Cathédrale de Chartres; Civilization, Medieval; Mont-Saint-Michel (Abbey : France)
The difference of sex is not imaginary. In 1058, when the triumphal
columns were building, and Taillefer sang to William the Bastard and
Harold the Saxon, Roland still prayed his "mea culpa" to God the
Father and gave not a thought to Alda his betrothed. In the twelfth
century Saint Bernard recited "Ave Stella Marts" in an ecstasy of
miracle before the image of the Virgin, and the armies of France in
battle cried, "Notre-Dame-Saint-Denis-Montjoie." What the Roman
could not express flowered into the Gothic; what the masculine mind
could not idealize in the warrior, it idealized in the woman; no
architecture that ever grew on earth, except the Gothic, gave this
effect of flinging its passion against the sky.
When men no longer felt the passion, they fell back on themselves,
or lower. The architect returned to the round arch, and even further
to the flatness of the Greek colonnade; but this was not the fault
of the twelfth or thirteenth centuries. What they had to say they
said; what they felt they expressed; and if the seventeenth century
forgot it, the twentieth in turn has forgotten the seventeenth.
History is only a catalogue of the forgotten. The eleventh century
is no worse off than its neighbours. The twelfth is, in
architecture, rather better off than the nineteenth. These two
rooms, the Aquilon and promenoir, which mark the beginning of the
Transition, are, on the whole, more modern than Saint-Sulpice, or Il
Gesu at Rome. In the same situation, for the same purposes, any
architect would be proud to repeat them to-day.
The Aquilon, though a hall or gallery of importance in its day,
seems to be classed among crypts. M. Camille Enlart, in his "Manual
of French Archaeology" (p. 252) gives a list of Romanesque and
Transition crypts, about one hundred and twenty, to serve as
examples for the study. The Aquilon is not one of them, but the
crypt of Saint-Denis and that of Chartres Cathedral would serve to
teach any over-curious tourist all that he should want to know about
such matters.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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