After the decorative splendour of the Byzantine architecture, the Norman work left in our own land seems comparatively simple and plain as time has left it, but its remains show its Roman descent in the doorway and porch of many a quiet village church, as well as on a greater scale in so many of our cathedrals, which often illustrate, in a remarkable way, the transition or growth of one style out of another, the new evolved from the old.
At Canterbury, for instance, one reads the signs which mark the transformation of the Norman building into the Gothic. The first church founded by St. Augustine was Saxon. This was enlarged by Otho (938) as a basilica. This again was ruined by the Danes (1013). The Norman part of the present building was constructed by Bishop Lanfranc (1070), on to which was grafted, as it were, the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth century Gothic which distinguish it.
There is a tower on the south side of the transept known as Anselm's Tower (from Bishop Anselm, one of the Norman builders), and on the lower part runs an arcading of interlacing round arches, the tower itself being richly arcaded in several stories in round arches. But this lower band shows the period of transition, from the use of the round arch, to the pointed—the pointed lancet arches being formed by the interlacing of the round, so that we have here the actual birth of the pointed arch (at least, as a decorative feature), which leads us to our next typical division and characteristic epoch of architectural style.
ANSELM'S TOWER, CANTERBURY.
We need not go out of our own country to find abundant illustrations of typical forms of pointed architecture. Almost any village church will give us the main features—the characteristic plan of nave and chancel, curiously following the plan of the ancient Roman basilica—the public hall and law court in one, and perpetuating for us the type of ancient dwelling or hall which may be said to have prevailed from the time of Homer to the end of the Middle Ages, varying chiefly in external features and architectural detail.
The severe lancet arch is characteristic of the first phase of the Gothic, which gradually grew out of the severer Norman. The gable took a higher pitch, and to support the weight and thrust of towers and spires, buttresses were used, and these became, also, a striking and characteristic feature of the pointed arch, which completed in the thirteenth century the period of its first development.
Lancet arch, high-pitched gable, buttress (plain and pinnacled), spired and pinnacled tower—these are the leading constructive exterior characteristics, the carved work, somewhat restrained, and chiefly manifested in peculiar foliation of the capitals and corbels, and in the hollows of arch mouldings in rows of sharp cut dog teeth.
In the interior clustered shafts took the place of the solid round Norman piers, rising, as we see in our cathedral naves, to support lofty vaulted roofs, the ribs moulded and covered at their intersections by carved bosses.
Again we may note the principle of recurring lines which repeat and emphasize the form of the arched openings and the structural lines of the vaulting in the mouldings. This recurrence gives that effect of extraordinary grace and lightness combined with structural strength which is so striking a characteristic of thirteenth century Gothic work, and of which there is no finer example than the nave of Westminster Abbey.
TRANSITIONAL ARCADE, SOUTH TRANSEPT, CANTERBURY.
TYPICAL FORMS OF ARCHES:
TYPICAL FORMS OF GOTHIC GEOMETRIC FOLIATION.
[Ruskin].
WESTMINSTER ABBEY: THE NAVE, LOOKING EAST.
We noted that the Greeks used the interstices of their construction for their chief decoration, their figure sculpture, and to some extent the same plan is followed in Gothic architecture, where we find the tympanums of doors, the spandrels of arcades (as in the Chapter House at Salisbury or the angel choir at Lincoln), and canopied niches (as at Wells), used for figure sculpture; but, at the same time, the structural features themselves are emphasized by ornament to a far greater extent, as in caps, arch mouldings, the junctions of the vaulting, and the like; and increasingly so in the succeeding Decorated and Perpendicular periods, until we get vaulted roofs of fan tracery like those of King's College Chapel at Cambridge, or Henry VII.'s Chapel at Westminster.
But if we may say that the chief decorative glory of Greek architecture was its figure sculpture, as mosaic was of the Byzantine churches, so we may say that the traceried window, filled with stained and leaded glass, became the chief decorative glory of Gothic architecture.
Unhappily great quantities of glass have disappeared from our cathedrals and churches, from one cause or another, but from the relics that remain we may form some idea of the splendour and quality of the old glass.
The famous windows of the south transept at York Minster, called "The Five Sisters," are good examples of the severer earlier style of pattern and colour, consisting of fine scroll-work and geometric forms, in which hatched grisaille patterns are heightened by bright points and lines of colour.
WEST FRONT OF WELLS CATHEDRAL.
Thirteenth century glass, where figures are used, is characterized by the smallness of their scale in proportion to the window, and traces of Byzantine tradition in their drawing, intricate design, and deep and vivid colouring, the work being composed of small pieces of glass leaded together; the effect of the jewel-like depth and quality of the colour—deep crimsons, blues, and greens being much used—being increased by the close network of leading.
As windows, in the course of the evolution of the Gothic style, were made broader, or rather, the window opening proper from wall to wall being greatly increased in width and height, they were supported and divided into panels or lights by elaborate stone tracery, a tracery which becomes almost as distinct a province of design as the design of the glass itself—distinct from, yet in close relationship to the architecture of the building. The comparative slight divisions of the tracery, however, gave more scope to the stained glass designer, who shows very emphatic architectural influence in the elaborate canopies which surmount the figures occupying the separate lights of the windows from the thirteenth to the end of the fifteenth centuries, as well as in the general vertical arrangement of the lines of their composition. He gradually increased the scale of his figures and gave more breadth to his design, and brought it more into relation with the art of the painter and the sculptor, at the same time acknowledging with them, in the disposition of his figures in the space, and the disposition of the draperies and accessories, that architectural influence under which the artist and craftsman of the Middle Ages worked with extraordinary freedom and fertility of invention, and yet in perfect harmony2—a sign of that fraternal co-operation and the effect of the formation of men into brotherhoods and guilds, which, coming in with the adoption of Christianity and the organization of the Church, remained through all the turbulence and strife of the time the great social force of the Middle Ages.
WESTMINSTER ABBEY, FAN TRACERY IN HENRY VII.'S CHAPEL, FIFTEENTH CENTURY.
It seems to me if we wish to realize the ideal of a great and harmonious art, which shall be capable of expressing the best that is in us: if we desire again to raise great architectural monuments, religious, municipal, or commemorative, we shall have to learn the great lesson of unity through fraternal co-operation and sympathy, the