Gothic Architecture

In the Middle Ages all the arts were auxiliary to architecture. The architect traced the details of his conception in the workshop, and superintended the construction; he directed stone-carvers, masons, sculptors, illuminators, painters, and glass-stainers, and laid his imprimatur on every branch of the work of which he was the creator.

Thus the connection between the allied arts was very close. The history of sculpture is that of architecture, for the diverse influences which marked their origin and modifications were common to both. Each reached its apogee in the brilliant manifestations of the thirteenth century, and each followed the same path to decadence less than two centuries later.

Statuary and ornamental sculpture were inseparable, being executed by the same artists in pursuance of the same idea: the study of nature.

In obedience to the law of increasing development they abandoned the hieratic forms imposed by religious tradition, but only to give a new expression to these very traditions, which were still preserved and venerated.

Roman inspiration, and even direct imitation of Roman sculpture, is clearly traceable in the first half of the thirteenth century. Rheims, which may be accepted as the masterpiece, the last word, so to speak, of Gothic architecture, illustrates this influence in certain magnificent examples of the western porch.

The architects of the thirteenth century were pre-eminently the children of their generation. Ignoring their Latin descent they followed in the paths of the innovators so far as monumental structure was concerned; but they in their turn inaugurated a new departure by abandoning the Byzantine convention in statuary and sculptured ornament which

had prevailed throughout the preceding century, in favour of the more ancient Roman tradition. In this one respect they made a salutary return upon those antique principles which they afterwards definitively abandoned.

The influence of Roman art upon French mediæval sculpture is unquestionable. Its course may be traced through the relations existing between North and South long before the Crusades, principally by means of the great religious communities, and even more manifestly in the countless monuments raised in Gaul on Roman models, or in those constructed by Gallo-Romans for several centuries. Many of these survived the incursions of the barbarians.

The origin of ornamental sculpture is no less venerable. Superficially, it would seem to have drawn its inspiration mainly from the Romanesque epoch; but according to modern savants[35] its source must be looked for in much remoter periods. Oriental art, imported into Scandinavia, and there barbarised, was introduced into Ireland in the early centuries of our era. The Irish monks, whose power was very great, and who seem to have been the principal agents in the Renascence of the days of Charlemagne, created, or at any rate greatly influenced Carlovingian art by their manuscripts and miniatures. From Carlovingian art that of the so-called Romanesque period was born, and this was in its turn the parent of the ornamental sculpture of the thirteenth century. In the admirably decorative character of this art we recognise the influence of an ancient tradition handed on from generation to generation, to be finally rejuvenated, invigorated, and transformed as to detail by a close study of nature, precisely as had happened in the allied development of statuary.

The architects of the Ile-de-France, like those of Rheims, assimilated the principles of the new art with the supple skill which characterised them, such assimilation bearing rich fruit at Notre Dame de Paris in the sculptured figures of the west porch, and no less in their accessory ornaments.

A most instructive comparative study is furnished by the north and south porches of Chartres Cathedral. Here we find, in one building, examples of sculptures inspired by the hieratic tradition of Byzantium, and of those which had been transformed and naturalised by a return to antique ideals.

At Amiens again certain of the sculptures were influenced by the new principles. But in the greater part there is a prodigality of motive and looseness of execution which indicate decline no less surely than the mistaken ingenuity of the structural details.

Mediæval sculpture followed the fortunes of architecture, both in its rise and fall. In its first beginnings it was characterised by a purity of style not unworthy of Rome in her most glorious days, but rapidly losing touch with the antique ideal, it lost measure and proportion in its development. The wise laws of simplicity, essential to
all greatness in art, were set aside in favour of an unruly exuberance which ran riot in details, and was the immediate cause of a decline perceptible even in the fourteenth century, and absolute in the fifteenth. "Sculpture was at its zenith. We are astounded by the activity and fertility of thirteenth-century artists, who peopled façades and embrasures with figures from seven to ten feet in height, and animated every tympanum with countless statuettes. The façade of Notre Dame, by no means one of the richest, has sixty-eight colossal statues, for the most part of the highest excellence; at Chartres and at Amiens there are over a hundred to each porch. The famous figure of Christ at Amiens is a masterpiece; bas-reliefs work out the details of the main subject, and enrich the story with innumerable pictures of amazing vigour and originality."

