Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 7.djvu/326

 2£8 REMARTCS ON THE COMPLETE GOTHIC the square, by certcain sloping surfaces variously disposed ; the pinnacles and dormer ^^^ndo^vs which break and animate the outline not being made to spring out of any obvious construction. In many of the churches of Normandy, (we may take St. Stephen's, at Caen, as a conspicuous instance,) groups of canopies on shafts, of exceedingly light and open structure, decorate the transition from the square tower to the octago- nal spire, and break the rectilinear outline of the spire itself; but they do not suggest to the mind, as the German spires, of which I speak, do, the conception of the octagonal struc- ture existing in the mass of the square tower, as a kind of formatiA'e nlsus, which at last burst out freely in the ujDper part of the tower, and shoots upwards in the spire, still retaining an organic connection with the square tower, out of which it springs ; this tower, also, is not an inert mass, but has itself a tendency to upward growth, shown in turrets, pinnacles, and other portions of a like character.^ Perhaps this co-existence of the tendency to the gro^i-h of a square tower and an octagonal spire in the same space, was at first not distinctly conceived or consciously contem- plated, but was produced by the attempt to give to the forms of the lower and upper parts of the towers, which, as I have said, were data supplied by the previous modes of church building, that appearance of organic connection which the spirit of Gothic architecture demands ; and which I have attempted in some measure to mark, by speaking of the Principle of Frame-work. We see the co-existence of the two tendencies in various degrees of development in the great structures to which I have referred. At Freiburg the square lower part of the tower is comparatively blank. The pre- paration for the transition to the octagonal part begins, however, under the first open gallery which runs round the tower ; and in this gallery, the impression of the square form is further diluted by making the sides into faces, and making the four angles acute. Above this gallery we have an open octagonal lanthorn, having eight fine tracery windows, and triangular canopies ; while the detached angles of the square, shooting up into niches and pinnacles, are still ® Mr. Willis, in his Architecture of the the transition from the scjuare tower to Middle Af/es, p. 14J5, has noticed the skill the octagonal spire, with wliieh the German architects manage