324 Burlesque festivals-transferred into ecclesiastical architecture. THE PASSION, THE PRINCIPLE The original of Dante's The middle age, juster than we, discerned in | Church. Even to this day, at Messina, the the ass sobriety, patience, resignation, and I Virgin, carried through all the city, seeks her know not how many Christian virtues. Where- son, as the Ceres of ancient Sicily sought fore be ashamed of the ass? The Saviour had Proserpine; and at last, just as she is entering felt no such shame.* . . At a later time these the grand square, she is shown our Saviour's simple manifestations turned into mockery; image, when she starts back with surprise, and and the Church was obliged to impose silence twelve doves flying out of her bosom, bear to on the people, remove them, keep them at a God the outpouring of maternal transport.* distance. But in the first centuries of the middle age, what harm was there in all this? Is not all permitted to the child? So little alarm did the Church feel at these popular dramas, that she borrowed their boldest fea-illumination was outside.‡ Let us picture to tures for the decoration of her walls. In Rouen cathedralf we see a pig playing on a fiddle; in that of Chartres, an ass holds a sort of harp; at Essone, a bishop holds a fool's bauble. Elsewhere, we see the images of vices and of sins sculptured with all the liberty of pious cynicism. The courageous artist does not shrink from representing the incest of Lot or the infamies of Sodom. T The Church exhibited at this period a marvellous dramatic genius, full of boldness and of easy good-fellowship, and often stamped with touching puerility. No one laughed in Germany when the new curé, in the midst of the mass of installation, walked up to his mother, and led her out to dance. If she were dead, there was no difficulty in saving her; he put his mother's soul under the candlestick. The love of mother and of son, of Mary and of Jesus, was a rich source of the pathetic to the He was slow of foot, unless the stick, or the goad, should prick him in the buttocks. Ha, sir ass, &c. He on the hills of Sichem, reared by Reuben, crossed the Jordan, bounded into Bethlehem. Ha, sir ass, &c. Lo with his great ears, the son of the yoke, the excellent ass, the lord of asses. Ha, sir ass, &c. In frisking he excels fawns, deer, and kidlings, swift beyond the dromedaries of the Midianites. Ha, sir ass, &c. Gold from Arabia, frankincense and myrrh from Saba, asinarian worth has brought into the church. Ha, sir ass, &c. &c. While he drags wagons, with many a little load, with his Nec te pœniteat pecoris, divine poeta. On a counterfort of the old tower. In the church of St. Guenault, rats are represented gnawing the globe of the world. Millin, Voyage, t. i. p. 20, et plate iv.-Aristotle does not escape this universal jeer. He is figured at Rouen bending down with his hands on the ground, and carrying a woman on his back. See the stalls of Notre-Dame de Rouen, Nôtre-Dame d'Amiens, of St. Guenault d'Essone, &c. In the church of l'Epine, a small village near Châlons, are some very remarkable, but also very obscene sculptures. St. Bernard writes about 1125 to Guillaume de St. Thierry-" What is the good of all those grotesque monsters in painting or in relievo, which are placed in cloisters in sight of those who are bewailing their sins? What is the use of this beautiful deformity, or this deformed beauty? What is the meaning of those unclean apes, those raging lions, those monstrous centaurs?" Ed. Mabillon, p. 539. This formed the subject of one of the external basreliefs of Reims cathedral. It has been effaced. At Pentecost, white pigeons used to be let loose in the church amidst tongues of fire; flowers were rained down, and the inner galleries were illuminated. At other festivals the ourselves the effect of the lights on these prodigious edifices, when the priests, winding through the aerial staircases, animated by their fantastic processions the darksome masses, passing and repassing along the balustrades, under the denticulated buttresses, with their rich costumes, wax tapers, and chants; when light and voice revolved from circle to circle, and below, in dark shadow, answered the ocean of people. Here was the true drama, the true mystery, the representation of the pilgrimage of humanity through the three worlds—that sublime intuition which Dante caught from the transient reality to fix and eternize in the Divina Commedia. After its long carnival of the middle age, this colossal theatre of the sacred drama has sunk into