The greatest and purest of Gothic churches, Notre-Dame
d'Amiens, illustrates, by its fine qualities, a characteristic
secular movement of the beginning of the thirteenth century.
Philosophic writers of French history have explained how, in that and
in the two preceding centuries, a great number of the more important
towns in eastern and northern France rose against the feudal
establishment, and developed severally the local and municipal life
of the commune. To guarantee their independence therein they
obtained charters from their formal superiors. The Charter of Amiens
served as the model for many other communes. Notre-Dame d'Amiens
is the church of a commune. In that century of Saint Francis, of Saint
Louis, they were still religious. But over against monastic
interests, as identified with a central authority--king, emperor, or
pope--they pushed forward the local, and, so to call it, secular
authority of their [110] bishops, the flower of the "secular clergy"
in all its mundane astuteness, ready enough to make their way as the
natural Protectors of such townships. The people of Amiens, for
instance, under a powerful episcopal patron, invested their civic
pride in a vast cathedral, outrivalling neighbours, as being in
effect their parochial church, and promoted there the new,
revolutionary, Gothic manner, at the expense of the derivative and
traditional, Roman or Romanesque, style, the imperial style, of the
great monastic churches. Nay, those grand and beautiful people's
churches of the thirteenth century, churches pre-eminently of "Our
Lady," concurred also with certain novel humanistic movements of
religion itself at that period, above all with the expansion of what
is reassuring and popular in the worship of Mary, as a tender and
accessible, though almost irresistible, intercessor with her severe
and awful Son.
Hence the splendour, the space, the novelty, of the great French
cathedrals in the first Pointed style, monuments for the most part of
the artistic genius of laymen, significant pre-eminently of that
Queen of Gothic churches at Amiens. In most cases those early
Pointed churches are entangled, here or there, by the constructions of the
old round-arched style, the heavy, Norman or other, Romanesque
chapel or aisle, side by side, though in strong contrast with, the
soaring new Gothic of nave or transept. But of that older [111]
manner of the round arch, the plein-cintre, Amiens has nowhere, or
almost nowhere, a trace. The Pointed style, fully pronounced, but in
all the purity of its first period, found here its completest
expression. And while those venerable, Romanesque, profoundly
characteristic, monastic churches, the gregarious product of long
centuries, are for the most part anonymous, as if to illustrate from the
first a certain personal tendency which came in with the Gothic
manner, we know the name of the architect under whom, in the year
A.D. 1220, the building of the church of Amiens began--a layman,
Robert de Luzarches.
Light and space--floods of light, space for a vast congregation, for
all the people of Amiens, for their movements, with something like the
height and width of heaven itself enclosed above them to breathe in;--you
see at a glance that this is what the ingenuity of the Pointed method of
building has here secured. For breadth, for the easy flow of a processional
torrent, there is nothing like the "ambulatory," the aisle of the choir and transepts.
And the entire area is on one level. There are here no flights of steps upward, as
at Canterbury, no descending to dark crypts, as in so many Italian
churches--a few low, broad steps to gain the choir, two or three to the high
altar. To a large extent the old pavement remains, though almost worn-out by the footsteps of
centuries. Priceless, though not composed of precious material, it gains its effect [112]
by ingenuity and variety in the patterning, zig-zags, chequers, mazes, prevailing
respectively, in white and grey, in great square, alternate spaces--the original floor of a
medieval church for once untouched. The massive square bases of the pillars of a Romanesque church, harshly
angular, obstruct, sometimes cruelly, the standing, the movements, of a multitude of persons.
To carry such a multitude conveniently round them is the matter-of-fact motive of the gradual chiselling away, the softening of the angles, the graceful compassing, of the Gothic base, till in our own Perpendicular period it all but disappears.
You may study that tendency appropriately in the one church of Amiens; for such in effect Notre-Dame has always been. That circumstance is illustrated by the great font, the oldest thing here, an oblong trough, perhaps an ancient saintly coffin, with four quaint prophetic figures at the angles, carved from a single block of stone.
To it, as to the baptistery of an Italian town, not so long since all the babes of Amiens used to come for christening.
Strange as it may seem, in this "queen" of Gothic churches, l'église ogivale par excellence, there is nothing of mystery in the vision, which yet surprises, over and over again, the eye of the visitor who enters at the western doorway. From the flagstone at one's foot to the distant keystone of the chevet, noblest of its species-- [113] reminding you of how many largely graceful things, sails of a ship in the wind, and the like!--at one view the whole is visible, intelligible;--the integrity of the first design; how later additions affixed themselves thereto; how the rich ornament gathered upon it; the increasing richness of the choir; its glazed triforium; the realms of light which expand in the chapels beyond; the astonishing boldness of the vault, the astonishing lightness of what keeps it above one; the unity, yet the variety of perspective.
There is no mystery here, and indeed no repose. Like the age which projected it, like the impulsive communal movement which was here its motive, the Pointed style at Amiens is full of excitement. Go, for repose, to classic work, with the simple vertical law of pressure downwards, or to its Lombard, Rhenish, or Norman derivatives.
