as a Norman church with round arches and heavy walls; that structure was buried under the Gothic abbey of 1245, but it inaugurated an architectural revolution. The rapid replacement of Saxon or Danish by Norman bishops ensured the triumph of the Norman style in England. The Conqueror and his successors lavished upon the bishops much of the wealth confiscated from Englishmen who had not appreciated conquest; the churches became instruments of mental pacification; soon the Norman English bishops matched the Norman English nobles in wealth; and cathedrals and castles multiplied as allies in the conquered land. “Nearly all tried to rival one another in sumptuous buildings in the Norman style,” wrote William of Malmesbury; “for the nobles felt that day lost which they had not celebrated with some deed of magnificence.”5 Never had England seen such a frenzy of building.
Norman English architecture was a variation of the Romanesque theme. It followed French exemplars in supporting the roof by round arches on fat piers, and by heavy walls—though its ceilings were usually of wood; when the vault was of stone the walls were from eight to ten feet thick. It was largely monastic, and rose in out-of-the-way places rather than in cities. It used very little external statuary, fearing the effect of a damp climate, and even the capitals of the columns were simply or poorly carved; in sculpture England never caught up with the Continent. But not many towers could match the mighty structures that dominated the Norman castles, or guarded the façade—or covered the transept crossing—of the Norman church.
Hardly any ecclesiastical architecture in England is still purely Romanesque. Most cathedrals underwent a Gothic lifting of arch and vault in the thirteenth century, and only the basic Norman form remains. In 1067 fire destroyed the old cathedral of Canterbury; Lanfranc rebuilt it (1070–7) along the lines of his former Abbaye aux Hommes at Caen; nothing survives of Lanfranc’s cathedral except a few patches of masonry where Becket fell. In 1096–1110 the priors Ernulf and Conrad built a new choir and crypt; they kept the round arch, but channeled the strains to points supported by external buttresses. The transition to Gothic had begun.
York Minster,* built in 1075 on a Norman plan, disappeared in 1291 under a Gothic edifice. Lincoln Cathedral, originally Norman (1075), was rebuilt in Gothic after the earthquake of 1185; but the two great towers and sumptuously carved portals of the west façade survive from the Norman church, and reveal the skill and power of the older style. At Winchester the transepts and crypt remain of the Norman cathedral of 1081–1103. Bishop Walkelin built it to receive the flow of pilgrims to the tomb of St. Swithin.† Walkelin appealed to his cousin the Conqueror for timber to roof the enormous nave; William agreed to let him take from Hempage Forest as much wood as he could cut in three days; Walkelin’s flock cut down and carried off the entire forest in sev
enty-two hours. When the cathedral was finished nearly all the abbots and bishops of England attended its consecration; we may readily imagine the competitive stimulus aroused by such an enormous edifice.
Some echo of the scope of Norman building comes down to us when we note that St. Alban’s Abbey was begun in 1075, Ely Cathedral in 1081, Rochester in 1083, Worcester in 1084, Old St. Paul’s in 1087, Gloucester in 1089, Durham in 1093, Norwich in 1096, Chichester in 1100, Tewkesbury in 1103, Exeter in 1112, Peterborough in 1116, Romsey Abbey in 1120, Fountains Abbey in 1140, St. David’s, in Wales, in 1176. These are not names, they are masterpieces; shame bows us at leaving them after a few hours, or dismissing them in a line. All but one were later rebuilt or re-clothed in Gothic. Durham is still predominantly Norman, and remains the most impressive Romanesque structure in Europe.