silence and into shade. The priest's weak voice is powerless to fill vaults, whose ample span was reared to embrace and contain the thunder of a people's voice. Widowed and empty are the churches. Their profound Symbolism, which then spoke with so clear a voice, is mute. They are now objects of scientific curiosity, of philosophical explanations, of Alexandrian interpretations-Gothic museums, visited by the learned, who walk round, gaze Yet irreverently, and praise instead of pray. do they clearly know what they praise? That which finds favor in their sight is not the church itself, but the delicate workmanship of its ornaments, the fringe of its cloak, its lace of stone. some laborious and subtle piece of workmanship of the later Gothic, (du Gothique en décadence.) Gross-minded men, who look upon these *J. Blunt, Vestiges of Ancient Manners and Customs discoverable in Modern Italy and Sicily, London, 18 p. 158.-How comes it that Mr. Blunt could only see in this a ridiculous mummery? In the Sainte-Chapelle, the figure of an angel used to be let down from the roof, holding a silver jar, from which he poured water on the hands of the officiating priest. Morand Hist. de la Sainte-Chapelle, p. 180.-At Reims, on the day of the Dedication, a lighted taper was placed between each arcade. Over the gallery of the Virgin in the church of NotreDame, at Paris, was the figure of a virgin, with two angels bearing candlesticks in their hands; and in these the dea or treasurer used to place tapers after lauds on SexagesInA Sunday. Gilbert. Description de Nôtre-Dame de ParisIn some churches, the priest represented our Lord's Aster sion on the portal.-Sometimes even the clergy were obliged to perform the ceremony on the loftiest parts of the church for instance, when relics were sealed up under the tower or steeple; as was done in the church of Notre-Dame at Paris. The figure of Gothic churches, a symbol of the crucifixion. OF ART IN THE MIDDLE AGE. The law of Gothic eccle The solemn and holy comedy revolves with 325 stones as stones, and do not feel the sap and fruit of the world, which nature decorates with life-blood which circulate there! Christians her leaves and her roses, may it not be, under or not, revere, kiss the sign they bear, the sign a funereal form, life and love? "I am black, of the Passion-'tis that of the triumph of but I am comely," exclaims the bride in the moral liberty. Here exists a something great Song of Songs. These sombre vaults may veil and eternal, whatever be the fate of this or a hymen. Do not Romeo and Juliet unite in that religion. The future fate of Christianity the tomb Painful is the embrace, bitter_the makes no difference here. Let it hencefor-kiss, and the bride smiles through tears. This ward be religion or philosophy, let it pass from vast vault, in which the mystery is shrouded, is mysticism to rationalism, the victory of human it a winding-sheet, is it a marriage garment? morality must ever be adored in these monu- .. Yes, 'tis the robe of nature, the antique ments. Not in vain were Christ's words- veil of Isis, on which all living creatures are Let these stones become bread." The stone | embroidered. This living foliage, whereon art became bread; the bread became God, matter, has woven the beasts of the earth and fowls of spirit-the day on which the great sacrifice the air, is her cloak, her tunic of love. The honored, justified, transfigured, transubstantia- mystery is arrayed in its mistress.* ted them incarnation, passion, synonymous words, are explained by a third-transubstan- its divine drama according to the natural drama tiation. By three different stages, here is the struggle, the hymen, the identification of the two substances: a dramatic and dolorous hymen in which the spirit sinks and matter suffers. The mediator is the sacrifice; the death, a voluntary death. There is blood on these nuptials. That terrible, that memorable day, it was yesterday, it is to-day, it will be to-morrow, and ever. The everlasting drama is daily played in the church. The church is itself this drama-a petrified Mystery, a Passion of stone, or rather, it is the Passioned, the sufferer. The whole edifice, in the severity of its architectural geometry, is a living body, a man. The nave, extending its two arms, is the Man on the cross; the crypt, the subterranean church, is the Man in the tomb; the tower, the steeple, is still He, but upright and rising to heaven. In this choir, which inclines from the direction of the nave, you see His head drooping down in the agony; you recognise His blood in the glowing purple of the windows. Touch these stones with cautious tread, step lightly over these flags-all are bleeding and suffering still. A great mystery is being enacted here. All around I see death, and am tempted to weep. Yet may not this immortal death, whose image art inscribes in a flowery vegetation, this flower of the soul, this divine * The choir inclines to the northwest in the churches of Notre-Dame at Paris, and of Notre-Dame and St. Ouen, at Rouen, Quimper, &c.