George Edmund Street: Unpublished Notes and Reprinted PapersStreet, George Edmund
History
George Edmund Street: Unpublished Notes and Reprinted Papers
Street, George Edmund
Architecture, Gothic; Church architecture -- Europe; Europe -- Description and travel; Street, George Edmund, 1824-1881
I have said enough, I trust, to induce others to examine carefully this
very interesting church; it is valuable as being a little in advance of
the most perfect period of the French pointed style, and as being much
more instructive, therefore, than a building which, like the cathedral
at Rheims, is in the main a little after the most perfect period, and
full, therefore, of symptoms of decline, instead of promise of advance.
From Notre Dame to the cathedral it is a descent from the finest early
first-pointed to commonplace middle-pointed, full of German character
in its detail. The west front and the whole of the apse have been much
modernized, and the finest remaining portion of the exterior is the
north transept front. The windows are geometrical middle-pointed of
four lights, and the flying buttresses on a large scale, double, and
surmounted by pinnacles. There is some good stained glass of late date
in some of the aisle windows.
Another church, dedicated, I think, to S. Alpin, has a nave and aisles
of six bays groined, without a triforium, and of the same date as
Notre Dame. There are transepts and a central tower, and a choir in
flamboyant style, and of a most unusual plan; the two arches east of
the tower diverge from each other, so that the width of the choir
gradually increases up to the point at which it is finished with an
apse of three sides. An aisle surrounds the whole, the windows of which
retain some very rich stained glass. This choir is the most remarkable
example that I have met with of a very late revival of, perhaps, the
earliest type of chevet. There are a great many altars in this church,
pews throughout with doors, and no sign whatever of any improvement.
In Notre Dame, where pews had disappeared and everything was being
restored, all the side altars had disappeared, and there was only one
altar left besides the principal altar in the choir.
And here I might well conclude these notes of French architecture. From
Châlons I went to Toul, and thence by Metz to Trèves, and I found,
as might be expected, nothing but German work. At Toul there are two
churches, the cathedral and S. Gengoult, both of some interest, and
with good cloisters; but it is very remarkable how we find here, not
only German detail, but the favourite German ground-plans also; S.
Gengoult is a cruciform church, with an apsidal chancel, and a small
apsidal chapel on each side opening into the transepts; whilst the
cathedral has an apsidal choir without aisles, and a square-ended
chapel on each side opening from the transepts. The window tracery
in S. Gengoult is perhaps the ugliest ever devised even by German
ingenuity, and yet of early geometrical character (_circa_ A.D. 1300),
and still retaining much very beautiful glass of the same date. The
nave of the cathedral has been recently seated with very smart fixed
open seats, of the kind which might have been erected fifteen or twenty
years ago in England.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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