by Will Durant
Stone tracery, in the large sense of any piercing of stone in a decorative design, passed from the walls to other parts of the Gothic cathedral—the buttress pinnacles, the gables above the portals, the soffits and spandrels of arches, the triforium arcade, the sanctuary screen, the pulpit and reredos; for the Gothic sculptor, in the joy of his art, could scarcely touch a surface without adorning it. He crowded façades and cornices and towers with apostles, devils, and saints, with the saved and the damned; he cut his fancy into capitals, corbels, moldings, lintels, frets, and jambs; he laughed in stone with the whimsical or terrifying animals that he invented as gargoyles (“little throats”) to carry staining rain away from the walls or channel it into the ground through buttresses. Never elsewhere have wealth and skill, piety and lusty humor combined to provide such a feast of ornament as revels in the Gothic cathedral. Undeniably the decoration was sometimes too profuse, the tracery was carried to a fragile excess, the statues and capitals must have been too gaudy with the paint that time has cleansed away. But these are the signs of a vital exuberance, to which almost any fault can be forgiven. Wandering in these jungles and gardens of stone, it dawns upon us that Gothic art, despite its heaven-pointing lines and spires, was an art that loved the earth. Amid these saints proclaiming the vanity of vanities and the terror of the Judgment soon to come, we perceive the unseen but omnipresent medieval artisan, proud of his skill, joyful in his strength, laughing at theologies and philosophies, and drinking with relish, and to the last drop, the bubbling, brimming, lethal cup of life.
V. FRENCH GOTHIC: 1133–1300
Why did the Gothic revolution begin and culminate in France?
The Gothic style was not a virgin birth. A hundred traditions joined in a fertilizing flow: Roman basilicas, arches, vaults, and clerestories; Byzantine themes of ornament; Armenian, Syrian, Persian, Egyptian, Arabic ogives, groined vaults, and clustered piers; Moorish motifs and arabesques; Lombard ribbed vaults and façade towers; the Germanic flair for the humorous and grotesque…. But why did these streams of influence converge in France? Italy, as in wealth and heritage the favored country of Western Europe, might have led the Gothic flowering, but she was the prisoner of her classic inheritance. Italy excepted, France was in the twelfth century the richest, and most advanced, nation of the West. She above all others had manned and financed the Crusades, and profited from their cultural stimulus; she led Europe in education, literature, and philosophy; and her craftsmen were conceded to be the best this side of Byzantium. By the time of Philip Augustus (1180–1223) the royal power had triumphed over feudal disunity, and the affluence, power, and intellectual life of France were congregating in the king’s own domain—that lie de France loosely definable as the region of the middle Seine. Along the Seine, Oise, Marne, and Aisne a fruitful commerce moved, leaving behind it a wealth that turned to stone in cathedrals at Paris, St. Denis, Senlis, Mantes, Noyon, Soissons, Laon, Amiens, and Reims. The manure of money had prepared the soil for the growth of art.
The first masterpiece of the transition style was the magnificent abbey church of St. Denis, in the Paris suburb of that name. It was the work of one of the most complete and successful personalities in French history. Suger (1081?-1151), Benedictine abbot and regent of France, was a man of refined tastes, who, while living simply, thought it no sin to love beautiful things and to gather them for the adornment of his church. “If the ancient law,” he replied to St. Bernard’s criticisms, “ordained that cups of gold should be used for libations, and to receive the blood of rams … how much rather should we devote gold, precious stones, and the rarest of materials to vessels designed to hold the blood of Our Lord?”10 So he tells us proudly of the beauty and cost of the gold and silver, the jewels and enamels, the mosaics and stained windows, the rich vestments and vessels, which he gathered or had made for his church. In 1133 he brought together artists and artisans “from all lands” to raise and adorn a new home for France’s patron St. Denis, and to house the tombs of the kings of France; he persuaded King Louis VII and the court to contribute the necessary funds; “following our example,” he says, “they took the rings from their fingers” to pay for his costly designs.11 We picture him rising early to superintend the construction, from the felling of the trees that he chose for timbers to the installation of the stained glass whose subjects he had selected and whose inscriptions he had composed. When he dedicated his edifice in 1144 twenty bishops officiated; the King, two queens, and hundreds of knights attended; and Suger might well have felt that he had won a crown more glorious than any king’s.
