Paris and environs with routes from London to Paris : handbook for travellers / by Karl Baedeker.

  • Karl Baedeker
Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Paris and environs with routes from London to Paris : handbook for travellers / by Karl Baedeker. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    served. Industrial art was at a comparatively low ebb during the Romanesque period; but a promising beginning is observable in the work of the goldsmiths and in (he allied art of enamelling, as well as in the embroidering of tapestry. We have seen how the use of the Romanesque vaulting led to the darkening of church-interiors. However welcome this mav have been in the vivid sunlight of the south, it was unsuitable in the gloomier climate of the north. .\s an escape from this disad- vantage the architects found that they might build their naves as wide and as high as they chose, and pierce their walls with many windows, if only the piers that sujiported the vaulting were suf- Hciently strengthened from without. The invention of ordinary and living buttresses led to the rise of the new architecture that was to prevail in the north for over three centuries; and this in- vention was made in the Isle de France, in the centre of Northern France. The French, therefore, have not unrea.sonably attempted to dis])lace the once somewhat contemptuous name of Givnnc .\rt in favour of the title ‘French .\rt’. Light could now be admitted so freely that the churches seemed almost ‘built of light’, to borrow a phrase once applied to the Sainte-Chapelle at Paris. The huge windows were now universally and naturally set in the pointed arches originally borrowed from the East; and their gradual adorn- ment with ever richer tracery, the embellishment of the buttresses with l)osses and crockets, and of the pediments with linials, the l)rolongation of the nave into the choir and of the aisles into the ambulatory, and the enhanced size and importance of the crossing and the transepts, are all characteristic of the French Gothic style. The rich and rapid development of the new art was powerfully fostered by the contemporaneous growth in the power of the towns, and by the rise and progress of the trade-guilds. .\s the French Ro- manesque churches arose chiefly in connection with the monasteries (especially the Cistercian and Clnniac) and bore a sacerdotal stamp, so the Gothic cathedrals testify to the strength and prosperity of the towns and, in spite of their heavenward aspiration, breathe the joy of mundane life. As no town was willing to lag behind the rest, these wondrous buildings arose in every quarter. Whether Gothic art attained its highest develo])ment in France is a question that must be answered in accordance with personal taste. There is no doubt, however, that in France it reached its earliest bloom. .And the earliest examples, in which there are evident traces of a mighty struggle, naturally attract the student lirst and retain his interest longest. The transition from Roman- esque to Gothic may be traced in the abbey-church of tSt-Denis, consecrated by Abbot Suger in the year 1140. The earliest purely Gothic cathedral of large size is that of Loon, with its remarkably spacious interior. Notre-Dame at Paris and the cathedral oi Chartres
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