The History of Art Survey

Lecture 26

Early to High Gothic Architecture

Gardner  486-502

 

Early Gothic Art: 1140-1194

 

18-

 

1     Ambulatory & radiating chapels, abbey church of Saint-Denis, Paris, 1140-44

*     Ibn Tulun Mosque, Sahn arcade, 879, Cairo

2     Plan of choir and radiating chapels of the St.-Denis                                      Paris

3     Vaults of Ambulatory and radiating chapels of the abbey St.-Denis            Paris

       Gothic rib vaults  domical vaults

       Construction of a Gothic Cathedral

4     Chartres Cathedral, begun 1134, rebuilt after 1194                                       Chartres

       West facade, Chartres Cathedral                                                                       Chartres

5     Royal (west) Portal, Chartres Cathedral, 1145-1155,                                      Chartres

       Jamb statues, Royal Portal, Chartres Cathedral                                             Chartres

6     Old Testament queen and kings, of the Royal Portal,                                    Chartres

7     West Facade of Laon Cathedral, c 1190                                                             Laon

8     Plan of Laon Cathedral, c 1160-1205, choir 1210-                                            Laon

       Section through the aisle, gallery, triforium, and clerestory, Cath             Laon

       View into the choir, Cathedral                                                                           Laon

9     Nave facing east, Cathedral                                                                                Laon

10   Nave elevations of four Gothic cathedrals: Laon, Paris, Chartres, Amiens

11   South flank of Notre-Dame, begun 1163, choir & transept 1182, nave buttresses c1225, westwork, 1260.                                                                                         Paris

       West facade, Notre-Dame,                                                                                  Paris

       Plan, Notre-Dame,                                                                                               Paris

12   Plan, Chartres Cathedral, as rebuilt after 1194                                              Chartres

13   Nave, Chartres Cathedral, begun 1194                                                             Chartres

       Elevations of nave walls: Laon and Chartres

14   Virgin and Child and angels (Notre Dame de la Belle Verrière), Choir window, Chartres, c 1170, 16ı

15   Rose window and lancets, north transept, Chartres, c 1220, 43ı diameter

16   St. Martin, St. Jerome, and St. Gregory, Porch of the Confessors, c1220-1230

       right doorway, south transept

17   Saint Theodore, jamb statue, Porch of Martyrs (left door, south trains) , c1230

 

Gothic Europe

 

Georgio Vasari, Michelangeloıs student was referring to late medieval art as Gothic in the mid-16th century.  He meant the term pejoratively, as an ancient Greek might have used barbarian.  The art of the Goths, those uncouth warriors whoıd destroyed the Roman empire.  North of the Alps, where it was all the rage in the 13-14th centuries it was referred to as opus modernum (modern work) and opus francigenum (French work).  The term stood for the towering elaborate churches in the style originating in France.  They stood for [literally represented] the city of god, the Heavenly Jerusalem, on earth.

 

The style originated in northern France around 1140, while the Romanesque was still flourishing elsewhere.  By the thirteenth century it was spreading out of the region around Paris and it was to spread through the fourteenth throughout Europe.  Still it was essentially a style of [Christian] western and northern Europe.  In eastern and southern Europe the Byzantine held sway.  In north Africa and the west Asia Islamic styles prevailed.  Our latest example Saint-Maclau at Rouen (18-28, begun in 1500) was contemporaneous with Michelangelo and over a century later then the Italian Renaissanceıs turn backward toward classicism.

 

Early Gothic  1140-1194;  High Gothic 1194-1300;  Late Gothic 1300-1500+

 

It is difficult to characterize the entire set of centuries covered here over such a vast area.  Our text points out that the Hundred Years war began in 1337 and the Black Death swept over western Europe killing a quarter of all its people between 1378 and 1417.  It was a period of growing wealth and populations.  The early medieval manors and monasteries, with their attached serfs, was slowly being replaced by more and more free men living in towns and cities.  Manufacturing, banking and trade were growing.  The feudal world was being consolidated into large regional kingdoms.  The great intellectual centers of the European universities were growing beyond the confines of the church.  Professional guilds were being formed.  The papacy was at its height of power and Christian Crusades against Muslims in the disputed Holy Land were still underway. 