Of his church only parts remain in the present edifice: the west front, two bays of the nave, the chapels of the ambulatory, and the crypt; most of the interior is a reconstruction by Pierre de Montereau between 1231 and 1281. The crypt is Romanesque; the west façade mingles round and pointed arches; its sculptures, mostly from Suger’s time, include a hundred figures, many well individualized, and all centering about one of the best conceptions of Christ the Judge in the whole sweep of medieval art.
Twelve years after Suger’s death Bishop Maurice de Sully paid him the compliment of bettering his instruction, and Notre Dame de Paris rose on an island in the Seine. Its chronology suggests the immensity of the task: the choir and transepts were built in 1163–82; the nave in 1182–96, the westernmost bays and the towers in 1218–23; the cathedral was finished in 1235. In the original design the triforium was to be Romanesque, but in the completion the whole structure adopted the Gothic style. The west front is unusually horizontal for a Gothic cathedral, but that is because the spires that were meant to top the towers were never built; perhaps for that reason there is a firm and simple dignity in this façade that has led able students to rank it as “the noblest architectural conception of man.”12 The rose windows of Our Lady of Paris are masterpieces of bar tracery and coloring; but they were not meant to be described by words. The sculptures, though injured by time and revolution, represent the finest work in that art between the age of Constantine and the building of Reims Cathedral. In the tympanum over the main portal the Last Judgment is carved with greater calm than in most later renderings of that ubiquitous theme; the Christ is a figure of quiet majesty; and the angel at His right is one of the triumphs of Gothic sculpture. Better still is La Vierge du trumeau—the Virgin of the Pillar—on the north portal: here is a new delicacy of treatment, finish of surface, naturalness of drapery; a new ease and grace of stance, with the weight on one foot and the body thereby freed from stiff verticality; in this lovely figure Gothic sculpture almost declared its independence from architecture, and produced a masterpiece quite capable of being taken from its context and standing triumphantly alone. In Notre Dame at Paris the transition was ended, and Gothic came of age.
The story of Chartres illuminates the medieval scene and character. It was a small town fifty-five miles southwest of Paris, just outside the royal domain, a market for the plain of Beauce, the “granary of France.” But the Virgin was said to have visited the place in person; the pious lame or blind or sick or bereaved made it a goal of pilgrimage; some were healed or comforted at her shrine; Chartres became a Lourdes. Furthermore, its Bishop Fulbert, a man mingled of goodness, intellect, and faith, made it in the eleventh century a shrine of higher education, alma mater to some of the most brilliant figures in early Scholastic philosophy. When Fulbert’s ninth-century cathedral burned down in 1020 he set himself at once to rebuild it, and lived long enough to see it finished. This, in turn, was destroyed by fire in 1134. Bishop Theodoric made the construction of a new cathedral a veritable crusade; he aroused such devotion to the task, financial and physical, that in 1144, according to the eye-witness account of Abbot Haimon of Normandy,
kings, princes, mighty men of the world, puffed up with honors and riches, men and women of noble birth, bound bridles upon their proud and swollen necks, and submitted themselves to wagons which, after the fashion of brute beasts, they dragged with loads of wine, corn, oil, lime, stones, beams, and
other things necessary to sustain life or build churches…. Moreover, as they draw the wagons we may see this miracle, that although sometimes a thousand men and women … are bound in the traces … yet they go forward in such silence that no voice, no murmur, is heard…. When they pause on the way no words are heard but confessions of guilt, with supplication and pure prayer…. The priests preach peace, hatred is soothed, discord is driven away, debts are forgiven, unity is restored.13
This cathedral of Bishop Theodoric had hardly been completed (1180) when, in 1194, fire gutted the nave, brought vault and walls to the ground, and left, as scarred survivors, only the subterranean crypt and the west façade with its two towers and spires. We are told that every house in the town was destroyed in that awful conflagration, whose traces are visible on the cathedral today. The discouraged people for a time lost faith in the Virgin, and wished to abandon the town. But the indomitable papal legate Melior told them that the calamity had been sent by God to punish their sins; he commanded them to rebuild their church and their homes; the clergy of the diocese contributed nearly all their income for three years; new miracles were reported of the Virgin of Chartres; faith was rekindled; multitudes came again, as in 1144, to help the paid workers pull the carts and set the stones; funds were contributed by every cathedral in Europe;14 and by 1224 toil and hope completed the cathedral that makes Chartres again a goal of pilgrimage.
