Page:Charles Moore--Development and Character of Gothic Architecture.djvu/100

Rh I have remarked above that no Gothic building unites all the perfections of which the entire group affords illustration; but of the nave of Amiens it may be said that a more admirable carrying out of Gothic principles can hardly be imagined.

The nave of St. Denis resembles in some of its features, though not in its proportions, that of Amiens, to which it is not long subsequent in date. Its vaults, however, are in form more like the earlier ones of which those of the Church of St. Leu d'Esserent are an instance. Their arches are of low sweep, and do not give to the vaults so much soaring expression as was common in contemporaneous constructions. The lower piers are largely a return to the Romanesque type—consisting of square members with engaged shafts, as in the section, Fig. 39. The three principal vaulting shafts rise without interruption from the pavement, while those of the longitudinal arches rest, as at Amiens, upon the triforium ledge. In the choir still another vaulting system is employed. Here the lower piers are plain round columns, against which the group of principal vaulting shafts rise, cutting through their capitals, and to these capitals the shafts of the longitudinal ribs descend, so that above the ground-story there are five shafts against each pier, as at Chartres and Reims.

The enormous, though ill-proportioned and yet magnificent choir of Beauvais presents, as it now exists, no new features in its vaulting system. The existing sexpartite vaults are not of the original design, but were probably constructed towards the end of the thirteenth century when, after serious ruptures had taken place in consequence of faulty con-