Here, rather, you are conscious restlessly of that sustained equilibrium of oblique pressure on all sides, which is the essence of the hazardous Gothic construction, a construction of which the "flying buttress" is the most significant feature. Across the clear glass of the great windows of the triforium you see it, feel it, at its Atlas-work audaciously. "A pleasant thing it is to behold the sun" those first Gothic builders would seem to have said to themselves; and at Amiens, for instance, the walls have disappeared; the entire building is composed of its windows. Those who built it [114] might have had for their one and only purpose to enclose as large a space as possible with the given material.
No; the peculiar Gothic buttress, with its double, triple, fourfold flights, while it makes such marvels possible, securing light and space and graceful effect, relieving the pillars within of their massiveness, is not a restful architectural feature. Consolidation of matter naturally on the move, security for settlement in a very complex system of construction--that is avowedly a part of the Gothic situation, the Gothic problem.
With the genius which contended, though not always quite successfully, with this difficult problem, came also novel aesthetic effect, a whole volume of delightful aesthetic effects. For the mere melody of Greek architecture, for the sense as it were of music in the opposition of successive sounds, you got harmony, the richer music generated by opposition of sounds in one and the same moment; and were gainers.
And then, in contrast with the classic manner, and the Romanesque survivals from it, the vast complexity of the Gothic style seemed, as if consciously, to correspond to the richness, the expressiveness, the thousandfold influence of the Catholic religion, in the thirteenth century still in natural movement in every direction. The later Gothic of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries tended to conceal, as it now took for granted, the structural use of the buttress, for [115] example; seemed to turn it into a mere occasion for ornament, not always pleasantly:--while the ornament was out of place, the structure failed.
Such falsity is far enough away from what at Amiens is really of the thirteenth century. In this pre-eminently "secular" church, the execution, in all the defiance of its method, is direct, frank, clearly apparent, with the result not only of reassuring the intelligence, but of keeping one's curiosity also continually on the alert, as we linger in these restless aisles.
The integrity of the edifice, together with its volume of light, has indeed been diminished by the addition of a range of chapels, beyond the proper limits of the aisles, north and south. Not a part of the original design, these chapels were formed for private uses in the fourteenth century, by the device of walling in and vaulting the open spaces between the great buttresses of the nave.
Under the broad but subdued sunshine which falls through range upon range of windows, reflected from white wall and roof and gallery, soothing to the eye, while it allows you to see the delicate carved work in all its refinement of touch, it is only as an after-thought, an artificial after-thoug
d'Amiens, illustrates, by its fine qualities, a characteristic
secular movement of the beginning of the thirteenth century.
Philosophic writers of French history have explained how, in that and
in the two preceding centuries, a great number of the more important
towns in eastern and northern France rose against the feudal
establishment, and developed severally the local and municipal life
of the commune. To guarantee their independence therein they
obtained charters from their formal superiors. The Charter of Amiens
served as the model for many other communes. Notre-Dame d'Amiens
is the church of a commune. In that century of Saint Francis, of Saint
Louis, they were still religious. But over against monastic
interests, as identified with a central authority--king, emperor, or
pope--they pushed forward the local, and, so to call it, secular
authority of their [110] bishops, the flower of the "secular clergy"
in all its mundane astuteness, ready enough to make their way as the
natural Protectors of such townships. The people of Amiens, for
instance, under a powerful episcopal patron, invested their civic
pride in a vast cathedral, outrivalling neighbours, as being in
effect their parochial church, and promoted there the new,
revolutionary, Gothic manner, at the expense of the derivative and
traditional, Roman or Romanesque, style, the imperial style, of the
great monastic churches. Nay, those grand and beautiful people's
churches of the thirteenth century, churches pre-eminently of "Our
Lady," concurred also with certain novel humanistic movements of
religion itself at that period, above all with the expansion of what
is reassuring and popular in the worship of Mary, as a tender and
accessible, though almost irresistible, intercessor with her severe
and awful Son.
Hence the splendour, the space, the novelty, of the great French
cathedrals in the first Pointed style, monuments for the most part of
the artistic genius of laymen, significant pre-eminently of that
Queen of Gothic churches at Amiens. In most cases those early
Pointed churches are entangled, here or there, by the constructions of the
old round-arched style, the heavy, Norman or other, Romanesque
chapel or aisle, side by side, though in strong contrast with, the
soaring new Gothic of nave or transept. But of that older [111]
manner of the round arch, the plein-cintre, Amiens has nowhere, or
almost nowhere, a trace. The Pointed style, fully pronounced, but in
all the purity of its first period, found here its completest
expression. And while those venerable, Romanesque, profoundly
characteristic, monastic churches, the gregarious product of long
centuries, are for the most part anonymous, as if to illustrate from the
first a certain personal tendency which came in with the Gothic
manner, we know the name of the architect under whom, in the year
A.D. 1220, the building of the church of Amiens began--a layman,
Robert de Luzarches.