-It must be premised that in some churches this inclination depends on the localities. "Mark each thing mystically; for there is nothing irrelevant here." Hugo de S. Victore, Rothomagi, 1648, vol. iii. p. 335, Speculum de Mysteriis Ecclesiæ. played by the sun and stars. It proceeds from life to death, from the incarnation to the passion, and thence to the resurrection, while nature turns from winter to spring. When the sower has buried the grain in the earth, to bear there the snow and the frost, God buries himself in human life, in a mortal body, and plunges this body into the grave. Fear not; the grain will spring up from the earth, life from the tomb, God from nature. With the breath of spring the spirit will breathe. When the last clouds shall have fled, in the transfigured sky you descry the ascension. Finally, in harvesttime, the creature itself, ripened by the divine ray that penetrated it, mounts with the Virgin to the Lord.t How has humanity arrived at this marvellous symbolization? What road did art pursue in its long career, to reach such a height? I must attempt to give the answer. My subject so wills; and far from digressing, I enter the rather the more into it, and sound its depths. The middle age, the France of the middle age, have given expression in architecture to their most intimate thoughts. The cathedrals of Paris, of St. Denys, and of Reims-those three words tell more than long recitals. Such monuments are great historic facts. What should I do? describe them, compare them with similar monuments of other countries? Such description and comparison would supply but an external, superficial, confused knowledge of them. We must go further, dig deeper, grasp the principle of their formation, the physiological law which presided over this vegetation of a distinct nature. Thus, beyond the artificial and (I subjoin the original, down to the close of the paragraph: "Cependant cette mort immortelle dont l'art inscrit l'image dans une efflorescente végétation, cette fleur de l'âme, ce divin fruit du monde, que la nature décore de ses * Montaigne says of a cloak of his father's, which he was feuilles et de ses roses, ne serait-ce pas, sous forme funé-fond of wearing, "I wrapped myself up in my father." (Je raire, la vie et l'amour? Je suis noire, mais je suis belle,' m'enveloppais de mon père.) dit l'amante du Cantique des Cantiques. Ces voûtes sombres peuvent voiler l'hymen. Roméo et Juliette ne s'unissent-ils pas dans un tombeau? Douloureuse est l'étreinte, le baiser amer, et l'amante sourit dans les pleurs. Cette voûte immense dont le mystère est enveloppé, est-ce un linceul, est-ce une robe nuptiale?. Qui c'est la robe de la nature, le vieux voile d'Isis, où toute créature est brodée. Ce vivant feuillage, où l'art a tissu les bêtes de la terre et les oiseaux du ciel, c'est son manteau à elle, son amoureuse tunique Il est vêtu de son amante.")-TRANSLATOR. †The zodiac and the Gospel were alternated on the front and in the roses of churches. Thus in the churches of NôtreDame de Paris, and of St. Denys, Reims, Chartres, &c., to each of the signs of the zodiac corresponds a bas-relief representing the labors of the month. In Nôtre-Dame de Chartres, the series commences with the history of Adam, to indicate that since his fall man has been condemned to labor. Little figures are often seen on the stalls representing arts and trades, as in those of St. Denys, brought from the castle of Gaillon, those of the cathedrals of Rouen, Chartres, &c 326 Definition of art, Sexual THE PASSION, THE PRINCIPLE ody. Indian and Persian external classification of Tournefort, science | the world, of which art is the serious parhas discovered the system of Linnæus and Jussieu. The organic law, then, of Gothic architecture, I have felt impelled to seek, on the one hand, in the genius of Christianity, in its principal mystery, the Passion; and, on the other, in the history of art and in its fruitful metempsychosis. Ars, in Latin, is the contrary of in-ers: it is the contrary of inaction, it is