Durham is a little mining town of some 20,000 souls. At a turn of the river Wear a rocky promontory rises; on that strategic elevation stands the gigantic mass of the cathedral, “half church of God, half castle against the Scots.”6 Monks from the island of Lindisfarne, fleeing from Danish raiders, built a stone church there in 995. In 1093 its second Norman bishop, William of St. Carilef, demolished this building, and with incredible courage and mysterious wealth raised the present edifice. The work continued till 1195, so that the cathedral represents the aspiration and labor of a hundred years. The lofty nave is Norman, with a double arcade of round arches resting on uncarved capitals and stout piers. The vault of Durham introduced to England two vital innovations: the groins were ribbed, helping to localize pressures; and the transverse arches were pointed, while the diagonals were round. If the transverse arches had been round, their crowns would not have reached the same height as the diagonals, which are longer, and the apex of the vault would have been a disturbingly uneven line. By lifting the crowns of the transverse arches to a point, they could be made to reach the desired height. This structural consideration, and no esthetic aim, apparently fathered the most prominent feature of the Gothic style.
In 1175 Bishop Pudsey added at the west end of Durham Cathedral an attractive porch or narthex, which for some unknown reason received the name of galilee. Here—where lies the tomb of the Venerable Bede—the arches are round, but the slender columns approach the Gothic form. Early in the thirteenth century the vault of the choir collapsed; in rebuilding it the architects supported the nave arcade with flying buttresses hidden in the triforium. In 1240–70 a Chapel of the Nine Altars was added to hold the remains of St. Cuthbert; and in that shrine the arches were pointed, and the transition to Gothic was complete.
IV. THE EVOLUTION OF GOTHIC
Gothic architecture might be defined as a localization and balancing of structural strains, emphasizing vertical lines, ribbed vaults, and pointed forms. It evolved through the solution of mechanical problems set by ecclesiastical needs and artistic aspiration. Fear of fire led to vaults of stone or brick; heavier ceilings necessitated thick walls and clumsy piers; the ubiquity of downward pressure limited window space, the thick walls shadowed the narrow windows, and the interior was left too dark for northern climes. The invention of the ribbed vault lessened the ceiling weight, allowing slenderer columns and localized strains; the concentration and balancing of pressures gave the building stability without heaviness; the localization of support through buttresses allowed longer windows in thinner walls; the windows offered inviting scope for the already existing art of stained glass; and the stone frames surmounting compound windows aroused the new art of pierced design or tracery. The arches of the vault became pointed to allow arches of uneven length to reach their crowns at an even height; and other arches, and window forms, became pointed to harmonize with the arches of the vault. Better ways of bearing pressure permitted higher naves; the towers and spires and pointed arches emphasized verticality of line, and produced the soaring flight and buoyant grace of the Gothic style. All these together made the Gothic cathedral the supreme achievement and expression of the soul of man.
But it is presumptuous to concentrate a century of architectural evolution into a paragraph. Some steps in the development invite calmer scrutiny. The problem of reconciling light grace with stable strength was better solved by Gothic than by any architecture before our time; and we do not know how long our own bold challenges to gravity will escape the leveling jealousy of the earth. Neither did the Gothic architect always succeed; Chartres is still without a crack, but the choir of Beauvais Cathedral crumbled twelve years after it was built. The essential feature of the Gothic style was the functional rib: the transverse and diagonal arch ribs rising from each bay of the nave united to form a light and graceful web upon which a thin vault of masonry could rest. Each bay of the nave became a structural unit, bearing the weight and thrusts brought down by the arches rising from its piers, and supported by counter pressures from the corresponding bays of the aisles, and by outer buttresses applied to the walls at the inward springing of each transverse arch.
The buttress was an old device. Many pre-Gothic churches had pillars of masonry externally added at points of special strain. A flying buttress, however, carries a thrust or strain over open space to a base support and to the ground. Some Norman cathedrals used half arches in the triforium to prop up the arches of the nave; but such internal buttresses reached the nave wall at too low a point, and gave no strength to the clerestory where the explosive pressure of the vault was most intense. To apply support at this high point it was necessary to take the buttress out of its hiding place, let it rise from the solid ground and throw it through open space over the aisle roof to directly sustain the clerestory wall. The earliest known use of such an external flying buttress was in the cathedral of Noyon about 1150.7 By the end of that century it had become a favorite device. It had serious faults: sometimes it gave the impression of a structural skeleton, a scaffolding negligently unremoved, or the makeshift afterthought of a designer whose building sagged; “the cathedral had crutches,” said Michelet. The Renaissance would reject the flying buttress as an unsightly obstruction, and would support by other means such burdens as St. Peter’s dome. The Gothic architect thought differently; he liked to expose the lines and mechanisms of his art; he developed a fondness for buttresses, and perhaps multiplied them beyond need; he compounded them, so that they would give support at two or more points, or to one another; he beautified their stabilizing piers with pinnacles; and sometimes, as at Reims, he proved that at least one angel could stand on the point of a pinnacle.
