Principle in Art, Etc.

by Coventry Patmore

This fact is a threadbare commonplace of architectural criticism, and one which is obvious to the eye of the dullest beholder of the interior or exterior of every Gothic cathedral; but the number and subtlety of the means by which the effect is gained is beyond all reckoning and analysis; and the object of this paper is to point out only a few of them which are not to be found in architectural manuals, and to show how this all-prevailing stream of ardent aspiration was moderated and governed so as to acquire the expression of peace as well as ardour, as befitted the beauty of the Christian temple. Mr. Freeman comes nearer than any other eminent architectural critic to a clear discernment of Gothic character when he says: “Where there is no strife there is no victory; the vertical line cannot be called predominant unless the horizontal exist in a visible condition of subjection and inferiority.” But the vertical line exists in Gothic architecture as much more than a foil to vertical character; it checks and keeps it within bounds, and exhibits it as an expression of the infinite bounded and peacefully bounded by the finite—which is the true character of the life and worship symbolised. Hence the square-headed tower is as fine, if not a finer finish to the Gothic cathedral than the spire. Compare the tower of York with the spire of Freyburg in Breisgau—the finest spire in the world, rising as it does as a spire from the ground—and it will be found that the cessation of the great, steady heavenward current in York, gradually prepared for as it is by the treatment of the face of the tower, and culminating in the compromise of open battlements, each of which frames the pointed arch, creates a more solemn and heart-expanding sense of infinite aspiration than the apparently greater flight of endeavour in the famous spire, which soars indeed twice the height of the tower, but, as it were, evaporates as it soars. The minds of the Gothic architects seem to have been much divided as to which was better: the checked and contained expression of the tower, in which an undiminished force of ascension was suggested, or the exhausting flight of the spire. The tower of Salisbury, for example, was not originally intended to carry the spire, which was added long after the cathedral was completed. They often obtained both features, giving a spire to only one of the west-end towers. There is, perhaps, no more satisfactory treatment of the west front than this, as may be seen in Strasburg Cathedral. Like many other fine effects, this most probably arose from accident—the accident of its not being convenient at the time to add the second spire; but that the incompleteness was fully recognised as a perfection is proved by the many instances of its having been, if not devised, allowed to remain.

There are three ways of treating the spire. It may commence at the earth, as that of Freyburg does, without the intervention of a tower; or it may rise from a tower the head of which is considerably larger than the base of the spire; or the base of the spire may coincide with the top of the tower, in which case it is called a “broach spire.” The second is the finest and by far the most frequent arrangement, as it combines the effects of spire and tower without confusing them; a part of the force of the tower being contained and checked, and a part being allowed to take its self-exhausting flight. It is to be observed, however, that even when the spire is most prominent—as in Lichfield, where there are three of them—it is, when compared with the whole building, only as it were an accidental escape and waste of the vast current of vertical force expressed by the entire mass of the building. Perhaps the most expressive treatment of the tower is in the innumerable examples in which only a very small proportion of its vertical force is permitted to escape in four or more pinnacles, one of which is often larger than the others. Spires and pinnacles are in most cases covered with lines of “crockets”: figures in which ascending power is usually expressed by the upward growth of a leaf; which is emphasised by some check, made apparent to the eye by a strong bulge, like that of a current flowing over a stone. Wherever the idea of weight or side-thrust would occur naturally to the eye—as in buttresses, lower angles of gables, etc.—there is an especial outburst of flaming finial or pinnacle, or other mode of contradicting and reversing the idea, which the Greek architect would have been contented with accepting and beautifying.

Let us now enter the church, which is, within as well as without, a great geyser of ascending life; which may indeed lose itself in the dimness of the vaulted roof, as the spire loses itself in air, but never shows weariness of its flight or a memory of the earth from which it started. As in Egyptian and Greek architecture, so in the Gothic, we must look to the column for the strongest expression of the characterising idea. The Egyptian column suffered and seemed half-crushed under the weight it bore; the Greek rose to its burthen with the glad assurance of being fully adequate to its task. The Gothic is conscious of no task at all; but flies, without the least diminution of its substance, and without swelling either under sufferance or gathering of strength by entasis at any particular point, to the commencement of the arch; where it divides itself, sending up the streams of its clustered shafts, some into the lines of the arch and others to the top of the clerestory wall; then dividing again to follow the lines of the vaulting, there to meet like fingers joined in prayer, but still having no thought of the weight of the roof they really help to carry.

