Lectures on the rise and development of medieval architecture; vol. 1

by Sir George Gilbert Scott

7. Great thickness of walls to resist the thrust of vaulting, aided by flat, pilaster-like buttresses in the principal planes of pressure.

8. In many cases—indeed, as a general rule—an air of gigantic massiveness in the entire construction.

9. The vaulting at first exactly accords with that of Roman buildings, embracing the barrel vault, the groined vault, and the dome, in nearly all the hitherto attained varieties. The arches always either semicircular or segmental.

The above characteristics are chiefly of a mechanical nature. The style possesses, however, sentiments of an infinitely nobler kind than anything which these mere material elements could impart. It possesses a sternness and dignity almost unearthly—a majestic severity of sentiment which seems, as it were, as if intended to rebuke the unpitying barbarity of the age, and to awe its rude and lawless spirits into obedience to the precepts of the Divine law. Its aspect is religious to the utmost extreme; but it expresses the stern uncompromising severity of religion rather than its more winning and elevating attributes—the asceticism of St. John the Baptist, the rebuker of sin and the preacher of repentance and of righteousness, rather than the spirituality of St. John the Evangelist, the preacher of Christian love, devotion, and praise. The sentiment they would express seems not so much “Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness,” as “Fear before Him, all the earth;” and the task they prescribe to their ministers to be rather to proclaim “the day of vengeance” than “the acceptable year of the Lord”—less to “bind up the broken-hearted and comfort all that mourn,” than to “lift up their voice like a trumpet, and show the people their transgressions.”

This stern simplicity is not, however, universal, for from the first the Romanesque architects occasionally indulged in even rich ornamentation, and, at a later date, often carried it to profusion; yet, even in the richest decorations, they continued grave and severe—their lines were hard and precise, their foliage strong and harsh, and their figure sculpture (unless intended to be grotesque) was the very image of sternness—rude in art, but often of great dignity of expression; and though in an age like ours, of technical perfection and flippant criticism, it often provokes a smile, it was, in its own simple and untechnical age, well calculated to produce wholesome and solemnizing impressions.

This is the style of which we should first treat when attempting to trace the history of Mediæval architecture. It is a mistake to imagine Pointed architecture to be severed by a great gulf from the Romanesque—the Pointed Gothic from the Round: it is its legitimate offspring, or rather itself in a more advanced stage of its development. The change from the round-arched to the pointed-arched Gothic is no change of essential principles; it is but the carrying on to their inevitable results of the principles of refinement, purification, elevation, the perfecting of the construction, and the softening down of the asperity of expression, which were going on during the whole of the Romanesque period. Nearly every characteristic of Pointed architecture finds its type, or its perfected model, in the Romanesque. They are not two styles, but one—the earlier and the later phases of the same architecture; the latter being only the carrying on to perfection of the progression which had, during every moment of its dominion, and in every province of its empire, been uniformly going on in the former.

Though the refining process went unceasingly on during the whole history of Romanesque architecture and affected all its features, it would appear that the constant endeavours to bring to perfection its various systems of vaulting were among the greatest causes of the change from the Round to the Pointed style, I will, therefore, endeavour to give a concise outline of the changes in this branch of construction during the period under consideration.

The churches of Western Europe up to this time, like the early basilicas, were for the most part covered with timber roofs; and the task which the Romanesque builders proposed to themselves was to convert them into vaulted churches.

The most normal and readily invented vault is that of the continuous barrel or demi-cylindrical form, covering an oblong building from end to end, and the most readily conceived idea, where the building has to be roofed over such a vault, is to fill in the space between the arch and the triangle of the roof solid, and make it at once the ceiling of the room and the support of the roof covering. Such a vault, however, has considerable outward thrust, and, being heavily loaded at the crown, would require walls of great thickness to stand against it. Let us suppose it applied to the nave of a basilica in place of the timber roof, and it is obvious that, being balanced on two ranges of columns, it could not stand for a moment without some very effective contrivance in the construction of the aisles to buttress up the walls and pillars on which this barrel vault is to rest.