The balancing of strains was far more vital to Gothic than the ogive or pointed arch, but this became the outward and visible sign of an inward grace. The pointed arch was a very old form. At Diarbekr in Turkey it appears on a Roman colonnade of uncertain date. The earliest dated example is at Qasr-ibn-Wardan in Syria in 561.8 The form is found in the Dome of the Rock and the Mosque of el-Aqsa at Jerusalem in the seventh century; on a Nilometer in Egypt in 861; in the Mosque of Ibn Tulun at Cairo in 879; it was in frequent use among Persians, Arabs, Copts, and Moors before its first appearance in Western Europe in the second half of the eleventh century.9 It may have come to Southern France from Moslem Spain or through pilgrims returning from the East; or it may have arisen spontaneously in the West to meet mechanical problems in architectural design. It should be noted, however, that the problem of bringing arches of uneven length to an even crown could be solved without the ogive by “stilting” the shorter arches, i.e., raising their point of inward springing from pier or wall. This, too, had an esthetic effect, as emphasizing vertical lines; and the device was widely adopted, seldom as a substitute for the pointed arch, often as a helpful accompaniment. The ogive solved a further problem: since the aisles were narrower than the nave, an aisle bay had more length than width, and the crowns of its transverse arches would fall far short of those of its diagonals, unless the transverse arches were either pointed, or stilted so high as to prevent their harmonious inward movement with the diagonals. The ogive offered a similar solution for the diffic
ult task of vaulting with arches of even crown the ambulatory of the apse, where the outer wall was longer than the inner, and each bay formed a trapezoid whose vault could not be forgivably designed without the pointed arch. That this was not at first chosen for its grace appears from the large number of buildings in which it was used to meet these problems, while the round arch continued to be used in windows and portals. Gradually the vertical lift of the ogive, and perhaps a desire for harmonized form, gave the pointed arch the victory. The ninety years of struggle between the round and the pointed arch—from the appearance of the ogive in the Romanesque cathedral of Durham (1104) to the final building of Chartres (1194)—constitute, in French Gothic, the period of the transition style.
The application of the pointed arch to windows created new problems, new solutions, and new charms. The channeling of strains through ribs from vault to piers, and from piers to specific points supported by buttresses, ended the need for thick walls. The space between each point of support and the next bore relatively little pressure; the wall there could be thinned, could even be removed. So large an opening could not be safely fitted with a single pane of glass. The space was therefore divided into two or more pointed windows (lancets), surmounted by an arch of stone; in effect the outer wall, like that of the nave, became a series of arches, an arcade. The four-pointed “shield” of masonry left between the upper ends of the paired and pointed windows and the top of the enclosing stone arch made an ugly blank, and cried out for decoration. About 1170 the architects of France responded with plate tracery; i.e., they pierced this shield in such a way as to leave stone bars or mullions in ornamental designs—circular, cusped, or lobed; and they filled the interstices, as well as the windows, with stained glass. In the thirteenth century the sculptors cut away more and more of the stone, and inserted into the opening little bars of stone carved into cusps or other forms. This bar tracery took on ever more complex paterns, whose predominating lines gave names to styles and periods of Gothic architecture: lancet, geometrical, curvilinear, perpendicular, and flamboyant. Similar processes applied to wall surfaces over the portals produced the great “rose windows,” whose radiating tracery generated the term rayonnant for the style that began at Notre Dame in 1230 and reached perfection in Reims and Sainte Chapelle. In the Gothic cathedral only the soaring articulation of the vault transcends the beauty of the “rose.”