A somewhat detailed consideration of the leading constructive characteristics of this building, and a comparison of them with those of other kindred buildings, will enlarge our understanding of the Gothic principles which are peculiar to France. These principles are substantially carried out in all of the great churches which were erected in this region between 1160 and 1220; but they were carried out more completely and consistently in some of them than in others. Hardly one of them unites all the perfections of which the entire group affords illustration; and the great variety of forms, under which the same leading idea struggles for embodiment, gives striking evidence of the active spirit of invention which animated this remarkable building movement.
One marked peculiarity of the Cathedral of Paris is that its piers are not adapted in form and magnitude to its sexpartite vaults. In this respect the adjustment of piers to vaults is the precise reverse of that which we have seen in the nave of Noyon, where the piers, fashioned for sexpartite vaults, are now covered with those of the four-celled form. It would seem that in Paris quadripartite vaults must have been intended when the plan was laid out, and that, for some now unknown reason, the sexpartite form was adopted after the building had been carried up to the springing of the vaults. For up to this level the construction of the piers is perfectly adapted for quadripartite vaulting—all the ground-story columns being of equal magnitude, and each of them carrying a group of three vaulting shafts, of which one group is precisely like another. The incongruity thus presented in both Paris and Noyon between the forms of the vaults and the adjustment of their supports is a serious defect in each of these otherwise admirable structures as they now exist; a defect which so contradicts the logic of the Gothic system as to leave little doubt that it was in each case the result of changes made in the original project—the changes having been wrought at Noyon probably at a later date than the original construction of the building, and at Paris after the construction had reached the springing of the vaults. [1]
- ↑ M. Viollet-le-Duc, s.v. Construction, remarks that the ill adjustment of the piers to the vaults in the Cathedral of Paris had in his early studies of the building greatly puzzled him; but that in the course of later investigations he perceived that the necessities of the sexpartite vault system were really provided for by the monolithic shafts which surround every alternate one of the piers which divide the
