by Will Durant
The sculptures of Reims, like its façade, mark the acme of Gothic art. Some are archaically crude; those in the central doorway are unsurpassed; and at various points on the portals, the pinnacles, the interior, we come upon figures that have almost the finish of Periclean statuary. Some, like the Virgin in the pillar of the central portal, are perhaps too graceful, and suggest a weakening of Gothic force; but the Virgin of the Purification at the left of the same portal, and the Virigin of the Visitation at the right, are among those achievements, of conception and execution, before which tongue and pen are stilled. More renowned, but not so near perfection, are the smiling angels in the Annunciation group of this façade. How different those joyous faces are from the St. Paul of the north portal!—itself one of the most powerful portraits ever carved in stone.
The sculptures of Amiens Cathedral excel those of Reims in elegance and finish, but fall short of them in dignity of conception and depth of revelation. Here on the western porch is the famous Beau Dieu, a little formal and lifeless after the living figures of Reims; here also is St. Firmin, no frightened ascetic but a firm, calm man, who never doubted right would triumph; and ‘here is a Virgin holding her child in her arms with all the absorbed tenderness of young motherhood. On the south portal the Vierge dorée, the Golden Virgin, smiles as she watches her child playing with a ball; she is a bit prettified, but too gracious to deserve Ruskin’s ungallant epithet, the “soubrette of Picardy.” Pleasant it is to see how the Gothic sculptors, after a century of serving theology, discovered men and women, and carved the joy of life on church façades. The Church, which also had learned to enjoy the earth, winked at the discovery, but thought it wise to have a Last Judgment on the main façade.
Amiens Cathedral was built in 1220–88 by a succession of architects-Robert de Luzarches, Thomas de Cormont, and his son Regnault. The towers were not completed till 1402. The interior is the most successful of Gothic naves; it rises to a vault 140 feet high, and seems rather to be drawing the church upward than to be bearing a weight. Continuous shafts from ground to vault bind the three-storied arcades of the nave into a majestic unity; the vaulting of the apse is a triumph of harmonious design over baffling irregularities; and the heart stands still at first sight of the clerestory windows and the roses of transepts and façade. But the nave seems too narrow for its height, the walls too frail for the roof; an element of insecurity enters into the awe aroused by this buoyant stone.
In Beauvais Cathedral this vaulting ambition of Gothic overleaped itself and reached its fated fall. The magnificence of Amiens stirred the citizens of Beauvais to jealousy. In 1227 they began to build, and vowed to raise the vault of their shrine thirteen feet higher than Amiens’. They brought the choir to the promised height; but hardly had they roofed it when it fell. In 1272a recuperating generation built the choir again as high as before, and in 1284 it fell again. Once more they built the choir, this time to 157 feet from the ground; then their funds ran out, and they left the church for two centuries without transepts or nave. In 1500, when France had at last recovered from the Hundred Years’ War, the gigantic transepts were begun; and in 1552—to top the spire of St. Peter’s in Rome—a lantern tower was raised over the transept cross to a height of 500 feet. In 1573 this tower collapsed, and brought down with it large sections of the transepts and the choir. The brave Beauvaisois at last compromised: they repaired the choir to its precarious pitch, but never added a nave. Beauvais Cathedral is therefore all head and no body; externally two rich transept façades and an apse engulfed in buttresses; internally a cavernous choir aglow with magnificent stained glass. If, ran an old French saying, one could combine the choir of Beauvais with the nave of Amiens, the façade of Reims, and the spires of Chartres, one would have a perfect Gothic cathedral.
In later ages men would look back to that thirteenth century and wonder what fountain of wealth and faith had poured out such glory upon the earth. For no man can know what France accomplished in that century—besides her universities, her poets, her philosophers, and her Crusades—unless he stands in person before one after another of the Gothic audacities that can here be only names: Notre Dame and Chartres and Reims and Amiens and Beauvais; Bourges (1195–1390) with its vast nave and four aisles and famed glass and lovely sculptured Angel with the Scales; Mont St. Michel with its marvel of a monastery (La Merveille, 1204–50) set in a fortress towering on an island rock off the coast of Normandy; Coutances (1208–1386) with its noble spires; Rouen (1201–1500) with its ornate Portail des libraires; and Sainte Chapelle in Paris—a “jewel box” of Gothic glass built (1245–8) by Pierre de Montereau as a chapel adjunct to the palace of St. Louis, to house the relics that the King had purchased from the East. It is good to remember, in ages of destruction, that men, when they will, can build as once they built in France.