 

 

 

1    Ambulatory & radiating chapels, abbey church of Saint-Denis, Paris, 1144

 

The beginning of Gothic architecture is measured from the creation of the ambulatory and radiating chapels of the abbey church of Saint-Denis, where architectural designers first experimented with the chief device of the style, the pointed rib arch that allowed flexibility of form and reduced wall space, that was to be the characteristic feature of Gothic architecture.  Louis VII of France, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and five archbishops attended the dedication of the new choir.  Saint-Denis (Dionysius), was the apostle who brought Christianity to Gaul.  The abbey church of Saint-Denis is the location of not only his tomb, but those of the Kings and Queens of France from the 9th century on.  It was a Carolingian basilica, developed over time.  In 1135 a new western, entrance facade was begun, and in 1140 the new east end was begun.  The Abbot Suger, who is responsible for the choice of the latest style didnıt live to see it dedicated, but he is credited with the choir and the styleıs initiation.  Suger was extremely close to the royal family, a confident of both Louis VI and VII, and for a period during Louis VIIıs absence in the Second Crusade, regent of France.

 

 

2    Plan of choir and radiating chapels of the St.-Denis            Paris

 

The church already had a venerable past and important relics in its crypt.  So the outline of the former church was maintained within the new one.  What was changed radically was the elevation and details of the new choir.  What do we see in this new choirıs plan? 

 

Letıs look at it along with the east end it replaced, or any other Romanesque church.  Where the earlier churches had thick walls, we now have light piers and greatly enlarged space for windows and light.

 

The esthetic basis of the Gothic in architecture is the quest for light, the terrestrial mark of divine perfection.  We have Sugerıs own words for his search for this divine light.  He said he wanted the new choir to encompass the previous structure, ³except for that elegant and praiseworthy extension in [the form of] a circular string of chapels, by virtue of which the whole [church] would shine with the wonderful and uninterrupted light of most sacred windows. providing the interior beauty.²[1]  The element not yet discussed here is the use of stained glass in the windows, which meant the light coming in was both colored brightly and that it came through the images of the bible, and was thus doubly symbolic and holy. 

 

As our text says, ³In Sugerıs eyes, then, his splendid new church, permeated with lux nova (new light) and outfitted with gold and precious gems, was a way station on the road to Paradise, which Œtransported [him] from this inferior to that higher world.ı²[2]

 

The structural means by which architectural designers were able to pursue this quest, for greater and greater light, was to shift their engineering from semi-circular mural vaults to pointed rib vaults.  The advance to ribs vaults opened up the wall to skeleton framing.  The new advance to pointed ribs allowed for vaulting almost any shape at whatever height the designer wished over any shaped area, while maintaining the regularity of the elevation.  Rib vaults allow for wide spaces between their vertical supports.  Semi-circular arches have widths confined to their diameters and hights confined to half their diameters, but pointed arches can cover almost any space while springing from almost any height.  Thus, when we look from the Romanesque plan with its Speyer or Durham, or the earlier Saint-Denis, we see masses and walls, and when we look at Abbot Sugerıs Saint-Denis choir we see wedge piers and complex shapes. 

 

 

3    Vaults of Ambulatory and radiating chapels of the abbey St.-Denis, Paris, Gothic rib vaults  domical vaults, Construction of a Gothic Cathedral

 

If we look up into the vaults this becomes more clear.  We see not the regularity of the Romanesqueıs equal groins, but a five sectioned dome with ribs of three different lengths, that can be circled around the outer perimeter of the east end to leave the greatest possible open space between rib piers for windows and yet maintain a consistent springing height in the elevation.  Things thus appear regular when we look at them, even though they are linking most unusual combinations of pier and aisle formations. 

