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
The wide ambulatory of Poissy is groin-vaulted, but diagonals cover the
two oriented apsidioles that open on a false transept, which arrangement
of pseudo-transept with chapels was copied soon after at Sens. The three
easternmost bays of the nave have retained their primitive intersecting
ribs, which are round-arched, decorated, and very broad, as are the
transverse arches that separate the vault into sections. Poissy's
sculpture is of an advanced type. Owing to later changes, there is much
patchwork in the church.
ST. DENIS-EN-FRANCE[31]
Give all thou canst: high Heaven rejects the lore
Of nicely calculated less or more:
So deemed the man who fashioned for the sense
These lofty pillars, spread this branching roof
Self-poised.
--WORDSWORTH.
[Illustration: _Poissy. An Early Example of Gothic Vaulting (c.
1135)_]
Finally came the hour of the new architecture's clear achievement. After
all the trial efforts, there now was built, midway in the XII century, a
monument which was to wield momentous influence. With the erection of
St. Denis, the center of Gothic art may be said to have shifted slightly
south, to Paris. From the capital the new movement spread out in
systematic progression--each church comprehending better than had its
predecessor the principle of thrust and counterthrust, each drawing from
it further consequences.
St. Denis did not put a stop abruptly to the coexistence in the same
edifice of both systems of vaulting any more than it began immediately
the usage of all the consequences of diagonals. Yet none the less the
Royal Abbey is rightly called the first Gothic monument, since here
first was demonstrated stout-heartedly the advantages of the new system.
Abbot Suger was the first to employ the generating member with the full
intelligence of its results. "From the moment of St. Denis' conception,
Amiens had become inevitable."
It was Suger who wedded definitely the pointed arch and the intersecting
ribs. He dared to make piers so slender that the beholders were
astonished they could carry the weight of a stone roof; he dared to open
his walls by windows so large that his choir was called by the people
the lantern of St. Denis. The mastery by Suger's craftsmen of the art of
stained glass was to have profound consequences in Gothic structure,
since it hastened the suppression of the wall screen between the active
members: "Behold I will lay thy stones with fair colors, and thy
foundations with sapphires; and I will make thy windows of agates, and
thy gates of carbuncles, and all thy borders of pleasant stones."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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