Gothic art raised itself in less than a century to its culminating point; within two centuries more it was to reach the fatal point where it would begin to decline. The thirteenth century saw it in all its glory, with the edifices we have mentioned; in the fourteenth it had become the Florid or Rayonnant Gothic, which produced the churches of St. Ouen at Rouen, and of St. Etienne at Metz. “Then,” says M. A. Lefèvre, one of the latest historians of architecture, “no more walls; everywhere open screen-work supported by slender arcades; no more capitals, rows of foliage imitated directly from nature; no more columns, lofty pillars ornamented with round or bevelled mouldings. As yet, however, there was nothing weakly in its extreme elegance; slim and delicate without being gaunt, the Florid style did not in the least disfigure the churches of the thirteenth century, which it bounded and decorated.
“But after the Rayonnant Gothic came the Flamboyant, which, always under the pretext of lightness and grace, denaturalises the ornaments, the forms, and even the proportions of the architectural members. It effaces the horizontal lines which used to give two stories to the windows of the nave, fills up the nave with irregular compartments, cœurs, soufflets, and flammes; suppresses the angles of the pillars and sharpens the mouldings; leaves even to the most massive supports nothing but an undulating, vanishing, impalpable form, where shadow cannot fix itself; changes the lancet-arches into braces, or into flat-arched vaults more or less depressed, and the florid ornamentation of the pinnacles into whimsical scrolls. It reserved all its riches for accessory or exterior decorations, stalls, pulpits, hanging key-stones, running friezes, rood-screens, and bell-towers. Visible decadency of the whole corresponds with great progress in details.” ([Fig. 313].)
The churches of St. Wulfran, Abbeville; of Notre-Dame, Cléry-sur-Loire; of St. Riquier; of Corbeil; and the cathedrals of Orleans and of Nantes, may be cited as the principal specimens of the Flamboyant style, and as the last notable manifestations of an art which thenceforward diverged more and more from its original inspiration. The middle of the fifteenth century is generally fixed as the limit beyond which the handsome Gothic buildings that still rose were no longer, in any degree, the normal productions of their period, but were felicitous copies or imitations of works already consecrated by the history of the art.
A remark may here be made showing to what extent religious feeling predominated in the Middle Ages; it is that at the very moment when the Norman and Gothic architects were designing and producing so many marvellous habitations for the Deity, they seemed to bestow scarcely any attention on the construction of comfortable or luxurious dwellings for man, even those destined for the most exalted personages of the State. In proportion as this sentiment of original faith lost its intensity, Art occupied itself more and more with princely and lordly habitations. The middle class was the last favoured by this progress, and the feeling of their position as citizens had taken the place of a zeal exclusively pious; so we find the “town-halls” absorbing the splendour and elegance of which private houses remained destitute; these being generally built of wood and plaster, and in the heart of the towns, so close together that they seemed to be disputing for light and air.
Fig. 313.—Saloon of the Schools, Oxford. (Fourteenth Century.)
Everywhere, during the Middle Ages, rose the church—the home of peace; but everywhere also towered up at the same time the castle, that characterised the permanent state of war in which feudal society lived, delighted, and gloried.
“The castles of the richest and most powerful nobles,” says M. Vaudoyer, “consisted of irregular, uncomfortable buildings, pierced with a few narrow windows, standing within one or two fortified enclosures, and surrounded by moats. The donjon, a large high tower, generally occupied the centre, and other towers, more or less numerous, flanked the walls, and served for the defence of the place.” ([Fig. 314]). “These castles,” adds M. Mérimée, “generally present the same characteristics as the ancient castellum; but a certain ruggedness, a striking quaintness in plan and execution, bear witness to a personal will, and that tendency to isolation which is the instinctive sentiment of the feudal system.”