 

 

*  Ibn Tulun Mosque, Sahn arcade, Cairo, 879

 

The Gothic architectural designers owe their pointed arches to the Arab architectural designers, who had been experimenting with them for the past several centuries.  As the note on page 494 mentions, we can trace them back even before the Arabs in west Asia as far as the Sasanian designers of Ctesiphon in the third century (2-28).   It was the Arabs who brought the pointed arch to Spain and from Spain that the designers of the politically and esthetically influential Benedictines of Cluny, brought the form to France.[3] 

 

 

 

4    West facade, Cathedral, begun 1134, rebuilt after 1194, Chartres

 

Chartres Cathedral (Notre Dame de Chartres) is after Saint-Denis the key monument of the Early Gothic.  This is so in part because of the quality of the work there.  Chartres was the wealthiest landowner in all of Europe at the time, and could and did afford the very finest designers and craftsmen.  But besides this, there is the issue of its two phases.  A terrible fire destroyed all of the structure but its west facade half a century after its completion, which necessitated a rebuilding in the High Gothic fashion, and so the church contains both the first phase of gothic and its high point.  In this first discussion, we will consider its Early Gothic westwork.

 

 

5    Royal (west) Portal, Chartres Cathedral, 1145-1155,         , Jamb statues,                                                                                  

 

The western facade, or westwork, as a whole is divided vertically into three elements: the central entrances to the nave, and the towers on either side.  Horizontally these are divided, somewhat differently, into stories.  In the center the ³Royal Portals² are beneath a second story and a rose window, while the towers, with their thick strip buttresses, each has a somewhat different rhythm, having grown ever more irregular as they ascended over the years.

 

The entrance is a distinct unit of three doorways under pointed arches, that maintain a strong Romanesque feeling, in the way they are sunk deeply into the wall by the rippling recession of their arches and jambs.  There is a simple hierarchy in their symmetry, established by the central one being wider and taller and deeper.  They are called the ³Royal Portals² because of the images of kings and queens carried on the jamb pillars.  It is the figurative sculpture of these passageways and their penetration into the wall of the facade that preserves most strongly the original design of 1145. 

 

The three doorways are tied together by their formal frameworks but independent in their individual iconographic programs.  The jambs and archivolts carry vertical figures, marching across the facade and raising up over each tympanum.  The three tympanums are each different, but carefully coordinated.  In the center is the familiar Last Judgment ensemble of Christ in a mandorla surrounded by the eagle, bull, lion and angel of Matthew, Luke, Mark and John.  On the left we see Christıs ascension into the heavens, flanked by a pair of angels.  On the right, framed between a similar pair of angels, we see the emergence of something new, the Virgin Mary enthroned with the Christ child in her lap. 

 

If the central doorway fits the pattern seen in the Romanesque doorways at Saint-Trophîme, Moissac and others, the Mary portal brings different.  The important church seminary located at Chartres was a major center advocating greater importance for Mary, as an intercessor with Christ at the Last Judgment.  Her prominence here at the entrance to the cathedral expresses this role.  A special cult of Mary reached a high point during the Gothic period.  Placing her in this doorway next to the usual Last Judgment doorway represented a shifting in the emphasis for the churchıs message to those entering, from the Last Judgment as threat of damnation, to the Second Coming as a promise of redemption.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

6    Old Testament queen and kings, Royal Portal, Chartres

 

Each of the jamb pillars, marking the recession into the wall flanking the doorways, carries an elongated image of one of Christıs royal ancestors, from the New Testament.  Medieval parishioners were instructed to regard them as symbols for the kings and queens of France, and so as representatives of the feudal as well as biblical authority, in the contemporary melding of secular and religious power.  It was this blending of power, along with the ownership of most of the surrounding regions fields and peasants that was the motivation for the iconoclasm seen here and more devastatingly at Saint-Denis and elsewhere during the French Revolution.  The invention of these jamb figures, seen for the first time here, has been called one of the rare examples of a totally new typology to occur in the middle ages.

