FIG. 113.—FLAMBOYANT DETAIL FROM PULPIT IN STRASBURG CATHEDRAL.
DECORATIVE DETAIL. The mediæval designers aimed to enrich every constructive feature with the most effective play of lights and shades, and to embody in the decorative detail the greatest possible amount of allegory and symbolism, and sometimes of humor besides. The deep jambs and soffits of doors and pier-arches were moulded with a rich succession of hollow and convex members, and adorned with carvings of saints, apostles, martyrs, and angels. Virtues and vices, allegories of reward and punishment, and an extraordinary world of monstrous and grotesque beasts, devils, and goblins filled the capitals and door-arches, peeped over tower-parapets, or leered and grinned from gargoyles and corbels. Another source of decorative detail was the application of tracery like that of the windows to wall-panelling, to balustrades, to open-work gables, to spires, to choir-screens, and other features, especially in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (cathedrals of York, Rouen, Cologne; Henry VII.’s Chapel, Westminster). And finally in the carving of capitals and the ornamentation of mouldings the artists of the thirteenth century and their successors abandoned completely the classic models and traditions which still survived in the early twelfth century.
The later monastic builders began to look directly to nature for suggestions of decorative form. The lay builders who sculptured the capitals and crockets and finials of the early Gothic cathedrals adopted and followed to its finality this principle of recourse to nature, especially to plant life. At first the budding shoots of early spring were freely imitated or skilfully conventionalized, as being by their thick and vigorous forms the best adapted for translation into stone (Fig. 114). During the thirteenth century the more advanced stages of plant growth, and leaves more complex and detailed, furnished the models for the carver, who displayed his skill in a closer and more literal imitation of their minute veinings and indentations (Fig. 115).
FIG. 114.—EARLY GOTHIC CARVING. This artistic adaptation of natural forms to architectural decoration degenerated later into a minutely realistic copying of natural foliage, in which cleverness of execution took the place of original invention. The spirit of display is characteristic of all late Gothic work. Slenderness, minuteness of detail, extreme complexity and intricacy of design, an unrestrained profusion of decoration covering every surface, a lack of largeness and vigor in the conceptions, are conspicuous traits of Gothic design in the fifteenth century, alike in France, England, Germany, Spain, and the Low Countries. Having worked out to their conclusion the structural principles bequeathed to them by the preceding centuries, the authors of these later works seemed to have devoted themselves to the elaboration of mere decorative detail, and in technical finish surpassed all that had gone before (Fig. 113).
FIG. 115.—CARVING, DECORATED PERIOD, FROM SOUTHWELL MINSTER.