action. In Greek, action is named drama. The drama is preeminently the action or the art, being the principle and the end of art. Yes, in face of the all-powerful nature which laughs at us in the deceiving phantasmagoria of her works, we erect a nature fashioned by ourselves. To this solemn irony, this eternal comedy, with which the world, while amusing man, makes him its sport and mock, we oppose our Melpomene. We take so little umbrage at the homicidal and charming nature which smiles upon as she crushes us, that we make it the delight of our lives to track and imitate her. Spectators and victims of the drama, we take our parts in it with a good grace, and dignify the catastrophe by embracing, accepting, idealizing it. "Art, action, drama, are strangers to matter. For inert matter to become spirit, action, art, for it to become human and put on flesh, it must be subdued, it must suffer. It must allow itself The fecundity of this double drama seems to to be divided, torn, beaten, sculptured, changed. have been seized by the Indians. The Indian It must endure the hammer, the chisel, the an- fig-tree, the bodhi, the tree-forest, (the manvil; must cry, hiss, groan. This is its Passion. grove,) each branch of which strikes root in Read in the English ballad of the Death of John the earth, another tree,-this arcade of arcades, Barleycorn, what he suffers under the flail, the this pyramid of pyramids, is the shelter under kiln, and the vat. Just so the grape in the which God reached, they say, the perfect state wine-press. The wine-press is often the shape of contemplation, the state of bodhi, buddhist, of the cross of the Son of man.* Man, grape, of absolute sage. As the God, so the tree barleycorn, all acquire under torture their high-―their name becomes identical; it is natural est form heretofore gross and material, they become spirit. The stone also breathes and gains a soul under the artist's hand; who calls life out of it. Well is the sculptor named in the middle age Magister de vivis lapidibus, ("the master of living stones.")† fecundity and intellectual fecundity. This tree, in which there are so many trees, this thought, in which there are so many thoughts, rise both together, and aspire to being: here is the ideal of fecundity, of creation. Aspiration, aggregation-these are the male and female princiThis dramatic struggle betwixt man and na- ples, the paternal and maternal, the two princiture is to the latter at once Passion and Incar-ples of the world, and of the little world of art nation, destruction and generation. Together, as well. Rather, we should say, the one only they engender a common fruit, a mixture of principle-aspiration after aggregation, of all the father and the mother-Humanized nature, in one, of all to one, as all the lines of the spiritualized matter, art. But, just as the fruit pyramid tend to the point. of generation more or less resembles father or mother, and yields in turn both sexes, so, in the mixed product of art, man or nature is more or less predominant. Here we have the virile; there, the feminine stamp. We must discrim-lines. This common aspiration of innumerable inate between sexual characters in architecture, as we do in botany and zoology. This characteristic is strikingly marked in Indian architecture; which presents, alternately, male and female monuments. The latter, vast caverns, profound wombs of nature in the heart of mountains, have been fecundated in their darkness by art: they pant for man, and seek to absorb him in their bosom. Other monuments represent man's impulse towards nature, the vehement aspiration of love, and start up, luxurious pyramids, seeking to impregnate the sky. Aspiration, respiration, mortal life and fecund death, light and darkness, male and female, man and nature, activity, passivity, the whole, combined, is the drama of *On one of the windows of St. Etienne-du-Mont, Jesus Christ is figured in the wine-press; the wine running from his body into vats. †The surname of one of the architects whom Ludovic Sforza sent for from Germany, to close the arches of the roof Milan cathedral. Gaet. Franchetti, Storia e descrizione Cuomo di Milano, 1821. The pyramidal form, the abstract pyramid, reduced to its three lines, is the triangle. In the ogival triangle, in the ogive, two lines are curves; that is, composed of an infinity of right lines, which is the mystery of the ogive, first appears in India and Persia, and in the middle age it prevails throughout our West. At the two ends of the world we see the efforts of the infinite towards the infinite; in other words, the universal, Catholic tendency. It is the endless repetition of the same within the same;† * John Crawford, Journal of an Embassy to the court of Ava, in the year 1827, p. 64. "The Gothic arch is observ not mark modern buildings."