 

The jamb figures of the central doorway are elongated emanations of the pillars behind them, emphasizing the verticality of their location in the architecture.  They are rigidly vertical, enwrapped in drapery whose linear folds emphasize this columnar nature.  Their arms are held close to their bodies.  They stare blankly into space.  What we will notice, however, if we look from those in the central portal toward those on the sides, is the beginning of a progression that marks the turning back in the direction of naturalistic representation that we have noted in the Romanesque and that gains speed through the Gothic. 

 

The jamb images of the outer portals, move away from the abstract toward more intuitively present figures in a number of ways.  Rather than being portrayed as merely projecting from the pillars behind them on little shelves, they are provided with more prominent platforms of supporting figures and architectural canopies, explaining their physical presence.  The figures themselves are somewhat more plastic, breaking out of the columnar outlines with draperies that are designed to reveal their individual bodies rather than the columnar architectural role. 

 

Gardnerıs text explains the Royal Portal sculpture at Chartres as the beginning of Gothic; I explain them as the culmination of the Romanesque and the movement in the direction of the Gothic.  It is a difference without important distinction.  The fact of the imageryıs style and symbolism is that they lie on a continuum of ongoing development seen throughout the Ile de France, region around Paris, that began much earlier and extended later.  Our periodization of this continuous development, dividing it into somewhat contrasting Romanesque and Gothic moments, is an abstraction that helps us note and explain these formal and symbolic trends.   

 

If the difference between any one point and another on the continuum is fairly insignificant, the totalizing of those points over time can be highly significant.  The combination of minor quantitative adjustments over time can add up to a qualitative realignment that changes everything.   In this case, as we consider the step between the Romanesque and the Gothic, we are watching what is at once a culmination of the medieval imagery and the beginning of something far more humanistic.  Our European Christian ancestors saw themselves as part of a feudal social reality in which the kingdoms of the earth flowed directly through a great chain of cosmic and cosmically legitimized authority.  The kings and barons and clergy of this world were those appointed to rule them as the agents of the great god above.  But this world and this view were changing, and we see emerging the incipient turn toward a humanism, seen so much more assertively in the next period that our culture has identified as a rebirth of humanism that is titled the Renaissance.  

 

What is most important here is to note the gradual turn back from diagrammatic toward the naturalistic and the parallel arrival of theological developments heralding Christıs human nature, in the development of Marianism, and a softening of the early medieval emphasis on the Last Judgment as we go beyond the millenium.  Our text notes this shift as it explains to us the transformation of the emergence of figures from the architecture in the early Gothic statue column.

 

 

10 Nave elevations of four Gothic cathedrals: Laon, Paris, Chartres, Amiens

 

 

 

Laon Cathedral, built in the second half of the 12th century, shows us the new direction more distinctly.  As our text says about its nave and choir structure, it ³retained many Romanesque features but combined them with the Gothic rib vaults resting on pointed arches.² (493)  What began at Saint-Denis, in the reconstruction of the choir, is seen at Laon in an entire nave, transept and choir interior.  We can view the direction of change in the diagrams of 18-10, as we see the full gothic development from Laon to Paris, the later stage of Chartres and then Amiens.  Over this period the nave arcades grow almost double in height, while progressively replacing more and more wall with glass, and heavenly light.

 

 

8    Plan of Laon Cathedral, c 1160-1205, choir 1210-               Laon

      Section through the aisle, gallery, triforium, and clerestory, Cath , Laon, View into the choir, Cathedral, Laon

 

Laon represents a stage in this progress.  The vaulting system of the nave is essentially Romanesque (e.g., Saint-Étienne 17-11), with six part rib vaults running down the nave and groin-vaulted side aisle bays on either side.  Looking at the elevation, however, we can now see the wall opened up by the addition of a fourth band of articulation called the triforium.  We may also note that all the arches are prominently pointed, the Romanesque semi-circular arch is gone.  The effect on the nave wall was to break up more flat space into linear detail.  The alternating support system, connected to the six part vaulting is only subtly visible. 