VI. ENGLISH GOTHIC: 1175–1280
From Chartres and the Île de France the Gothic style swept into the French provinces, and crossed frontiers into England, Sweden, Germany, Spain, at last into Italy. French architects and craftsmen accepted foreign commissions, and everywhere the new art was called opus Francigenum—work born in France. England welcomed it because she was in the twelfth century half French; the Channel was but a river between two sides of a British realm that included half of France; and of that realm Rouen was the cultural capital. English Gothic derived from Normandy rather than from the Île de France, and kept in a Gothic frame the Norman massiveness. The transition from Romanesque to Gothic was almost simultaneous in England and France; about the same time that the pointed arch was being used at St. Denis (1140) it was appearing in Durham and Gloucester cathedrals, at Fountains Abbey and Malmesbury.24 Henry III (1216–72) admired everything French, envied the architectural glory of St. Louis’ reign, and taxed his people into poverty to rebuild Westminster Abbey, and to pay the school of artists—builders, sculptors, painters, illuminators, goldsmiths—whom he gathered near his court to execute his plans.
Of the three periods into which English Gothic falls—Early English (1175–1280), Decorated (1280–1380), and Perpendicular (1380–1450) —we confine ourselves here to the first. The long and pointed form of Early English windows and arches gave the style another name—Lancet. Façades and portals were simpler than in France; Lincoln and Rochester had some sculptures, Wells many more; but these were exceptional, and could not be compared, in quality or quantity, with the portal statuary of Chartres, Amiens, or Reims. Towers were massive rather than tall; but the steeples of Salisbury, Norwich, and Lichfield show what the English builder could do when he preferred elegance and height to dignity and mass. Interior elevation likewise failed to lure the architects of England; sometimes they tried it, as at Westminster and Salisbury; but more often they allowed the vault to lie oppressively low, as at Gloucester and Exeter. The great length of English cathedrals discouraged the effort to attain proportionate height; Winchester is 556 feet long, Ely 517, Canterbury 514, Westminster Abbey 511; Amiens is 435, Reims 430, even Milan only 475. But Winchester’s internal height was but 78 feet, Canterbury’s 80, Lincoln’s 82, Westminster’s 103, while Amiens rose to 140 feet.
The east end of the English Gothic church retained the square apse of the Anglo-Saxon style, ignoring the convenient French development of the polygonal or semicircular apse. In many cases the east end was expanded into a Lady Chapel for the special worship of the Virgin; but the adoration of Mary never reached in England the enthusiasm that marked it in France. Often in England the chapter house of the cathedral canons, and the palace of the bishop, were attached to the church and constituted with it the “cathedral close,” usually surrounded by a wall. In the Gothic monasteries of England and Scotland—as at Fountains, Dryburgh, Melrose, Tintern—the spread of dormitories, refectories, abbey, and cloistered walks formed in one enclosure an impressive artistic whole.
The essential principle of Gothic architecture—the balancing and channeling of pressures to reduce ungainly massiveness of support—seems never to have
won full acceptance in England. The old Romanesque thickness of wall was only slightly moderated in English Gothic, even when, as at Salisbury, the design did not have to adapt itself to a Romanesque base. English architects, like the Italian, were repelled by the flying buttress; they adopted it here and there, but halfheartedly; they felt that the supports of a building should be contained in the structure itself, and not in excrescences. Perhaps they were right; and though their cathedrals lack the feminine grace of the French chef-d’oeuvres, they have a firm and masculine power that reaches beyond the beautiful to the sublime.
Four years after the murder of Becket at Canterbury, the choir of the cathedral burned down (1174). The people of the town beat their heads against the walls in anger and bewilderment that the Almighty had permitted such disaster to a shrine that had already become a goal of religious pilgrimage.25 The monks entrusted the work of rebuilding the choir to William of Sens, a French architect who had made a name for himself with the cathedral that he had built for his city. William worked at Canterbury from 1175 to 1178; a fall from a scaffolding disabled him, and the undertaking was carried on by William the Englishman, a man “small in body,” says the monk Ger-vase, “but in workmanship of many kinds acute and honest.”26 Much of the Romanesque cathedral of 1096 remained; round arches survived amid the generally Gothic renovation; but the old wooden ceiling of the choir was replaced by a ribbed vault of stone, the columns were lengthened to a graceful height, the capitals were exquisitely carved, and the windows were filled with brilliant stained glass. Gathered in its cathedral close, and yet towering over its quaint and lovely town, Canterbury Cathedral is today one of the most inspiring sights of the earth.
