George Edmund Street: Unpublished Notes and Reprinted Papers

by George Edmund Street

Some apology is necessary for venturing to attempt to grapple with so large a subject as is that of pointed architecture in Germany. My only excuse for making such an attempt must be the vivid recollection of the journeys I have at different times made in that country, and the desire to help cordially in explaining to those who have still the journey before them, the features which characterize its architecture.

I have unfortunately been unable to hear what Mr. Parker has told you of pointed architecture in France; but no doubt he has dilated with sufficient enthusiasm upon the exquisite art there seen, upon the skill in the disposition of the ground plans—never equalled elsewhere—upon the beauty and vigour of the sculpture, and upon the nervous manliness and at the same time delicacy of the art in nearly all the buildings of the best period, at least in the old Île-de-France, in Picardy, and in Normandy. I grieve to say that I shall be able to give no such commendation to German architecture, and that, delightful as the recollections of what I have seen there are, I cannot nevertheless shut my eyes to the fact that in most respects it is entirely inferior to the development of the same style in France and England.

There are at the same time some peculiarities in the dates of old German work which are rather striking in comparison with English and French works.

You have, then, first of all, a few buildings, such as the convent at Lörsch, which are said to be and perhaps are of Roman design. Then next there is an immense group of churches of which those of Cologne and the Rhineland are the most distinguished examples, which, whilst it is entirely unlike anything in the rest of northern Europe, has a most remarkable affinity to the Lombard churches in the north of Italy, at Pavia, Bergamo, and elsewhere. These churches date from the early part or the middle of the twelfth century and continue with but little alteration of importance down to the end of the thirteenth, when the strange spectacle is seen of a style almost completely Romanesque in its character suddenly supplanted by another style which, so far as I can see, in no way grew out of it, and which is distinguished from the first by peculiarities of a most marked kind, and by the perfect and complete form which it at once assumed. Then after this style, which again in its turn retained its hold longer than our styles ever did, and which to a late period is altered only slightly in its detail, you will find another essentially German style answering in point of date to our later third-pointed and to French flamboyant. The Germans have therefore less natural growth to show in their architecture than we have. Instead of our beautiful gradations from Romanesque to third-pointed in which the germ of each development is to be discovered in the antecedent work, you have there a series of breaks or gaps in the chain which it is very difficult to account for, and which make the study of the style highly interesting, and at the same time somewhat perplexing.

The question seems naturally to arise whether each of these new styles, thus wanting in evidence of natural growth one out of the other, is to be looked at as a German invention in the true sense of the word, or as the result of the sudden conversion of a slow and sluggish people to the beauties of foreign work, and then their resolute and hearty earnestness in the attempt to make the style their own by some infusion of national peculiarities.

I incline to this last opinion because I believe that no style was ever invented. Architecture has always grown gradually and systematically, and it is quite possible to imagine that Germany may have refused to follow the lead of France and England in art until their superiority was so great as to make it an absolute matter of necessity, and that then an attempt would be made to give a national character to what they had in the first place borrowed.

A slight comparison of dates of a few buildings will explain my grounds for speaking as I do of German architecture.

Of the Rhine churches the most remarkable are the work of the thirteenth century. S. Gereon at Cologne was commenced A.D. 1200 and vaulted in A.D. 1227. S. Cunibert was in building from A.D. 1205 to A.D. 1248, when it was consecrated. Naumburg has a nave of A.D. 1200. Limburg is early in the thirteenth century; and Bamberg the same; whilst Gelnhausen was in building from A.D. 1250 to A.D. 1370. Now all these churches are of such a character that were we to see them in France we should at once put them down as the work of the end of the twelfth century, and we should look for another class to fill up the period between A.D. 1200 and A.D. 1270, when Cologne was commenced or the nave of Strasburg completed. You will see how important these dates are when you consider that at the same time that S. Gereon and S. Cunibert at Cologne, the choir of Magdeburg, and Gelnhausen, were being built, Amiens cathedral, S. Denis and other churches of the same kind were rising throughout France, whilst in England Westminster and a host of other churches of late first-pointed were built at the same time. I do not mean to say absolutely that no transitional buildings are to be found, but only that they were of extraordinary rarity and do not afford the same evidence of natural growth that our own do.

Of work really similar to our own first-pointed I can hardly give you more than one example, and that at Lübeck in the north porch of the cathedral, where—to say the least—the paternity of the work may well be doubtful. Of a later style and almost unique in its character, is the fine church of S. Elizabeth, at Marburg, a church whose date is well known (A.D. 1235 to A.D. 1283), and which affords us one of the few German examples of a style intermediate between the work at S. Gereon and that of Cologne cathedral. This will be seen by the sketches[83] which I have here, in which, however, it is to be observed that the design of the nave and apsidal terminations of the choir and transepts are the early portions of the work, and that the fittings and west front date nearer the end of the century. In the still beautiful reredos I think we may see the traces of an incipient departure from the style of the earlier work, and an approach to identity with what I must consider as the inferior art of the thorough German Gothic, as it is seen in its perfection in the cathedral at Cologne.

The aisles of the nave of Magdeburg cathedral seem also to me to be vastly superior to any other German work of the date that I know, whilst the western rood-screen and some of the details of the western choir at Naumburg are also of a degree of beauty which it would be very difficult to surpass elsewhere. The aisles of Paderborn cathedral, too, are of a peculiar but exceedingly good character. But these are, as I think, only exceptions which serve to prove the rule, and cannot in any degree be taken as evidence of the same kind of growth and gradual development that we trace with so much interest in every church and building of the Middle Ages in England. It was an architecture of fits and starts and conceits, not of growth, and full therefore of the contradictions and eccentricities which such a condition necessarily involves. And now having so far paved the way by a short statement of what is really the great peculiarity of German architecture, I will go on to consider and describe the several varieties of the style rather more in detail.