-M. Lenormant conceives the a repetition graduated in one same ascent. Rear them, as in the Indian monuments, pyramid on pyramid, lingam on lingam; heap, as in our cathedrals, ogives and roses, spires and tabernacles, churches on churches, and let humanity stop in the erection of its pious Babel, only when its arms shall fail it. It is far, however, from India to Germany, from Persia to France. Identical in its principle, art varies on the road, has been enriched by its variations, and has brought us the rich tribute. India has contributed, but Greece too, Rome too, and undoubtedly other elements besides. GOTHIC ECCLESIASTICAL ARCHITECTURE. On first leaving Asia, the Greek temple, a simple collection of columns under the flattened triangle of the pediment, scarcely presents a trace of the aspiration to the sky, which characterized the monuments of India, of Persia, and of Egypt. The aspiration disappears; beauty here consists in aggregation and order; but the aggregation is weak. This phalanx of columns, this architectural republic, is not yet united and closed in by a vault. In Greek art, as in the social world of Greece, the bond is imperfect. How little unity there was in the Hellenic world, despite its Amphictyonic as semblies, is well known. Between republic and republic, city and city, there was little connection. Even its colonies were only bound to their metropolis by religion and filial recollections. Far more closely cemented was the Etruscan and Roman world; and so with Italian art. Here the arcade reappears, intersects itself, and the vault closes in: in other words, aggregation is strengthened, and aspiration seeks to reappear on high. As is art, so is the constitution of society. We find here social hierarchy the power of association is great. The metropolis keeps her colonies subjected to herself: however distant they may be, they are : included within the city. To be the expression of such a world, the column is not enough; nor even the arcade-witness the monuments of Trèves and Nîmes with their double and triple stories of arcades and porticoes. All this is insufficient to represent what is to follow. The East has given nature; Greece, the city; Rome, the city of law: the West and the North are about to make it the city of God. Primitively, the Christian Church is known to have been only the basilica of the Roman tribunal. The Church takes possession of the very prætorium in which Rome pronounced her condemnation. The divine invades the juridical city. Here the pleader is the priest; the prætor, God. The tribunal is enlarged, is rounded, and forms the choir. Like the Roman city, this church is still restricted, and exclusive; it does not open to all. It envelopes itself in mystery, and requires initiation. It still loves the darkness of the catacombs in which it was born, and hollows out vast crypts, which recall to it its cradle. The catechumens are not admitted within the sacred enclosure; they still wait at the door. The baptistery is without, without is the cemetery; the tower itself, the organ and voice of the church, rises at its side. The heavy Roman arcade seals with its weight the subterranean church, buried in its mysteries. Things go on thus as long as Christianity has to struggle, as long as the storm of invasions lasts, as long as the world has no belief in its duration,-but when the fatal era of the year 1000 is past, when the eccle siastical hierarchy has conquered the world, and it is completed, crowned, and closed in by the pope; when Christendom, enlisted in the army of the crusade, has become conscious of its unity,-then the church casts off her narrow vestments, waxes large as if to embrace the whole world, issues forth from her darksome crypts, soars upwards, elevates her vaulted roofs, raises them in bold ridges, and in the Roman arcade the oriental ogive once more appears. The Roman hierarchy heaped arcade upon arcade, the sacerdotal heaps ogive on ogive, pyramid on pyramid, temple on temple, city on city. Here the temple, nay the city itself, enters but as an element. The Christian world contains all preceding worlds; the Christian temple all temples. The Greek column is there, but dilated to colossal size, and exfoliated into a sheaf of gigantic pillars. There,. too, is