Light and space--floods of light, space for a vast congregation, for
all the people of Amiens, for their movements, with something like the
height and width of heaven itself enclosed above them to breathe in;--you
see at a glance that this is what the ingenuity of the Pointed method of
building has here secured. For breadth, for the easy flow of a processional
torrent, there is nothing like the "ambulatory," the aisle of the choir and transepts.
And the entire area is on one level. There are here no flights of steps upward, as
at Canterbury, no descending to dark crypts, as in so many Italian
churches--a few low, broad steps to gain the choir, two or three to the high
altar. To a large extent the old pavement remains, though almost worn-out by the footsteps of
centuries. Priceless, though not composed of precious material, it gains its effect [112]
by ingenuity and variety in the patterning, zig-zags, chequers, mazes, prevailing
respectively, in white and grey, in great square, alternate spaces--the original floor of a
medieval church for once untouched. The massive square bases of the pillars of a Romanesque church, harshly
angular, obstruct, sometimes cruelly, the standing, the movements, of a multitude of persons.
To carry such a multitude conveniently round them is the matter-of-fact motive of the gradual chiselling away, the softening of the angles, the graceful compassing, of the Gothic base, till in our own Perpendicular period it all but disappears.
You may study that tendency appropriately in the one church of Amiens; for such in effect Notre-Dame has always been. That circumstance is illustrated by the great font, the oldest thing here, an oblong trough, perhaps an ancient saintly coffin, with four quaint prophetic figures at the angles, carved from a single block of stone.
To it, as to the baptistery of an Italian town, not so long since all the babes of Amiens used to come for christening.
Strange as it may seem, in this "queen" of Gothic churches, l'église ogivale par excellence, there is nothing of mystery in the vision, which yet surprises, over and over again, the eye of the visitor who enters at the western doorway. From the flagstone at one's foot to the distant keystone of the chevet, noblest of its species-- [113] reminding you of how many largely graceful things, sails of a ship in the wind, and the like!--at one view the whole is visible, intelligible;--the integrity of the first design; how later additions affixed themselves thereto; how the rich ornament gathered upon it; the increasing richness of the choir; its glazed triforium; the realms of light which expand in the chapels beyond; the astonishing boldness of the vault, the astonishing lightness of what keeps it above one; the unity, yet the variety of perspective.
There is no mystery here, and indeed no repose. Like the age which projected it, like the impulsive communal movement which was here its motive, the Pointed style at Amiens is full of excitement. Go, for repose, to classic work, with the simple vertical law of pressure downwards, or to its Lombard, Rhenish, or Norman derivatives.
Here, rather, you are conscious restlessly of that sustained equilibrium of oblique pressure on all sides, which is the essence of the hazardous Gothic construction, a construction of which the "flying buttress" is the most significant feature. Across the clear glass of the great windows of the triforium you see it, feel it, at its Atlas-work audaciously. "A pleasant thing it is to behold the sun" those first Gothic builders would seem to have said to themselves; and at Amiens, for instance, the walls have disappeared; the entire building is composed of its windows. Those who built it [114] might have had for their one and only purpose to enclose as large a space as possible with the given material.
No; the peculiar Gothic buttress, with its double, triple, fourfold flights, while it makes such marvels possible, securing light and space and graceful effect, relieving the pillars within of their massiveness, is not a restful architectural feature. Consolidation of matter naturally on the move, security for settlement in a very complex system of construction--that is avowedly a part of the Gothic situation, the Gothic problem.
With the genius which contended, though not always quite successfully, with this difficult problem, came also novel aesthetic effect, a whole volume of delightful aesthetic effects. For the mere melody of Greek architecture, for the sense as it were of music in the opposition of successive sounds, you got harmony, the richer music generated by opposition of sounds in one and the same moment; and were gainers.
And then, in contrast with the classic manner, and the Romanesque survivals from it, the vast complexity of the Gothic style seemed, as if consciously, to correspond to the richness, the expressiveness, the thousandfold influence of the Catholic religion, in the thirteenth century still in natural movement in every direction. The later Gothic of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries tended to conceal, as it now took for granted, the structural use of the buttress, for [115] example; seemed to turn it into a mere occasion for ornament, not always pleasantly:--while the ornament was out of place, the structure failed.
Such falsity is far enough away from what at Amiens is really of the thirteenth century. In this pre-eminently "secular" church, the execution, in all the defiance of its method, is direct, frank, clearly apparent, with the result not only of reassuring the intelligence, but of keeping one's curiosity also continually on the alert, as we linger in these restless aisles.
The integrity of the edifice, together with its volume of light, has indeed been diminished by the addition of a range of chapels, beyond the proper limits of the aisles, north and south. Not a part of the original design, these chapels were formed for private uses in the fourteenth century, by the device of walling in and vaulting the open spaces between the great buttresses of the nave.
Under the broad but subdued sunshine which falls through range upon range of windows, reflected from white wall and roof and gallery, soothing to the eye, while it allows you to see the delicate carved work in all its refinement of touch, it is only as an after-thought, an artificial after-thoug