Its example, seen by countless prelates and pilgrims, spread the Gothic style through Britain. In 1177 Peterborough fronted the west transept of its cathedral with a splendid Gothic portico. In 1189 Bishop Hugh de Lacy built the handsome retrochoir of Winchester Cathedral. In 1186 an earthquake rent Lincoln Cathedral from top to base; six years later Bishop Hugh began its reconstruction on a Gothic design by Geoffrey de Noyers; the noble Grosseteste finished it about 1240. It stands on a hill overlooking a typically beautiful English countryside. Seldom has sublimity of mass been so well reconciled with delicacy of detail. The three great towers, the broad façade with its sculptured portal and complex arcades, the lordly nave, seemingly light despite its mass and span, the graceful shafts and carving of the piers, the rose windows, the palmlike vaulting of the chapter house, the magnificent arches of the cloisters—these would have made Lincoln Cathedral a credit to mankind even had there been no “Angel Choir.” In 1239 an old Norman tower fell and crushed Bishop Hugh’s choir; a new choir rose in 1256–80 in the nascent Decorated style, ornate but exquisite; legend ascribed its name to the angels who were said to have built it, since no human hands could have compassed such perfection; but probably the name came from the smiling angel musicians sculptured on the spandrels of the triforium. On the south portal of this choir English sculptors almost rivaled the carvings of Reims and Amiens. Four statues there, beheaded and otherwise mutilated by the Puritans, can bear such comparison; one representing the Synagogue and another representing the Church are the finest English statuary of the thirteenth century. A great scientist, Sir William Osier, thought this Angel Choir the fairest of all products of human art.27
In 1220 Bishop Poore engaged Elias de Derham to design and build Salisbury Cathedral. It rose to completion in the unusually short space of twenty-five years; it is Early English throughout, and breaks the rule that English cathedrals mingle several styles. The unity of design, the harmony of mass and line, the simple majesty of the transept tower and spire, the grace of the vault in the Lady Chapel, and the lovely windows of the chapter house redeem the squat heaviness of the nave piers and the oppressive shallowness of the vault. Ely Cathedral still has a wooden ceiling, but not unpleasing; there is a warm and living quality in wood that never comes to architecture in stone. To Ely’s fine Norman nave the Gothic architects added a pretty west porch, or galilee (c. 1205); a presbytery with handsome column clusters of Purbeck marble; and, in fourteenth-century Decorated Gothic, a Lady Chapel, a choir, and, over the transept crossing, a gorgeous lantern tower—the “Ely Octagon.” Wells Cathedral (1174–91) was one of the earliest examples of English Gothic; its nave was not too well designed; but the west front added (1220–42) by Bishop Jocelyn “narrowly escaped being the most beautiful in England.”28 In the niches of this façade were 340 statues; 106 are missing, victims of Puritanism, vandalism, and time; those that remain constitute the largest collection of figure sculpture in Britain. We cannot say as much for their quality.
The culminating achievement of Early English Gothic was Westminster Abbey. Henry III, who had made Edward the Confessor his patron saint, felt that the Norman church built by Edward (1050) was unworthy to house Edward’s bones; he ordered his artists to replace it with a Gothic edifice in the French style; and for this purpose he raised by taxation £750,-000, which we may diffidently equate at $90,000,000 today. The work began in 1245, and continued till Henry’s death in 1272. The design followed Reims and Amiens, even to admitting the Continental polygonal apse. The sculptures of the north porch, portraying the Last Judgment, were influenced by those of Amiens’ west front. In the spandrels of the transept triforium are remarkable reliefs of angels; one angel in the south transept offers to the centuries a tender, gracious face rivaling the cherubim of Reims. Over the doorway of the chapter house are two figures representing the Annunciation, and showing the Virgin in a charming gesture of modest deprecation. Even finer are the early royal tombs in the Abbey, and, best of all, that of Henry III himself—an ideally handsome and well-proportioned improvement upon the stout and stunted King. The crimes of a score of rulers are in those splendid tombs forgotten, and half redeemed by the English genius that lies buried under the stones of this sovereign sepulcher.
