Page:A history of architecture on the comparative method for the student, craftsman, and amateur.djvu/327

 GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE IN EUROPE. 269 which, indeed, is so characteristic as to give a suggestion of height coinciding with the aspiring tendency of the style and its connection with the rehgious enthusiasm of the period. In the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries the Gothic masons carried to the utmost the use of stone as a building material, heaping it up in towers that rose on open archways through the lofty roofs of the naves and transepts, and tapered away in shell-like spires embroidered in all the fretwork of lace- like tracery. They hung it aloft in ponderous vaults treated by art to seem the gossamer web of nature, scarce capable of bearing the stalactite pendants in which the fancy of the fifteenth century found its expression, and eventually pushing their practice to the furthest boundaries, they cut the granular stone to the thin- ness of fibrous wood or iron, and revelled in tricks of construction and marvels of workmanship. The Gothic architects, developing still further the principles of Romanesque architecture (page 221), had to employ the materials at hand according to their nature, and to seek for those laws of elasticity and equilibrium which were substituted for those of inert stability as practised by the Greeks and Romans. This elasticity was obtained by the employment of stone laid in narrow courses with tolerably thick mortar joints. Every vertical support in Gothic architecture depended for its stability on being stayed by a buttress, which in its turn was weighted by a pinnacle ; and every arch-thrust met another which counteracted it. In the case of the nave vaults, the collected pressures of the vaulting and roof were counteracted by arches, called flying buttresses, leaning against the nave wall and sup- ported at some distance by massive piers, weighted with tall pinnacles (Nos. log a, 141 f, g, h, and 153 a). Walls became mere enclosures, and the entire structure consisted of a framework of piers, buttresses, arches, and ribbed vaulting held in equilibrium by the combination of oblique forces neutralizing each other (No. 141). Even the walls themselves were occupied principally by glazed windows, divided by stone mullions, having their upper parts designed with combinations of curves of great variety. No such system of construction, it is evident, could have been developed without the employment of such a material as stone, laid in tolerably small courses with mortar joints, which gave the necessary elasticity to the various pressures. These principles led to the introduction of much novelty in mouldmgs, capitals and piers, for the numerous vaulting ribs being collected at intervals were supported on capitals of a shape formed to fit them, and these were provided with shafts, some- times carried on corbels and sometimes continued to the ground, influencing very largely the form of the nave piers. Further, the comparative scarcity of materials taught the Gothic