Page:Charles Moore--Development and Character of Gothic Architecture.djvu/284

Rh constituted like the mediæval artists of France, and disciplined as they were by the Greek traditions that had come through the Byzantine channel, naturally led to results having much in common with those that had before been reached in a similar way by the Greeks. Not, however, that the mediæval outlook into the world of nature, or the mediæval apprehensions of beauty, were the same as those of the Greeks. They were, of course, in many respects so widely different that in some aspects of the matter we might almost conclude that there was nothing in common between them. The Greek demanded physical beauty. In drawing his material from nature he rejected all that was not outwardly beautiful.

FIG. 172. Selection with him was an inborn principle and a constant habit. The mediæval French artist, on the contrary, saw the beauty that may coexist with imperfection; and, although he also exercised a spirit of choice, this spirit was of a more penetrative nature, and had a correspondingly wider range. But in understanding of the form chosen, and in apprehension of just that treatment of it which the ends of plastic art demand, there was the closest similarity between the Phidian sculptors and those of the Ile-de-France in the thirteenth century. It is this which gives the likeness to Greek art that we recognise in the sculpture of the portal of the Virgin; but it is only in form that this tympanum is of such high excellence. The expression of the lintel of Senlis is by no means equalled in this design.