VII. GERMAN GOTHIC: 1200–1300
Flanders imported Gothic from France at an early date. St. Gudule’s, proud on its hill in Brussels, was begun in 1220; its chief glory is its stained glass. St. Bavon’s, at Ghent, built a Gothic choir in 1274; and St. Rombaut’s, at Mechlin, surveyed the countryside from huge towers never finished but still too ornate. Flanders was more interested in textiles than in theology; its characteristic architecture was civic; and its earliest Gothic triumphs were the cloth halls at Ypres, Bruges, and Ghent. That of Ypres (1200–1304) was the most majestic: a 450-feet-long façade of three-storied arcades, with colonnaded corner pinnacles and stately central tower; it was reduced to ruins in the First World War. The Cloth Hall of Bruges (1284f) still dominates its square with a superb and world-famous belfry. These fine buildings, and those of Ghent (1325f), suggest the prosperity and just pride of the Flemish guilds, and constitute some part of the charm of these now quiet and pleasant towns.
As Gothic spread eastward into Holland and Germany it encountered increasing resistance. In general the grace of the Gothic style did not accord with the sturdy force of the Teutonic frame and mind; Romanesque was more congenial, and Germany clung to it till the thirteenth century. The great cathedral of Bamberg (1185–1237) is transitional: the windows are small and round-arched, and there are no flying buttresses; but the vault is in ribbed and pointed form. Here at the outset of German Gothic we find a remarkable development of sculpture: at first imitating the French, but soon advancing to a style of splendid naturalism and power; indeed, the figure of the Synagogue on the Bamberg church is more satisfying than the similar figure at Reims.29 The Elizabeth and Mary in the choir are far from replicas of like subjects in France; Elizabeth has the face and form of a togaed Roman senator, and Mary is a woman of physical substance and vigor, such as Germany has always loved.
Almost every German cathedral surviving from this period contains outstanding statuary. The best is in the cathedral of Naumburg (c. 1250). In the west choir is a series of twelve statues portraying local dignitaries with a ruthless realis
m that suggests that the artists were underpaid; as if in atonement, the portrait of Uta, the margrave’s wife, is a wistful German’s conception of an ideal woman. A frieze on the screen of the choir shows Judas taking money to betray Christ; the figures are crowded together in bold composition, but without damage to their individuality; Judas is represented with some sympathy, and the Pharisees are powerful personalities. This is the masterpiece of German sculpture in the thirteenth century.
In 1248 Conrad of Hochstaden, Archbishop of Cologne, laid the foundation stone of the most famous and least German of German cathedrals. The work progressed slowly in the chaos that followed the death of Frederick II; the cathedral was not consecrated till 1322; much of it dates from the fourteenth century; the elegant spires, complex with crockets and open-work tracery, were built in 1880 from fifteenth-century designs. Modeled on Amiens, Cologne followed French style and methods closely. The lines of the façade are too straight and hard, but the tall, slender pillars of the nave, the brilliant windows, and the fourteen statues on the piers of the choir make an attractive interior, almost miraculously spared by the Second World War.
The cathedral of Strasbourg is more satisfying. There, as at Cologne, proximity to France made a French style seem no more foreign than it would seem in Strasbourg today (1949). The exterior is French grace, the interior is German force. The cathedral is approached through a picturesque congestion of gabled houses. Statues adorn the façade, but are outshone by a rose window of great compass and splendor. The single tower at one corner of the front gives the structure a crippled look. But the combination of dignity and decoration is here perfectly successful; we come to understand Goethe’s description of this façade as “frozen music,” though we should use a warmer phrase. “Brought up as I was,” Goethe wrote, “to looking upon Gothic architecture with contempt, I despised it; but when I went inside I was struck with wonder, and I felt the attraction of its beauty.”30 The stained glass here is very old, perhaps older than any in France. The sculptures of the south transept portal (1230–40) are of rare excellence. The tympanum over the door is a deep relief of the Virgin’s death; the apostles gathered at her bedside are inadequately individualized; but the figure of Christ is well conceived and skillfully carved. Rising alongside this portal are two pre-eminent statues: one representing the Church—a buxom German queen; the other a slim and graceful figure, blindfold but beautiful, symbolizing the Synagogue; remove the bandage, and the Synagogue would win the argument. The French Revolutionary Convention, in 1793, ordered the destruction of the cathedral’s statues to transform it into a “Temple of Reason”; a naturalist known to us merely as Hermann rescued the figures of Church and Synagogue by concealing them in his botanical garden, and saved the tympanum reliefs by covering them with a board bearing a French inscription: Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité.31