Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 6.djvu/759

 GOTHIC

679

GOTHIC

French Cron-n established a temporal control over the papacy. The exile at Avignon, begun in 1305, fol- lowed as it was by the Great Schism, broke the links that bound kings and peoples to the hitherto domi- nant Church, opened the doors of Italy to the influx of the neo-paganism that came from the East with the fall of Constantinople in 1453, permitted the uprising of heresy in all parts of Europe, and made possible the

Fal-us de Justice, K

supremacy in Italy of the tyrants of the fourteenth cen- tury — \'isconti. Sforza, Medici. The Black Death, which scourged all Europe, and the Hundred Years War in France brought down from its high estate the civilization that had flowered at Chartres, and Reims, and Amiens, and when architecture began to recover itself in France after the return of peace, its advance was on lines suggested by the fourteenth century Gothic of England, which had continued to grow rich and fertile, the most vital school of Gothic art of the time in Europe. The seeds were sown during the war itself, the chapel of St. John Baptist of the cathe- dral of Amiens, built in 1375, being of a fully devel- oped Flamboyant style. From now on the substitu- tion was complete; whatever building there was, was explicitly Flamboyant; the old logical system, the old breadth and nobility of design, detail always duly sub- ordinated to just composition, were gone almost in a night. Says Enlart: "Ce style, qui est I'exageration et la decadence de I'art gothique, n'apporte presque aucun perfectionnement a I'art de batir ou de dessi- ner, mais seulement un systeme decoratif tres particu- lier et plus ou moins arbitraire, qui, applique sans ex- ception dans les moindres details, produit beaucoup d'effet et beaucoup d'harmonie d'ensemble" (This style, which is the exaggeration and decadence of Gothic art, adds hardly any perfecting to the art of building or of designing, but only a very peculiar and more or less arbitrary system of decoration, which, when applied with thorough consistency to the mi- nutest details, is very effective and produces a very harmonious general effect. — "Manuel d'archeologie fran^ais", I, 586).

The delicate and fantastic beauty of Flamboyant de- tail is unquestionable, and, as decoration, thelacelike webs of thin lines, graceful cur\-ing forms, and craftily spotted lights and shades, as they appear in Rouen, Troyes, and Abbeville west fronts and the transepts of Beauvais, in Louviers, Caudebec, Notre-Dame de I'Epine, St. Maclou, Rouen, St-Michel, and St-Ger- niain, Amiens, are amongst the most charming crea- tions of artistic fancy. It must be remembered, how- ever, that it is all strictly a form of decoration, not an architectonic style, nor even a sub-school thereof, un- less in such peculiarly admirable examples as the Troyes facade, the chevet of Mt. St-Michel, and the very wonderful St-Germain at .\miens, the still persisting quality of structural integrity combined with just pro-

portions and a certain unusual restraint in the placing of decoration justify a dignity hardly argued bv the unparalleled license of the general output of the flam- boyant period. To a certain extent it is an architect- ural mystery, for it is an excessive refinement of art appearing after the close of a period of sound and vig- orous civilization, in the midst of war and anarchy, contemporaneously with religious degradation, grow- ing side by side with tendencies that in a few years were to bring the civilization it connotes forever to an end. In this it was not alone, however. Similar con- ditions in Italy surrounded the culmination of the great arts of paintmg and sculpture, while in England tlie delicate and exquisite Perpendicular Gothic reached its highest development in the reign of Henry VIII. Says Mr. Porter, in considering this phenome- non: "Thus in the hour of political and economic mis- fortune, in the midst of the financial ruin and degrada- tion of the Church, was bom flamboyant architecture — the last frail blossom of medieval genius. Did this art come into being as a prophetic manifestation of the great national awakening that was to produce Jeanne d'.\rc and shake off the Engli.sh yoke? I should hardly dare affirm it, for the historj' of architecture ever reflects, rather than presages, economic develop- ments" (op. cit., II, X, 368). One may go further even than this, and say that the flowering of art is always a generation or more later than the causes of its being. Dante and Giotto are the last of the medieval epoch, rather than the forerunners of the Renaissance. Shakespeare is Ehzabethan by accident of birth, but essentially he is the fruit of pre-Reformation England. The early Renaissance in Italy is the flowering of medievalism, rather than the germinating seed of the Renaissance, and similarly the poetic, if inorganic, Flamboyant art of France takes its colour not from the downfall of Catholic civilization in fifteenth-century PVance, but from the better days that preceded the great debdcle. The magic of fifteenth-century art is neither the unwholesome iridescence of decay nor the first brightening towards the dav\-n of a Renaissance, but the afterglow of a great day, in the brightness of which stood the creative personalities of Sts. Odo of Cluny and Robert of Molesme, Bernard and Norbert, Gregory VII and Innocent III, King Philip Augustus and King Louis IX.

Generally speaking, fifteenth-centurj' architecture throughout Europe is secular as opposed to the Clu-

FiHST Court, St. John's College, Cambridge

niac Romanesque and Norman, and the Cistercian Gothic of the three preceding centuries. Perpendicu- lar Gothic in England and its derivative, Tudor, is largely the product of guilds of architects, sculptors, and masons, working primaril)' for great merchants and the friars, the latter being the dominant rehgious influence of the time. In France and Flanders the Flamboyant style is peculiarly the product of the in- dividualistic architect and the purvevor of artistic luxuries, and during the entire period the best and most significant work Ls to be sought amongst guild-