 

 

 

9    Nave facing east, Cathedral, Laon

 

The total effect ‹visible if we compare the nave photographs of Saint-Étienne (17-10) and Laon (18-9)‹ steps away from the distinct Romanesque compartments of the first-half of the century and to the more unified continuity of the Gothic, second-half. 

 

 

7    West Facade of Laon Cathedral, c 1190, Laon

 

There is a more striking advance if we look at the Laonıs westwork, as it was finished later than the nave.  Laonıs western facade is a Gothic leap beyond the Romanesque of Saint-Étienne (17-9).  Instead of an essentially flat design, divided into three parts by raised strip-buttresses, with windows at various levels, we have a more plastic mass, filled with deeply penetrating windows over a projected portal.  The Gothic facade is more unified as a whole.  Its three portals spread across the entire width, as do the three great windows above and the facade triforium.  The whole is further united by the emphasis on the rose window created by its size and its bumping up of the triforium above it.  The twin towers maintain the established facade division, while their plasticity holds them within the overall unity.  ³At Laon, as in Gothic architecture generally, the operating principle was to reduce sheer mass and replace it with intricately framed voids.² (495)

 

 

11 South flank of Notre-Dame, begun 1163, nave buttresses c 1225, Paris, westwork c 1260, Paris,

 

When Louis VI moved to Paris around 1130 the city began to grow even larger, commercial activity burgeoned and a new great cathedral became a necessity.  Notre-Dame was constructed on the Île-de-la-Cité, one of the two islands in the Seine that seem to have been the original seed of the city dating back to Roman times.  It replaced a much earlier, Merovingian church on the site. 

 

The choir and transept, where the altar stands for the bishop to say his Mass, were completed by 1182.  The nave and side-aisles for admitting a larger public to the event, were not completed until around 1225, two generations later.  The westwork of towers and facade were not finished until a century after building began, around 1260. 

 

What is most striking here is the size and prominence of the great rose window in the transept and the flying buttresses of the nave and choir exterior.  The flying buttress adds the last major ingredient of the ensemble of Gothic architecture, and possibly its most prominent.  With the continual opening up of the nave wall,  to create ever more impressively divine light effects, came a weakening of its structure.  The flying buttress was an answer to this structural limit on the basilicaıs expressive goal. 

 

It is also a reminder as to the continuing importance of the interior of the church, in contrast to its exterior.  However elegant and characteristic of the age they appear today, it is hard not to see these spiney, exoskeleton  ribs as particularly attractive to their builders.  If they actually admired them ‹as we may today in our familiarity and appreciation of the style as a whole‹ they would have included them more prominently on their facades rather than doing al they could to down play their presence.

 

The buttresses are there to strengthen the wall at the level of vault, some 250 feet above the floor.  Notre-Dame-de-Paris is a five aisle basilica, and these flying buttresses rise from beyond the outer aisles.  We saw an example of the form at Durham, where flying buttresses are enclosed within the structure as the they carry the ceiling of the tribune gallery.  At Notre-Dame they rise in stages.  The buttresses rising over the outer aisles leaning against the tribune gallery, from which higher buttresses rise against the nave.  We can see the most spectacular of them when we turn our gaze toward the choir at the east end. 

 

The pinnacles and other decorations upon them add a bit of glamour, as the thinness of their structures and the sweep of their curves adds a filigreed elegance.  But cannot be denied that they exist for the benefit of the interior effect of the stained glass brilliance, and at the expense of the exterior finish.

 

 

 

Early Gothic  1140-1194;  High Gothic 1194-1300;  Late Gothic 1300-1500+

 

 

Historians see the second-half of the 12th century as the formative stage of the Gothic style, and so call it the Early Gothic.  The style thirteen century is seen as the period of its mature development and called the High Gothic.  There is unquestionably a logic to this periodization, much the same as that which gives us an early, middle and late of almost any style.  Since styles arenıt platonic forms, or organic growth, but definitional brackets later critics develop to explain the burgeoning variety of human production, we have to admit that our definitions of their periodic development defines not artistic development so much as the shaping of our critical categories. 

