Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 7.djvu/331

 AND AFTER-GOTHIC STYLES IX GERMANY. 23:3 and thus lifted into the air such vaults as those of the choirs at Cologne and Amiens. The After- Gothic builders carried their vaults to a great height, but no longer cared to give them a manifest organic connexion with the ground. In their edi- fices, the vaults rest upon blank walls, or are supported upon cylindrical or polygonal pillars, out of which the vaulting ribs spring abruptly with a discontinuous impost. The windows are made very long by the height of the building, but have no canopies ; there are considerable spaces of blank wall ; the but- tresses have no pinnacles, and are stopped by a sloping top below the eaves of the roof The roof is exceedingly high and steep, but commonly of plain slate, and, as I have said, with eaves. And thus the later churches of Germany, though conspicuous for their height, have none of that look of up- ward growth, which gave beauty and life to the elevation of the pure Gothic works, but seem as if they were buoyed up by some power acting on the whole bulk, like a balloon. This idea of an elevation of internal buoyancy rather than of universal growth of the parts, appears further in the practice which became so common in the later churches of making the three aisles of the same height ; as, for instance, in the choirs of St. Sebaldus' and St. Lav>'rence's at Nuremberg, and in St. Stephen's at Vienna. And it must be allowed that the earlier mode of giving great elevation by means of an external frame-work of flying buttresses carried over the side aisles, was not without its disadvantages. For in order to sustain the vault at so great a height as the choir of Cologne or of Amiens, the buttresses were made so massive, that instead of being subordinate to the central structure, they rather appear to be themselves the principal masses. When we look at Cologne Cathedral from the east, it offers itself to us rather as a circular range of great buttress turrets, among which the central erection is quite inconspicuous, than as a clerestory supported by stages of flying buttresses in due subordination to the central roof In this respect, edifices in which the same extravagant elevation was not aimed at, as the nave of Strasburg Minster, and most of our English Cathedrals, contrast favourably with the more ambitious plans of such buildings as Cologne, Amiens, and Beauvais, and exhibit the organisation of the building in a far more luminous and satisfactoiy aspect. But the interior eflect of the principle of buoyancy, as manifested in three tall aisles of VOL. VII. I I