How France Built Her Cathedrals: A Study in the Twelfth and Thirteenth CenturiesO'Reilly, Elizabeth Boyle
History
How France Built Her Cathedrals: A Study in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries
O'Reilly, Elizabeth Boyle
Architecture, Gothic; Cathedrals -- France
Flamboyant Gothic was essentially a decorative art. Therein only did it
differ from preceding schools, for it developed no new principles of
construction. Because of the flamelike undulations of its window
tracery, the Norman archæologist, M. de Caumont, who had brought into
use the name Romanesque, invented the equally useful term
Flamboyant.[141] Capricious, overladen, disturbingly restless, this
final phase of the national art may often be (it has been called more
terrestrial than celestial), it was inclined to exhibit its technical
dexterity; but none the less it was keenly alive and a vast improvement
on the over-formalized geometric Rayonnant Gothic to which it succeeded.
In both, the profiles were prismatic, fluid, and weak. Discipline which
made for robustness was forever lost.
A century before the characteristics of Flamboyant art developed in
France, they were in use in England, and there called Curvilinear or
Decorated Gothic. Window mullions undulated, arches were crowned with
reversed curves and sculptured finials, secondary, connecting ribs were
added to the vaulting, bases were elongated, there were interpenetrating
molds, hanging keystones, piers without capitals, and such new models
for foliate sculpture as the deeply indented leaves of parsley and curly
cabbage. When capitals were given up, the ribs died away weakly in the
piers. The Gothic of England had changed to its cold Perpendicular phase
by the time that the architects across the Channel adopted the features
called Flamboyant in France.
M. Camille Enlart has developed the idea that the last phase of the
national architecture was a product of the English occupation during the
Hundred Years' War, that from elements of decoration introduced by
England, the French composed a style which differed somewhat only from
that in vogue across the Channel from 1300 to 1360. In France, flowing
tracery and ogee arches were not used before 1375. France need feel no
diminution of her claim of leadership in Gothic architecture because she
adopted, for her XV-century traits, certain decorative details developed
first by others, since the Gothic of England was originally of French
derivation.
The theory of an English origin for French Flamboyancy is contested by
M. Anthyme Saint-Paul, who thought that from the same elements of
XIII-century Gothic one country developed its own Curvilinear style and
the other its own, Flamboyant Gothic.[142] M. de Lasteyrie agreed with
the thesis that there is a French origin for French late-Gothic
manifestations. That Flamboyant art is in part indigenous and partly of
foreign derivation is probably nearest the truth. Certainly sporadic
cases of florid features appeared in French art during the XIII and XIV
centuries, but it is clear that in various places long held by the
English there appeared the first or the fullest expression of
late-Gothic art.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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