Mr. Ruskin complains of Gothic capitals—as he might also have done of Gothic bases—that they are unnecessary and ridiculous because they have no bearing power. If they had, they would cease to be Gothic, and the whole character of the wonderful art would be ruined. Capitals are sometimes entirely omitted, as in the shafted piers of Cologne; but when this is the case the point at which the arch springs becomes doubtful to the eye, and there is something exhausting in the wholly uninterrupted flight of the vertical lines. The capitals, like the horizontal astragal which often binds at intervals the clustered column, have no other purpose but to correct these effects of unrelieved continuity; and the mouldings of capitals, when they exist, not only have no and express no “bearing-power,” but they very carefully express the contrary by various devices of undercutting, etc. It is the same with the base, when it is not altogether dispensed with. The most common form of Gothic base is a curious caricature of the Attic base, the form of which had been transmitted unimpaired to the Gothic architect through the Romanesque and Norman. It was perched upon and overhung a stilted plinth, which was itself a reversal of the expression of elementary support in the original flat plinth; and the curves of this base were so diminished in one part and exaggerated in another that all reference to supporting power seemed to be derisively abolished. The “ogee” is a moulding which strongly expresses carrying power. A favourite Gothic base was two reversed ogees, the lower projecting far over the edge of the plinth, which, in classic architecture, always afforded a wide-spreading field for the base. And so on.

It would take a bulky volume to trace the wonderful integrity with which the three modes of envisaging the idea of weight are carried out in the three great architectures; but enough has been said to give the clue by which a fairly cultivated and perceptive student may follow up the subject for himself.

V

Before proceeding to consider the Norman and Moresque styles, a word should be said about that portion of Gothic decoration which does not directly help the main effect of aspiration—namely, cusped and foliated tracery, diaper-work, the foliage of spandrels, etc. etc. Kugler says: “This filling-in appears as a peculiar sort of architecture of independent signification.” He does not, however, give the interpretation which he sees to be required. Yet there is an interpretation which only needs to be put in words to be obvious to every eye which has made itself familiar with these objects. In exact proportion to the recognised perfection of these details, as it was attained in the middle or “decorated” period of pointed architecture, they become expressions of an idea almost identical with that which has been traced in the mode by which contented suspension or delay of the infinitely aspiring character in the main lines of the building is conveyed. As the inexhaustible torrent of upward life is checked peacefully, but with no denial of infinite potential aspiration, in the square-headed tower, so the same reconciliation of life with law without the least detriment to either—that reconciliation which is the consummation of Christianity—is expressed even more completely in the more essentially decorative details of pointed architecture. It is in the treatment of foliage that this character can be most easily traced, and this can be done best by comparing it with other modes of treatment. By the Greek architect this and other natural objects, when wanted for ornament, were what is called “conventionalised”; honeysuckles, roses, and waves of the sea were represented by certain formal figures which suited the lines of the architecture, and were not too much like nature to attract attention from those all-important lines to themselves. In the Italian Gothic, again, such natural objects are represented as nearly as possible like nature, but with such slight modifications and arrangements as were necessary to give them the consciousness of art. This is the sort of imitation which Mr. Ruskin recommends, and into which the northern Gothic fell in the decay of the art. But in fourteenth-century Gothic—that is to say, in the Gothic which was as much superior to that of the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries as the art of Athens was superior to that of Pæstum or Rome—nature was neither imitated nor conventionalised. The special aim of the fourteenth-century ornamentation is to show a vigorous life playing with perfect freedom in severely geometrical forms—with freedom so perfect that it is difficult to say whether the life shapes the law or the law the life. This highly and essentially symbolic character is the most marked expression of Gothic tracery. In its decay it took the form of licence and weakness in the French “flamboyant,” and of hardness and rigidity in the English “perpendicular”; the life prevailing—to its own destruction—in the one, the lifeless law preponderating in the other. Gothic foliage, again, always feels the law; though, so far from suffering thereby, it is, in its place, far more beautiful than nature. The leafage not only follows geometrical outlines, but swells under its limitation into rich protuberances. The yearning for and potentiality of infinite ascension, peacefully accepting its temporal limitations, and the freedom of life perfected by law, are the artistic motives of every detail as well as of the main masses of pure Gothic.

