Page:Character of Renaissance Architecture.djvu/88

58 between these ribs are vaulted over with courses of masonry slightly arched from rib to rib, and thus running in a direction perpendicular to that of the courses in a Gothic vault cell, as in B, Figure 27. A series of hollowed gores are thus formed which give a scalloped instead of a plain circular plan to the vault as a whole. But such a vault differs fundamentally from a Gothic vault. For the line of the crown of each cell is the steep segmental curve ab in A, Figure 29. In other words, the vault as a whole is a hemisphere with its surface broken into shallow hollows like the gores of a melon. It is obvious that in a vault with cells so shaped the thrusts are as great at all points in the circumference as they are in a simple hemispherical dome, and that such a vault can have no Gothic character. To develop this into any real likeness to a Gothic vault, it would be necessary to reduce it to an unbroken circular plan by cutting off the scallops at its base so that it would fit into the circular drum, upon the inner surface of which it would now intersect in series of small arches, one for each hollowed gore, with its springing at the point d and its crown at the point c. Then these arches would have to be raised by stilting and pointing until their crowns were brought up to the level, or near the level, of the point b as in B of the same figure. Thus the line dc, which represents the height of the arches in the first stage of this development, becomes the line ac in the second stage. So long as the chord of the arc bc is a steeply inclined line, the vaulting cells cannot bear upon the ribs, nor can the thrusts of the vault be concentrated in a Gothic way.