Gothic Architecture

The term Gothic, as applied to the architectural period dating from the middle of the twelfth to the end of the fifteenth century, is purely conventional.

The expression is clearly misleading as indicating the architecture of the Goths or Visigoths; for these tribes were vanquished by Clovis in the sixth century, and left no monumental trace of their invasion. Hence, their influence upon art was nil. The term is radically false both from the historical and the archæological point of view, and originates in an error which demands the strenuous opposition due to persistent fallacies. By a strange irony of fate the term Gothic, used in the last century merely as the opprobrious synonym of barbaric, has been specialised within the last sixty years in connection with that polished epoch of the Middle Ages which sheds most lustre upon our national art. And this, in spite of its Germanic origin.

Romanesque architecture, or to be exact, that architecture which, by virtue of the archæologic convention of 1825, we agree to label Romanesque, undoubtedly borrowed its essential elements from the Romans and Byzantines, modifying and perfecting them by the genius of Western Europe; but the architectural period which began in the middle of the twelfth century, and is so unjustly dubbed Gothic, was of purely French birth; its cradle was the nucleus of modern France. Aquitaine, Anjou, and Maine were the provinces in which it first took root. The royal domain, and notably the Ile-de-France, witnessed its most marvellous developments, and it was from the very heart of France that its splendour radiated throughout Europe.

But the tyranny of usage leaves us no choice as to the title of this volume. We are compelled to style it Gothic Architecture, though we would gladly have registered our protest by naming it French Mediæval Architecture.

This idea, which has recently found support in quarters which might have been considered free from such chauvinism, is based upon a narrow and peculiarly modern view of art. Art activities in the Middle Ages were as instinctive and unconscious as speech. The forms of architecture were invented and elaborated much in the same way as language. For the purpose of the historian of architecture, the northern half of France, the three southern quarters of Great Britain, and the districts threaded by the Rhine, form a single country, a single foyer of art. They all pressed on from similar starting-points to similar goals; and if the French went ahead in one direction, they fell astern in another. It may be allowed that, on the whole, the architects of the Ile-de-France did better than their rivals. Gothic architecture is pre-eminently logical, and logic is pre-eminently the artistic gift of the Frenchman. So that its more scientific development in the "French royal domain" was only to be expected. That success of this kind gives a right to call the whole development "French mediæval architecture" cannot be allowed.

The term Gothic is, however, purely arbitrary, as is also that of pointed, which has been introduced by writers who admit the principle of the broken arch as the characteristic of so-called Gothic architecture.

The broken or pointed arch, which is formed by the intersection of two opposite curves at an angle more or less acute, was known to architects long before its systematic application. It occurs in buildings of the ninth century in Cairo, and was used prior to this in Armenia, and still earlier in Persia, where indeed it superseded all other forms of span from the times of the last of the Sassanides onwards. It is an expedient which gives increased power of resistance to the arch by diminishing its lateral thrusts.

The pointed arch is a form which admits of infinite variations. The one law which governs its construction is expediency. It frankly abandons those rules of classic proportion which are the canons, so to speak, of the round-headed arch. Thus we shall find the pointed approximating to the round-headed form in the twelfth century, only to diverge from it more widely than before, till, towards the close of the thirteenth and throughout the fourteenth century, it took on the acute proportions necessitated by a perilous disposition to prefer loftiness to solidity.

Fundamentally, it is of little moment whether the architecture of the twelfth to the sixteenth century be termed Gothic or pointed, when we recognise these terms as equally inexact. The point to be really insisted upon is that the filiation we have already demonstrated in our book on Romanesque Architecture continued slowly, but surely, in the wake of civilisation, of which architecture is ever one of the most striking manifestations.

So-called Gothic architecture was not the product of a single generation; it was the continuous logical development of the Romanesque movement, just as the latter in its time had been the outcome of a gradual adaptation of old traditions to new-born exigencies. Thus our Aquitainian forbears, by their successful translation into stone of the eastern cupola, prepared the way for the groined vault, the embryo of which is clearly traceable in the pendentives of the dome at St. Front.