and three smaller chapels are all completed by the carrying up of just such cupolas above these central divisions. Now these buildings are all very small. The cupolas are twenty-five feet, eighteen feet, sixteen feet wide, within: St. Theodore’s little shrine would not hold a hundred worshippers. It is easy to see that the exterior design with the high cupola was worked out for these small buildings; but it is easy to see also that the general plan is capable of nobler exterior treatment. If, therefore, there should ever be an attempt made to build in modern Europe in the Byzantine style, it will be modified, inevitably, by this possibility, and by the obvious necessity of satisfying the general demand for a splendid outside. The recently built cathedral in London, spoken of below in Chapter X, is an instance of this.
Still, the glory of the Byzantine style must be found in its interior decoration. The Greek half of the Empire took from the Roman masters of the world the taste for splendid material; and, wherever some money could be had, the alabaster and the rosy and gray marbles of Greek and Asiatic quarries were brought to the spot. Mosaic gave a more vivid color; and this gave also the opportunity for the telling of the Gospel story and the legends of saints in permanent pictures. St. Mark’s church at Venice is the type for Europeans to study. The sense of pure delight in glowing and harmonious color, combined with soft and flowing line, is nowhere so strongly felt: no building, until Santa Sophia can be cleansed of Turkish whitewash, will affect the lover of splendid decoration so powerfully.
CHAPTER IV
CENTRAL MEDIÆVAL DESIGN
GOTHIC architecture is a natural development of the Romanesque architecture of northern France. It took its origin in the second half of the twelfth century, that origin being wholly constructional. The Romanesque builders were extremely harassed by their problems of masonry roofing, as mentioned in Chapter III, and there was taken up as a device to facilitate this vaulting the plan of an arched rib of carefully-worked hard stone, carried diagonally across the open space which required the stone roof: then another similar rib crossing the first one, leaving only triangles, each about one-fourth of the full size of the open space, which triangles could be vaulted with great ease. Instead of a square or parallelogram containing a thousand square feet horizontal and needing to be covered by a somewhat complicated vault, all that was required was the careful adjusting of two narrow arches in cut stone, and then the very simple vaulting of each one of the four triangles, about two hundred square feet each, horizontal. This was a simple and rather obvious device, one would think: but it took thirty years to develop, and once complete, the whole great system of Gothic building and the whole Gothic style, including everything from the cathedral of Reims to the smallest chapel, came from it as a matter of course.
If the student desire a clear notion of the nature and the appearance of Gothic rib-vaulting he may study [Plate XXVI], in which the structure can be seen better than in the high vaults of a cathedral. Each rib is a part of an independent arch of stone, perhaps a foot wide and twenty inches or two feet deep. The arch-solids (voussoirs) are very carefully cut, and the arch built with all its company of corresponding arches to meet at top, midway, in a boss of cut stone. This done, the triangular spaces are easy enough to build with smaller and rougher stones, and the haunches are loaded outside and above with still ruder masonry.
The style was developed in that tract of country which lies between the Loire on the south, the Somme on the north, the Meuse on the east, and, on the west, a line drawn north and south through the cities of Caen and Angers—a district about one hundred and thirty by two hundred and fifty miles, equal to England and Wales south of the Trent and the Mersey, or, say, the State of Pennsylvania. The style was never quite at its best except in what is now France, though the boundaries of the district above named were soon overpassed by the perfected Gothic. The most nearly French, and therefore most normal and faultless, examples out of France are those of the Rhine and of northern Spain where French master-masons seem to have worked. The Gothic, beginning as early as 1290 in England, is of extreme beauty in a simple, quasi-domestic, less grand and less perfectly developed way than the French. The Gothic of Germany and the Austrian dominions differed from the normal type in being somewhat fantastical and irregular, but still more in a lack of a thoroughly intelligent proportion of the parts. The so-called Gothic of Italy is never admirable as a style except in a few Cistercian monastic churches: and the magnificent cathedrals such as Orvieto, Siena, Monreale, and Florence are rightly beloved indeed for their magnificent combination of the decorative arts of form and color—their mosaics, their delicate sculptures in marble, their wrought and highly developed porches, their superb wall-tombs—but are of minor architectural importance from the very fact of their complete lack of constructional significance.