 

In order to explain what George Kubler called ³the shape of time² we have given organic titles to our periodization by which we try to grasp it.  It is through the 13th century that we see our identification of the particular set of qualities we gather under the heading of Gothic most strongly present.  It is that suiting our definition we call the High Gothic.   It should not be taken to mean that this is a finer Gothic any more than continuing to use Vasariıs coining of the category as Gothic can be continued to indicate the pejorative meaning he intended.  High Gothic just means really Gothic.

 

Because so much of our definition is build around the importance of Chartres to the literature, and the changes between its earlier and later phases, we begin the High Gothic with it.  Or as our book says, ³Architectural historians usually consider the new Chartres Cathedral the first High Gothic building‹the first to have been planned from the beginning with flying buttresses.²  (495)  Thus we have the seemingly precise High Gothic period of 1194-1300. 

 

 

12   Plan, Chartres Cathedral, as rebuilt after 1194, Chartres

 

All but the westwork of the Early Gothic cathedral at Chartres was destroyed in a fire in 1194.  The monastic churches of the Romanesque period were generally smaller than the urban churches of the Gothic period, and built much quicker.  As we have already seen urban building could take many decades to complete.  The bodies of many Gothic churches are marked by the changes in style and interest that took place over those periods.  The building of churches was financed in a variety of ways.  Taxing the local population, war booty, both came into play.  The great cathedral at Reims was financed largely through the sale of clerical indulgences (church pardons for sins).  The entire reconstruction of Chartres took place in somewhat exceptional 27 years, through the extraordinary taxation of the townspeople, who ³at one point...revolted against the prospect of a heavier tax burden...[and] stormed the bishopıs residence and drove him into exile for four years.² 

 

Indeed the clergy at Chartres were so hated by the local populace that they long required a skywalk entrance into the cathedral, by which they could come and go unmolested.

 

 

Not only the westwork, but the crypt, containing the precious relics that brought large numbers of pilgrims to the church ‹the mantle of the Virgin and the famous Black Madonna‹survived the great fire.  The rebuilding was over the Romanesque outline, but in a quite different, Gothic structure.  The six part compartments over alternating piers of the earlier design were replaced by a continuous repetition of rectangular bays carrying four-part, pointed vaults.  ³The visual effect of these changes was to unify the interior...so the viewers saw them ...as individuals of space.  The nave became a vast continuous hall.² (497)   Rather, that is, than the series of compartments, that marked the Romanesque.  

 

The design of the nave included only a single row of side-aisles with buttresses reaching in from beyond.  It includes two sets of side aisles in the choir, which, as a the later stage of Laon, now extended well beyond the crossing of the transepts.

 

 

13   Nave, Chartres Cathedral, begun 1194, Chartres

       Elevations of nave walls: Laon and Chartres

 

The flying buttress made appeared as the basilica eliminated the tribune gallery, that had previously buttressed the nave clerestory wall.  The nave was now one monumental story high, buttressed by the flying bridges of the structureıs exoskeleton.  On the inside one saw triforium arcading tracery and glass in lancet windows reaching all the way down the hall to the distant windows of the choir.  Where the Romanesque church surrounded the worshipper with stone, the Gothic worshipper was surrounded by colored light. 

 

³Despite the vastly increased size of the clerestory windows, the Chartres nave is relatively dark.² (499)  That is because the windows were filled with stained glass not clear glass, and the glory of stained glass is the depth and richness of its colors, particularly the reds and blues.  It was mystical light the designers sought, not a brighter interior.   

 

 

14   Virgin and Child and angels (Notre Dame de la Belle Verrière), Choir window, Chartres, c 1170, 16ı

 

One of the most valuable aspects of Chartres is the survival there of some of the earliest stained glass windows.  The Notre-Dame de la Belle Verrière window In the choir is preserved from the period before the great fire.  It shows the enthroned virgin with the Christ child in her lap, in a rich scene of worship against a red background.  Mary is seen as the crowned-queen of heaven, with a halo behind her head and accompanied by the dove of the holy spirit.  

