GOTHIC
679
GOTHIC
French Cron-n established a temporal control over the
papacy. The exile at Avignon, begun in 1305, fol-
lowed as it was by the Great Schism, broke the links
that bound kings and peoples to the hitherto domi-
nant Church, opened the doors of Italy to the influx of
the neo-paganism that came from the East with the
fall of Constantinople in 1453, permitted the uprising
of heresy in all parts of Europe, and made possible the
Fal-us de Justice, K
supremacy in Italy of the tyrants of the fourteenth cen-
tury — \'isconti. Sforza, Medici. The Black Death,
which scourged all Europe, and the Hundred Years
War in France brought down from its high estate the
civilization that had flowered at Chartres, and Reims,
and Amiens, and when architecture began to recover
itself in France after the return of peace, its advance
was on lines suggested by the fourteenth century
Gothic of England, which had continued to grow rich
and fertile, the most vital school of Gothic art of the
time in Europe. The seeds were sown during the
war itself, the chapel of St. John Baptist of the cathe-
dral of Amiens, built in 1375, being of a fully devel-
oped Flamboyant style. From now on the substitu-
tion was complete; whatever building there was, was
explicitly Flamboyant; the old logical system, the old
breadth and nobility of design, detail always duly sub-
ordinated to just composition, were gone almost in a
night. Says Enlart: "Ce style, qui est I'exageration
et la decadence de I'art gothique, n'apporte presque
aucun perfectionnement a I'art de batir ou de dessi-
ner, mais seulement un systeme decoratif tres particu-
lier et plus ou moins arbitraire, qui, applique sans ex-
ception dans les moindres details, produit beaucoup
d'effet et beaucoup d'harmonie d'ensemble" (This
style, which is the exaggeration and decadence of
Gothic art, adds hardly any perfecting to the art of
building or of designing, but only a very peculiar and
more or less arbitrary system of decoration, which,
when applied with thorough consistency to the mi-
nutest details, is very effective and produces a very
harmonious general effect. — "Manuel d'archeologie
fran^ais", I, 586).
The delicate and fantastic beauty of Flamboyant de- tail is unquestionable, and, as decoration, thelacelike webs of thin lines, graceful cur\-ing forms, and craftily spotted lights and shades, as they appear in Rouen, Troyes, and Abbeville west fronts and the transepts of Beauvais, in Louviers, Caudebec, Notre-Dame de I'Epine, St. Maclou, Rouen, St-Michel, and St-Ger- niain, Amiens, are amongst the most charming crea- tions of artistic fancy. It must be remembered, how- ever, that it is all strictly a form of decoration, not an architectonic style, nor even a sub-school thereof, un- less in such peculiarly admirable examples as the Troyes facade, the chevet of Mt. St-Michel, and the very wonderful St-Germain at .\miens, the still persisting quality of structural integrity combined with just pro-
portions and a certain unusual restraint in the placing
of decoration justify a dignity hardly argued bv the
unparalleled license of the general output of the flam-
boyant period. To a certain extent it is an architect-
ural mystery, for it is an excessive refinement of art
appearing after the close of a period of sound and vig-
orous civilization, in the midst of war and anarchy,
contemporaneously with religious degradation, grow-
ing side by side with tendencies that in a few years
were to bring the civilization it connotes forever to an
end. In this it was not alone, however. Similar con-
ditions in Italy surrounded the culmination of the
great arts of paintmg and sculpture, while in England
tlie delicate and exquisite Perpendicular Gothic
reached its highest development in the reign of Henry
VIII. Says Mr. Porter, in considering this phenome-
non: "Thus in the hour of political and economic mis-
fortune, in the midst of the financial ruin and degrada-
tion of the Church, was bom flamboyant architecture
— the last frail blossom of medieval genius. Did this
art come into being as a prophetic manifestation of the
great national awakening that was to produce Jeanne
d'.\rc and shake off the Engli.sh yoke? I should
hardly dare affirm it, for the historj' of architecture
ever reflects, rather than presages, economic develop-
ments" (op. cit., II, X, 368). One may go further even
than this, and say that the flowering of art is always a
generation or more later than the causes of its being.
Dante and Giotto are the last of the medieval epoch,
rather than the forerunners of the Renaissance.
Shakespeare is Ehzabethan by accident of birth, but
essentially he is the fruit of pre-Reformation England.
The early Renaissance in Italy is the flowering of
medievalism, rather than the germinating seed of the
Renaissance, and similarly the poetic, if inorganic,
Flamboyant art of France takes its colour not from the
downfall of Catholic civilization in fifteenth-century
PVance, but from the better days that preceded the
great debdcle. The magic of fifteenth-century art is
neither the unwholesome iridescence of decay nor the
first brightening towards the dav\-n of a Renaissance,
but the afterglow of a great day, in the brightness of
which stood the creative personalities of Sts. Odo of
Cluny and Robert of Molesme, Bernard and Norbert,
Gregory VII and Innocent III, King Philip Augustus
and King Louis IX.
Generally speaking, fifteenth-centurj' architecture throughout Europe is secular as opposed to the Clu-
FiHST Court, St. John's College, Cambridge
niac Romanesque and Norman, and the Cistercian
Gothic of the three preceding centuries. Perpendicu-
lar Gothic in England and its derivative, Tudor, is
largely the product of guilds of architects, sculptors,
and masons, working primaril)' for great merchants
and the friars, the latter being the dominant rehgious
influence of the time. In France and Flanders the
Flamboyant style is peculiarly the product of the in-
dividualistic architect and the purvevor of artistic
luxuries, and during the entire period the best and
most significant work Ls to be sought amongst guild-