the Roman arch, at once more solid and bolder. In the spire reappears the Egyptian character; which fact constitutes an essential distinction between them and monuments of Greek architecture. While the latter are composed of inseparable parts, from the agreement of which results the harmony of the whole, and which would be nothing except as a whole, and without which there would be no whole, the hugest Hindoo temples are formed by the junction, and, so to speak, by the addition of parts all identical with each other, and which might remain independent of the edifice to which they belong, because they are so many reproductions of all its proportions, so many copies of it in little. Each monument, therefore, is the total, if I may so express myself, of a greater or lesser number of other monuments of similar construction, though of different dimensions, so that their junction forms, not a whole, but an aggregation, in every respect conformable to each of its component parts. This character, which, perhaps. has not attracted sufficient notice, recurs in the smallest deLails of Indian sculpture, for instance, in the singular statues of their divinities, which the artist purposely loads with the same attributes a thousand times repeated. Without enter-roof of Nôtre-Dame at Paris is only three or four, and the ing into the question here, how far the Hindoos may have been indebted for their architectural system to the natural scenery around them, or to the original, if not always just ideas that prevail throughout their religious system, we must confess that it is impossible not to be struck with this character on looking at these drawings of Mr. Daniel's." *Arched ceilings are apt to sink in at the crown.-Gothic ceilings are hardly ever built of free-stone, but of small stones mixed with a great quantity of mortar; and in several churches the ceiling is not more than six inches thick. The frame or forest passes above the ceiling, and rests solely on the lateral walls. It is covered with a leaden tiling of fortytwo thousand two hundred and forty pounds weight, for merly surmounted by a handsome steeple one hundred and four feet high.-Gilbert, Description de Nôtre-Dame de Paris. 328 Gothic art reflex of the The window-its disti guishing sign. The more deeply it had sunk, the higher did it rise. The glittering spire escaped like the deep sigh of a chest oppressed for a thousand years. And so powerful was the respiration. so strongly did the heart of the human race beat, that it revealed itself in every part of its stony covering, which shone with love to meet God's looks. Regard the contracted but deep obelisk, but raised on a temple. The figures of angels and of prophets, standing on the counterforts, seem to cry out to the four quarters of heaven the summons to prayer, like the imaum on the minarets: while the arched buttresses, which rise to the roofing of the nave,* with their lighted balustrades, their radiant wheels, their denticulated bridges, seem Jacob's ladders, or that sharp bridge of the Per-orbit of the Gothic window, of that ogiral eye sians, over which the souls of the departed are obliged to cross the abyss, at the risk of losing their balance under the weight of their sins. umphant with celestial glory. But hardly is the fourteenth century past, than the roses alter, and change into burning shapes,-are they flames, hearts, or tears? Perhaps all three at once. when it endeavors to open itself in the twelfth century, this eye of the Gothic window is the distinguishing sign of the new architecture.f Behold this prodigious pile, this work of Ancient art, worshipper of matter, was distinEnceladus. To rear these rocks, four, five guished by the material support of the temple, hundred feet in the air, giants must have by the column-whether Tuscan, Doric, or sweated,-Ossa on Pelion, Olympus on Ossa, Ionic. The principle of modern art, child of -but no, it is no work of giants, no confused the soul and of the spirit, is not form, but the mass of enormous materials, no inorganic ag- physiognomy, the eye; not the column, but the gregation, something stronger has been at window; not the full, but the void. In the work than the arm of the Titans.