 

We can compare it with the Theotokos and Child of Hagia Sophia (12-16).  For our text, the comparison ³highlights not only the Byzantine imageıs greater severity and aloofness but also the sharp difference between the light-reflecting mosaic medium and Gothic light-transmitting stained glass.²  

 

I donıt know what the point of this comparison is, if not to inform us that Byzantine imagery is more ³aloof² than Gothic imagery.  And beyond the relatively unhappy connotation of ³aloof² I donıt know what that is intended to indicate to us about the differences between Eastern and ³Western² Christianities. 

 

On the other hand, ³The artist represented Mary as the beautiful, young, rather worldly, Queen of Heaven, haloed, crowned, and accompanied by the Holy Spirit dove.²  (499-500)

 

I canıt see this difference at all, looking at the two images ‹which you can hold together in your book by folding the pages a bit.  Let me encourage you to see what you can see, and to let me know if you do see useful differences.   I donıt mean I canıt tell the images apart, but that I canıt see how one is somehow more aloof or less beautiful or worldly or young.

 

³Byzantine and Gothic architects used light to transform the material world into the spiritual, but in opposite ways. In Gothic architecture, light was transmitted through a kind of diffracting screen of stone-set glass.  In Byzantine architecture, light was reflected from myriad glass tesserae set into the thick masonry wall.² (500)

 

Letıs look at the image for a moment.  The first thing we should notice is its enframement.  It is in a lancet, pointed-arch, outline, broken up by the stone bar grid of the armature that supports it.  Within the this form we have the lead bounded pieces of colored glass.  There is an outline border band in red with circles of blue, with a flower in each circle and one in between.  The body of the frame is broken up into a central, red panel flanked by narrow blue based panels.  The side panels are filled with angels bearing trumpets and incense holders.  The top angels swing their incense holders into the red ground where the virgin Mary is seated, beneath the dove of the holy spirit.  The tympanum shaped wedge of the window shows architectural roofs and turrets behind the central panel, as if this were all taking place in a heavenly palace.

 

 

15   Rose window and lancets, north transept, Chartres, c 1220, 43ı diameter

 

Thanks to the flying buttresses the great windows grew larger and larger.  They were all composed of small pieces of glass leaded into larger panels, but these larger panels grew to cover a greater and greater area.  Our book includes a large plate of the windows at the end of the north transept.  The set was the gift of the Queen of France, Blanche of Castile around 1220.  The lancetıs supporting the rose are composed of yellow fleurs-de-lis on a blue ground and yellow castles on a red ground, both royal motifs.  In the large lancets we see compositions with Saint Anne flanked by prophets.  Above in the Rose we see the Virgin and child at the center and new testament figures.  There are labels everywhere, though none could actually be from the floor of the cathedral. 

 

The point of the imagery is place the saints there and to have the light shine through them upon the worshippers,  They are there for the symbolic significance of their presence, and only secondarily for us to read their imagery.  From below what is experienced is the richness of the color and the fact of images in attendance.  No worshipper at Chartres ever had the view of these windows that we can through color photography and printing. 

 

³The rose and lancets change in hue and intensity with the hours, turning solid architecture into a floating vision of the celestial heavens.²  (502)  That is the point.  Like the Byzantine church, the Gothic cathedral is a vision of heaven that the worshipper can enter to pray. 