The unknown architect had planned to top with towers not merely the flanks of the west front but also the transept portals and the apse. Only the two façade towers were built. Le Clocher vieux—the Old Bell-Tower (1145–70)—rose with its spire to 351 feet at the south end of the façade; it is simple and unadorned, and wins the preference of professional architects.15 Its northern mate—Le Clocher neuf—twice lost its wooden spire by fire; the spire was rebuilt in stone (1506–12) by Jean le Texier in flamboyant Gothic style of crowded and delicate ornament; Fergusson thought it “the most beautifully designed spire on the continent of Europe”;16 but it is generally agreed that so ornate a spire mars the unity of an austere façade.17
The fame of Chartres rests on its sculpture and its glass. In this palace of the Virgin live 10,000 carved or pictured personages—men, women, children, saints, devils, angels, and the Persons of the Trinity. There are 2000 statues in the portals alone;18 additional statues stand against columns in the interior; visitors who climb the 312 steps to the roof are astonished to see carefully carved life-size figures where none but the vigorous curious can ever notice them. Over the central portal is a splendid Christ, not, as in later façades, sternly judging the dead, but seated in calm majesty amid a happy throng, His hand held out as if to bless the entering worshipers. Attached to the recessed “orders” of the portal arch are nineteen prophets, kings, and queens; they are slender and stiff as befits their station as literally pillars of the church; many are crude and unfinished, perhaps injured or worn; but some of the faces have the philosophic depth, the gentle repose, or the maiden grace, that were to be perfected at Reims.
FIG. 26—Cathedral Rheims
FIG. 27—St. Nicaise Between Two Angels Rheims Cathedral
FIG. 28—“The Annunciation and Visitation” Rheims Cathedral
FIG. 29—Wrought lron Grille Abbey of Ourscamp
FIG. 30—Cathedral Canterbury
FIG. 31—Hôtel de Ville Ypres
FIG. 32—Cathedral Salisbury
FIG. 33—Cathedral Interior Durham
FIG. 34—Cathedral Interior Winchester
FIG. 35—Westminster Abbey London
FIG. 36—Cathedral Strasbourg
FIG. 37-“The Church” Strasbourg Cathedral
FIG. 38—“The Synagogue” Strasbourg Cathedral
FIG. 39—Saint Elizabeth Detail from “The Visitation” Bamberg Cathedral
FIG. 40—Mary Detail from “The Visitation,” Bamberg Cathedral
FIG. 41—Ekkehard and His Wife Uta Naumburg Cathedral
FIG. 42—Rose Façade Orvieto Cathedral
FIG. 43—Façade Siena Cathedral
FIG. 44—Pulpit of Pisano Siena Cathedral
FIG. 45—Rear View of Cathedral Salamanca
FIG. 46—Cathedral Interior Santiago di Compostela
The transept façades and porches are the fairest in Europe. Each has three portals, flanked and separated by beautifully carved columns and jambs, and almost covered with statues every one of which is so individualized that several have received names from the folk of Chartres. The south porch centers its 783 figures around Christ enthroned on His judgment seat. Here Notre Dame de Chartres is subordinated to her Son; but in compensation she is endowed, as in Albertus Magnus, with all the sciences and philosophy, and in her service, on this portal, appear the Seven Liberal Arts—Pythagoras as Music, Aristotle as Dialectic, Cicero as Rhetoric, Euclid as Geometry, Nicomachus as Arithmetic, Priscian as Grammar, Ptolemy as Astronomy. St. Louis, in the words of his charter of 1259, caused the north porch to be completed “by reason of his particular devotion to the church of Our Lady of Chartres, and for the saving of his soul and the souls of his forefathers.”19 In 1793 the French Revolutionary Assembly defeated by a narrow margin a motion to destroy the statues of Chartres Cathedral in the name of philosophy and the Republic; “philosophy” compromised by chopping off some of the hands.20 This north porch belongs to the Virgin, and tells her story with reverent affection. The statues here stand out in the round, as fully matured sculpture; the drapery is as graceful and natural as in any Greek carving; the figure of Modesty is French girlhood at its best, where modesty gives to beauty a double power; there is nothing finer in all the history of sculpture. “These statues,” said Henry Adams, “are the Aeginetan marbles of French art.”21