The Romano-Byzantine style attained in its final development, the “Norman,” to the unity of idea which is the criterion of a true style. The arch up to this time had been treated partly as a thing of beauty in itself and partly as the constructive theme; in the Norman it took its place, expressionally, as subordinate to the wall, the mass of which it carries and distributes between the piers. The wall itself is the artistic theme of Norman architecture, and all decorative and some constructional features are devoted to making a boast of its mass and thickness. Weight—the theme in the three highly contrasted modes of the Egyptian, Greek, and Pointed architectures—plays no part in the Norman expression. The arch, being recognised by the eye for what it is, an infinitely powerful supporter, can express no proportion to finite superincumbent weight; and it is treated as a mere head to the gap in the wall between nave and aisle. The expressional intention of the Norman architects in this matter is curiously and decisively proved by the fact that their favourite arch-mouldings were the billet and chevron—i.e. lines of notches and angles which completely broke up all idea of arch-character as referable to supporting power or to weight distributed on to the piers, and transferred the interest of the eye to the material substance of the wall out of which these figures were cut. The piers between these arches were huge masses of wall, either quadrangular or turned into great cylinders, without entasis or any other sign of having to bear anything; and such decoration as they had was devised so as to deny emphatically any reference to superimposed burthen. The figure of the weight-carrying shaft set in the angles of these piers was their principal decoration; but they were Lilliputian mockeries of the Attic shaft, or were twisted singly or doubly, and in various other ways ridiculed, as it were, the idea that shaft-power was demanded in the huge masses of masonry to which they were attached. The only thing that these little shafts—whether in notch of pier or in recess of porch, blind arcade, or window—ever carried or appeared to carry was a single line of the often innumerable mouldings, the purpose of which was simply to display the immense thickness of the wall, which was the true and only theme of this style. This system of emphasising the wall by negativing the shaft-power was occasionally carried into the almost grotesque excess of representing the shaft as broken in the middle! The favourite treatment of the Norman wall was to boast of its thickness exactly as the Doric shaft boasted of its supporting power—that is, by throwing away some portion of it. The face of the wall was recessed in panels, which were often filled with blind arcades. Modern builders often recess walls in this way in order to save material, leaving the wall thickest where it has most work to do; but the Norman and Lombard architects had no such economy in view. The windows and other apertures in the wall showed, by their shafted and moulded chamfers, the reality of thickness so great that the panelling and blank arcading was seen to be no sacrifice, though it was a delicate and effective suggestion of one. This arcaded panelling is not only on one plane of the wall-surface. The recessed plane is again recessed in the same way, and yet again, arcade within arcade; and finally, in the higher portions of the wall, open galleries are worked in its thickness. In apertures the constructive rule which requires that the bevel or chamfer should slant inwards, to give the better light, is sacrificed to the opportunity of showing the mass of the wall; and the chamfer is external, and is so treated in its decoration as to increase in every possible way the appearance of thickness. The treatment of the doorway, which is the point from which the expressional idea may be best enforced upon every beholder, is very peculiar. When there is no advanced porch, a deep arch is practised through a great part of the wall, and the thickness is emphasised by an elaborate perspective of shafts and mouldings. Within this deeply recessed arch the actual doorway is often worked as a horizontal-headed aperture in a plane face of wall without chamfer; the remaining thickness of the wall, not shown by the recessed arch, being thus left to be measured by the imagination, which has already been excited by the display of thickness within thickness of decorated archway. The Norman architects, in order still further to increase this effect, had sometimes recourse to a device that can scarcely be justified by strict architectural principles, which should never falsify construction in order to heighten expression. A face of wall was advanced in front of the main wall of the building, in order to obtain a much greater depth of masonry for showing off the multitudinously moulded entrance-arch. This projection did not form a real advanced porch, having its proper ecclesiastical purposes, but was nothing but a boast and display of mass in the masonry which really had no existence, the advanced face of wall concealing the fact that there was only mass enough behind it to allow of this misleading display. It may be said that the Gothic spire is constructed simply for display. It is quite true; but it is avowedly so constructed, and there was no concealment about it.

Mr. Ruskin, by the way, strangely affirms that “the direct symbolisation of a sentiment is a weak motive with all men”; inferring thence that there was no intention of aspiration in the Pointed architecture which he cares so little for. But surely the reverse is the case; and such symbolisation, in one way or other, constitutes a great part of the life of all men. The Gothic spire, which was the most costly as well as the most useless feature of the Gothic cathedral, is a final answer to such doctrine, which strikes indeed at the life of all artistic work. If it did not “symbolise a sentiment,” what was done by it?

The round arch, which was the accident of the Norman architecture, being treated therein as a mere cavernous gap in masses of, in themselves, all-sufficient masonry, was, as it has been already said, adopted by the Byzantine architects as the principal theme of their art; but this arch could be made nothing of, as the main source of expression, until it developed the dome; and the dome, as it proved, could not be made much of, until the Moresque builders took it in hand. It had the fatal defect, when on a large scale, of lateral thrust, which could only be met by a construction which had the double defect of positive and negative falsehood. The domes of St. Sophia and St. Vitale, which the eye naturally presumes to be of one mass or substance with the substructure, are really formed, for lightness, of Rhodian bricks, pumice-stone, and coils of empty jars; and yet the lateral thrust is so great that it has to be opposed by a vast buttress-system, which is carefully concealed, because it would contradict, if exposed, the inevitable effect of extreme lightness in the dome. The Renaissance architects found themselves equally at a loss, as we know, in dealing with this feature. Both in St. Peter’s and St. Paul’s there is not one but two entirely separate domes. And when all is done the Byzantine and Renaissance domes are nothing to the eye but hollow shells, with no special artistic expression.