 

 

*     The South transept, Chartres, c1220-1230,

 

The canopies of the south transept portals extend well-out from the doorways, creating a covered porch beyond the concentric concavities of the jambs. The richness of the entire ensemble is overwhelmingly busy compared to the austerity of the Royal Portals on the west. This plastic reaching out into space from the wall of the structure is one of the hall marks of the Gothic.  Each doorway has a separate iconographic program and the set of three are tied together

 

 

16   St. Martin, St. Jerome, and St. Gregory, Porch of the Confessors, c1220-1230, right doorway, south transept

 

The right doorway of the southern portal is called the porch of the confessors.  Our image of three figures on the inside jamb shows Saints Martin, Jerome and Gregory.  We can see here how far the style has moved since the middle of the previous century.  Rather than standing out from the pillar as a sort of emanation, they are provided with a full architectural settings.  The figures each stand over identifying subtext-figures, supported by jamb sized pedestals and beneath architectural canopies.  Though still somewhat elongated, they are close to normal proportions and so fully formed that you do not see the pillars behind them.  Each is quite an individual psychological type with its own personality and near-portrait-specific features. 

 

Beyond their individuality the separate Saints seem to relate to each other.  Jerome is shown turning towards Martin, and seems to look at him as he gesture to his book.  Gregory could be looking across to ward the figures on the opposite side.  Each is of a different stature. 

 

 

17   Saint Theodore, jamb statue, Porch of Martyrs (left door, south trains) , c1230

 

Across the portal are Saints Stephen, Clement and Lawrence, equally individual in their stature, facial expressions, poses and attributes.  And on the outer end here there is a fourth figure, Saint Theodore, who is portrayed as ³an ideal Christian knight...clothed in the cloak and chain-mail armor of Gothic Crusaders.  The handsome long-haired youth holds his spear firmly in his right hand and rests his left hand on his shield.  He turns his head to the left and swings out his hip to the right.²

 

All of this seems like highly apt description and analysis to me.  What comes next is strange.  It is what I have been calling survey myopia a sort of hegemonic theory that tries to reduce all creativity to repetitions of the first time a famous example has approached the same conception.  Its a bit like saying every apple in sculpture is either inspired by the one Eve shared with Adam or Paris awarded to Venus. 

 

³The bodyıs resulting torsion and pronounced sway call to mind Classical Greek statuary, especially the contrapposto stance of Polykleitosıs Spear Bearer (5-38).  It is not inappropriate to speak of the changes that occurred in thirteenth-century Gothic sculpture as a second ³Classical Revolution.²

 

Are we once again amidst a slow cultural shift from less to more naturalistic sculptural imagery?  Yes.  Are we at a stage somewhere between that seen in the stiffly Archaic  and that in the more natural Classical?  Yes again.  Itıs also about the same level we passed through, moving in the other direction in the Philosopher Sarcophagus in the Vatican Museum (10-72) of the late third century CE  or the Enthroned Christ of the later fourth (11-6).  Those who continue this survey up to the present will pass through it again in the early twentieth century. 

 

To liken the figure of Saint Theodore to Polykleitosıs Spear Bearer, however is bizarre.  It is like comparing anyone you see with a body builderıs physique to the only celebrity bodybuilder you know.  We will pass another, even more inappropriate example of this ³just-like-the-Greeks² analysis the last week of the semester when a Gandharan Buddha is compared with Apollo.[4]

 

The fact is this Saint Theodore is a particularly nice work of sculpture, and it stands in a spot where it catches good light for photography and it radiates a level of naturalism that is quite enjoyable after the seven or eight centuries of medieval European abstractions we have been passing through, over the past few weeks.  Still, it is quite unkind to compare its wooden abstraction with Polykleitosıs Spear Bearer

 

We are turning a revolutionary corner, but we are doing so, so slowly, most historians donıt acknowledge it until the Renaissance, a couple of centuries from this point.

 

You should be checking these our for comparison yourself. 

 

 


[1] Erwin Panofsky, trans., Abbot Suger on the Abby Church of Saint-Denis and Its Art Treasures, 2nd ed. Princeton, 101.  Quoted in Gardner 489.

[2] Ibid,, 55.

[3] Gardnerıs text continues to say Islamic designers, which I am resisting, for the reasons Iıve been stating.  Neither the Sasanianıs who used the forms earlier, nor the French who used them in Gothic structures, saw them as religious structures. 

[4]  See page 171.