-What? twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the window, The breath of the Spirit; that light breath | buried in the depth of walls, like the solitary which passed before the face of Daniel, carry- of the Thebaid in his granite cell, is wholly to ing away kingdoms and dashing empires to itself; it meditates and dreams. By degrees, pieces, is what has swelled these roofs and it advances from within to without, till it wafted these towers to the sky. It has anima- reaches the external superficies of the wall. ted all the parts of this vast body with a power- It radiates in beautiful mystic roses, all triful and harmonious existence, and has drawn out of a grain of mustard-seed the vegetation of this marvellous tree. The Spirit is the builder of its own dwelling. See, how it labors out the human figure in which it is enclosed, how it stamps its physiognomy, how it A similar progress is observable in the ргоforms and deforms its features; how it sinks gressive enlargement of the Church. The the eye with meditation, worldly trials, and spirit, whatever it does, is ever ill at ease in griefs; how it ploughs the forehead with wrin-its dwelling, which it vainly seeks to extend. kles and with thoughts; how it bends and vary, and adorn. It cannot rest there it is curves the very bones, the powerful frame- stifled. No, beautiful as you are, marvellous work of the body, to the motions of the life cathedral, with your towers, your saints, your within. In like manner, the Spirit was the flowers of stone, your forests of marble, your architect of its own stony covering, and fash- great Christs, with their glories of gold, you ioned it to its own use, traced on it, without cannot contain me. Round the Church must and within, the diversity of its own thoughts, be built little churches: it must be radiant with told its history upon it, took care not to leave chapels. Beyond the altar must be reared unchronicled one hour of the long life which it had lived, and engraved upon it all its remembrances, all its hopes, all its regrets, all its loves. To this cold stone it transferred the dreams and cherished thoughts of its existence. After it had once escaped from the catacombs, from the sacred crypt in which the pagan world had detained it, it reared this crypt to the sky. *It was in the twelfth century (the first period of the primitive ogival style) that buttresses were first projected from the walls; in the eleventh century, they used to be hidden under the roofing of the wings.-Next, the counterforts were raised like towers above the roofing of the wings, and were crowned with small steeples. Niches were hollowed in the right feet of the counterforts; the arcades were denticulated, and were pierced with trefoils and roses. Caumont, t. ii. p. 238. See, also, the magnificent plates in Boisserée's work, Description de la Cathedrale de Cologne. This height would seem to be the ideal to which German architecture aspired. Thus, according to the plans, which are still extant, the towers of Cologne cathedral were designed to be five hundred German feet high; the spire of Strasburg is five hundred Strasburg feet high. Fiorillo, Geschichte der Zeichnenden Künste in Deutschland, t. i. p. 411. There is hardly an instance of a crypt after the twelfth ! century. Caumont, Antiquités Monumentales, t. ii. p. 123. It was in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that the great impulse was given to ogival architecture.--The largest crypta Notice Historique et Descriptive sur Notre-Dame de Chartres, p. 76. in France is that of the cathedral of Chartres. See Gilbert, its curvilinear angles are like the corners of the eye. GilThe root of the word ogive is the German aug, “eye;" bert, Description de Notre-Dame de Paris, p. 56.-In the primitive ogival architecture, the windows were long and narrow; they are styled by the English antiquaries, lancet. Two lancet windows are often joined and framed in one principal arch. Between the tops of these double lancet windows, and that of the principal arch, remains a space in which a trefoil, quatre-foil, or small rose is usually inserted. Caumont, p. 251. It is, at least, the chief element of classification which our Norman antiquaries have conceived that they have established, after a comparison of more than twelve hundred churches of different ages. The glory of having given a scientific principle to the history of Gothic art, belongs to the province which contains the greatest number of mont ments of the kind. At the head of our Norman antiquaries I must mention MM. Auguste Prévost and de Caumont. In the thirteenth century, the choir became longer than before, in comparison with the nave. The collateral naves were prolonged round the sanctuary, and were always bor dered with chapels. Caumont, p. 36. This was the mode of construction in general use in the eleventh century. Ibid. p. 122. |