The favourite themes of the thirteenth century had something in common with those of the Romanesque epoch, though there is a sensible difference of treatment and considerable progress in composition, which exhibited more of taste and learning and less of eccentricity. But the satiric power and delight in caricature of our forefathers still demanded an outlet. These found expression in many a caustic gibe at clergy, princes, and rich burghers, and took substance in many a quaint gargoyle. A luxuriant system of ornamentation, adapted from the vegetable kingdom, was auxiliary to statuary. The main subject was enframed by it, or relieved against it; while often the composition itself was enriched by its introduction to complete the decorative effect. Or such a system of decoration was the only sculpturesque motive employed; it was then used with the utmost elaboration, and developed at the expense of statuary. Such was the case in Burgundy and Normandy, in which provinces the latter art was of slow growth. The Byzantine character of the scrolls, carved bands, and fantastic foliage of Romanesque art disappeared; ornament took on a new independence, and began to seek its types among native plant forms.

The carved leafage (Fig. 106) of the cloister arcades in the Abbey of Mont St. Michel strikingly illustrate this departure. The very plants which inspired the thirteenth-century sculptors still flourish at the foot of the ancient abbey walls.

Thus the flora of our own fields was applied in lithic form to the elements of our church architecture. But the breadth proper to architectural sculpture was still preserved by means of ingenious combinations.

It was not until the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that the imitation of natural forms became servile, tedious, and over-minute, and that the beauty of the whole was sacrificed to exaggerated faithfulness of detail.[36]

It should be noted that the decadence which manifested itself in monumental sculpture was far less rapid in the more intimate art which may be distinguished as imagery. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries all sculptors were image-makers; but towards the close of the latter, and during the fifteenth, the term was specially applied to carvers of images in wood, ivory, etc. Art still flourished in their ateliers in all its beauty, notably that of the goldsmiths, who carved images in high or low relief in precious metals, and who, thanks to the severely paternal regulations of the maîtrise, were enabled to bring French decorative art to the highest degree of perfection. The beautiful carved wooden stalls of Amiens, Auch, and Albi, to name
but the most famous, testify to the vigorous talent of the fourteenth and fifteenth-century image-carvers.

Flemish ateliers, which were kept up by the severe rules of the guilds, exercised a salutary influence upon the Burgundian craftsmen. This is more especially true of the great workshops of Antwerp and of Brussels, and perhaps also of those of Southern Germany. Burgundian influences reacted in their turn upon the artists of the Ile-de-France, notably in Paris (that brilliant centre of all artistic activities in the fourteenth century), and stirred them to emulation. The union of these various elements brought about the revival of the fine tradition of the thirteenth century, and towards
the close of the fifteenth century paved the way for a French Renascence, which heralded that more famous movement of the sixteenth, the credit of which is usually given to the Italians, who, however, such was the infatuation of the times, contributed rather to the debasement than to the regeneration of French national art.

The remarkable sculptures that owe their origin to the ateliers of Antwerp are distinguished by one of the quarterings of the civic arms, a severed hand burnt in with a red-hot iron. Those of Brussels are branded in like fashion. The images of wood, ivory, and vermeil, that we figure as illustrating the art of the image-carvers from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, show that the old tradition was still cherished in this community. Their artists were so far swayed by iconographic convention that a certain hieratic sentiment is perceptible in their works; but this is never allowed to outweigh fitness of action and expression, and their masterpieces are so instinct with taste and delicacy, composed with so much skill and executed with such freedom, that they are the admiration of modern artists.[37]

These essentially French qualities they owe, primarily, of course, to the genius of their creators, but in a scarcely inferior degree to the fostering care of the maîtrises, institutions which only require a certain modification by the progressive leaven of today, to become models for the imitation of all whose function it is to develop national art.