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
There was to be another chapter for the Gothic tale. Aspiration was born
again, national pride lifted its head and art flowered. Not from beyond
the mountains or the sea came the needed missionary this time, nor from
a Carolingian palace, nor out of Norman and Burgundian cloister. No
saint-king was to lead now, but only a young girl from a peasant hamlet.
When Jeanne d'Arc broke the spell of foreign invasion, when she gave
France a new soul, then all over the land rose that pæan of rejoicing
which we call Flamboyant Gothic art, for verily it flamed up with joy.
Never will you see an arch of double curvature, accoladed, soaring to
its triumphal finial, never will you gaze at radiant belfries rising
richer and richer with each story, never will you pray beneath a
late-Gothic pageantry picture window with its mullions swaying in
exaltation, but the thought of the Maid of Orleans and her mission will
come to you. This Flamboyant art may run riot in details like any
modern, but it remains true in its essentials to the Middle Ages.
Forever will it tell of the freeing of France from foreign rule, even as
the academic Rayonnant phase sets forth the lowered ideals of Philippe
le Bel, or the ampleness of XIII-century Gothic, the creative age of
Louis IX and his augmenting grandfather. No regional schools were there
in the last manifestations of the national art; they built the same at
Albi as at Rouen, at Bordeaux as at Lyons, for an entire people shared
the same feeling of recovered self-respect.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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