George Edmund Street: Unpublished Notes and Reprinted PapersStreet, George Edmund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George Edmund Street: Unpublished Notes and Reprinted Papers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 saw nothing between S. Leu and Beauvais, though in the part of France
bordering on the Oise, I believe that every village would afford
something worth seeing in its church. My time, however, was limited.
As you reach Beauvais, the country changes; there is a great deal of
wood, a very scattered population, and but few churches. Of course the
first object of every one at Beauvais is the cathedral; a building
from the study of which I derived less satisfaction than might be
expected. It is unpleasant to find an artist striving after more than
he is really able to attain, and this was conspicuously the case with
the architect of Beauvais. The church was consecrated in A.D. 1272 and
fell in A.D. 1284. In order to repair its defects the arches of the
choir were subdivided, and from the great size of the columns, and
the narrow span of the arches, the present effect is that of a church
in which the arches have but little to do, and in which everything
has been sacrificed to keep the building from falling again. Then
when the roofs and passages about the building are mounted it is seen
that the great object of the architect has been simply to obtain one
grand effect--that of height and airiness, and that to this everything
has been sacrificed, the details throughout being poor, coarse, and
slovenly in their mode of execution. The whole gave me the impression
of being the work of an unsatisfactory architect, though at the same
time it is impossible to deny the excessive grandeur of the vast
dimensions of the interior so far as it is completed, or the beauty
of arrangement which marked the original scheme of the ground-plan,
unpractical and unstable as it was. It may be right, however, to
attribute some of the failures, with M. Viollet-le-Duc, to the
carelessness of workmen; though no good architect allows himself to be
so excused.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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