Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 7.djvu/318

 220 REMARKS ON THE COMPLETE GOTHIC Halberstadt (xxv.), where %iiig buttresses were intended ; the nave of Cologne (xxxvi.), where the principle appears fully developed ; and the choir of that edifice (xli.), which shows the external frame-work of composite and flying buttresses carried still further. St. Sebaldus, at Nuremburg (Ivii.) — in the choir — shows this principle of frame-work well carried through in three aisles of equal height ; as Halberstadt (xlvii.) does for the more ordinary form, with clerestory and side aisles. The Church of St. Catharine, at Oppenheim (of which a descrijotion has been published by M. Miiller), is a fine example of a structure thus reduced to frame-work, the walls being thin and paneled, the windows large, with no tri- foriura, the buttresses deep, and the space between them, in their lower parts, being formed into chapels, opening into the church on the inside, and having large windows out- wards (like King's College Chapel), so that there is very little wall. Mr. K. observes also (xx.), with reference to Heisterbach, that the introduction of the pol^^gonal apse, instead of the earlier semi-circular apse, made it possible to have an organic connexion of the apse vaulting with the vaulting of the choir ; and thus there was a coherent frame- work running through the whole. He conceives also (xxxii.), with reference to the Dominican Church at Ratisbon, that the Dominicans and Franciscans, who had great influence at the time to which he refers (1230 — 1240), aimed at sim- plicity even in building ; and thus, aU useless ornament being avoided, and the essential elements of the structure developed under the guidance of the pointed arch, the new art of building was formed.^ n. Principle of Tracery. — The tracerjj^ which fills the openings of windows in the Complete Gothic style may be considered as growing out of the idea of frame-work. Tracery, tlie more the blank wall disappears, the branches ; or rather, which makes his more satisfactory is the effect (xlvii.) ; plates, ilhistrating this supposed deriva- <ind (Ixix.), with reference to Frankfort tion, exhibit analogies which are really Cathedral, that in Germany the develop- interesting. Yet we see in these plates ment of the idea did not proceed to its that the principle of frame-work cannot completion, — which, he says, would have absorb the whole of the edifice. In his led builders to reduce the roof to a skele- hypothetical wicker-work archetypes of ton of ti-aeery, filled with stained glass. Gothic work, the solid parts of wall, or the ^ The prevalence of the principle of spandrels of :u"ches, for instance, are com- frame-work in Gothic architecture is the posed of close basket-work ; a mode of cii'cumstaiice which gives a sort of ap- construction which suggests the notion of parent jjlausibility to Sir James Hall's an org.inisation to which a solid wall in theory of the derivation of the Gothic no way conforms, style I'rnm structures composed of flexible