Fig. 398.—Divinity Schools, Oxford.
Begun 1445. Finished about 1480.
In the Divinity Schools ([Fig. 398]) these great arches show themselves throughout as the supports of the otherwise helpless vault; in Henry VII.’s Chapel they are visible only in the side vaults, which are strutted up from them with strong tracery, but their upper portions penetrate the central vault, and become concealed from view.
The same system is carried into the apse ([Fig. 399]), and that with the most surprising skill. The apse is supposed to be a portion of an entire octagon, with an aisle supported by eight small columns, of which two are lost by its conjunction with the straight part of the chapel. These columns being converted into pendants, the structural arches supply, as before described, the support demanded, but in this case they converge to the central part of the octagon.
Fig. 399. Henry VII.’s Chapel, Westminster Abbey, Plan of Apse.
The treatment of this point in detail cannot intelligibly be described in words. It is, perhaps, the most consummately skilled piece of designing to be found in the whole range of Mediæval vaulting.
I have now completed my running (and all too rapid) sketch of the arched and vaulted systems of Mediæval architecture, though purposely leaving to another occasion the subject of domes. The limits of three lectures have only sufficed to give a somewhat cursory glance at its salient points, leaving the treasures of its detail to be searched out by the zealous student.
No subject in the whole history of architecture is so remarkable, or would more richly repay the investigator. I commend it to your individual study, and will only add that our own country is more rich in the variety of its vaulting than any other, and that London is especially well supplied with objects of study, containing, as it does, excellent examples of nearly every variety of vaulting, from the stern severity of the work of King Edward the Confessor in the substructures of his monastic buildings at Westminster, to that gorgeous and astonishing work which I have just been describing, and of which we may boldly assert (whatever may be our individual preferences), that the world does not contain its equal.