Page:Charles Moore--Development and Character of Gothic Architecture.djvu/200

Rh and have no capitals, the impost being continuous. The walls are plain and unbroken save by tall narrow lancets, one in each bay of the aisles. Externally there are buttresses of considerable projection which rise, with four set-offs, to the wall cornice. In the chief monument of German mediæval art, the Cathedral of Cologne|, the Gothic structural system is, indeed, complete. The great French models—Amiens and Beauvais, which directly prompted the erection of this building—were closely followed as regards their mechanical principles. The vaults have all the functional ribs that are peculiar to France, and their cells exhibit those twisted surfaces which generally distinguish Gothic vault construction. The upright supports are functionally designed, compactly grouped, and are continuous from the pavement, while a complete and logical system of buttresses is brought to bear upon the vault thrusts. But Cologne is a late construction, the greater part of it dating from the fourteenth and subsequent centuries. Even the choir, the oldest part, was not begun till 1248, and it was not consecrated till 1322. It is in no sense a development of anything German, but is, in its structural system, strictly an importation from France. It is a copy made in a spirit, not so much of appreciation as of emulation. It shows a faithful study and an intelligent apprehension of the mechanism of Gothic, but it reveals no inventive freedom, no spontaneous exercise of native genius. In the whole range of pointed architecture in Germany there is no