As one enters the cathedral, four impressions mingle: the simple lines of the nave and vault, hardly comparable in size or beauty with the nave of Amiens or Winchester; the ornate choir screen, begun in 1514 by the flamboyant Jean le Texier; the peaceful figure of Christ on a pillar of the south transept, and, suffusing all with soft color, the unequaled stained glass. Here, in 174 windows, are 3884 figures from legend and history, ranging from cobblers to kings. It is medieval France seen through the richest colors ever developed—dark reds, soft blues, emerald greens, saffron, yellow, brown, white; here above all is the glory of Chartres. We must not look to these windows for realistic portraiture; the figures are ungainly, sometimes absurd; Adam’s head, in the medallion of the Expulsion from Eden, is painfully askew, and the bilateral charms of Eve could hardly divert the worshiper to concupiscence. It seemed to these artists enough that the pictures told a story while the colors fused in the viewer’s vision, and in their mingling painted the cathedral air. Excellent in design is the window of the Prodigal Son; famous for color and line the window of the symbolic Tree of Jesse; but better than all the rest is Notre Dame de la belle verrière—“Our Lady of the Beautiful Window.” Tradition holds that this lovely panel was rescued from the fire of 1194.22
Standing at the crossing of transept and nave, one may see the major roses of Chartres. In the main façade the central rose spans forty-four feet, almost as wide as the nave that it surveys; some have called it the finest work in glass known to history.23 Flooding the north transept is the “Rose of France,” given by Louis IX and Blanche of Castile, and dedicated to the Virgin; facing it across the church is the “Rose of Dreux,” in the south transept façade, given by Blanche’s enemy, Pierre Mauclerc of Dreux, and opposing Mary’s Son to Blanche’s Mother of God. Thirty-five lesser roses and twelve still smaller roselets complete the roster of Chartres’ circular glass. The modern spirit, too hurried and nervous to achieve patient and placid perfection, stands in wonder before works that must be ascribed not to the genius of singular individuals, but to the spirit and industry of a people, a community, an epoch, and a faith.
We have taken Chartres as typifying mature or rayonnant Gothic, and we must not indulge in similar tarrying over Reims, Amiens, and Beauvais. But who could pa
ss hurriedly by the west front of Reims? If the original spires still rose from the towers, that façade would be the noblest work of man. Astonishing are the unity and harmony of style and parts in a structure raised by six generations. The cathedral finished by Hincmar in 841 was burned down in 1210; on the first anniversary of that fire a new cathedral was begun, designed by Robert de Coucy and Jean d’Orbais to be fit for the crowning of France’s kings. After forty years of labor, funds ran out; the work was stopped (1251), and the great church was not completed till 1427. A fire in 1480 destroyed the spires; the savings of the cathedral were used up in repairing the main structure, and the spires were not rebuilt. In the First World War shells smashed several buttresses, and tore huge gaps in roof and vault; the outer roof was destroyed by fire, and many statues were ruined. Other figures have been mutilated by fanatics, or by the erosion of centuries. History is a duel between art and time.