Page:Charles Moore--Development and Character of Gothic Architecture.djvu/73

Rh capitals,  from which the high vaults sprang, were situated below the level of the clerestory string, so that these vaults may have been sufficiently abutted by those of the triforium.

The choir of the Cathedral of Noyon has many points of resemblance to that of Senlis. It is on a somewhat larger scale, is lighter in the proportions of its parts, and, in some respects, betokens a freer exercise of the inventive talents of that great body of secular builders which was now taking the lead in architectural constructions, and finding scope for its genius in these communal cathedrals that were beginning to rise, in quick succession, in the newly-chartered towns.

Noyon had been one of the first cities to organise a commune; and it had done so under the fortunate circumstance of its bishop having taken the initiative in the work, so that from the first there was harmony between the ecclesiastical and civil authorities, which is curiously imaged in the church. The vaults of this choir happily remain in good preservation. Unlike the original vaults of Senlis, they are quadripartite in oblong compartments; and hence we have here a uniform, rather than an alternately varied, series of vaulting shafts and piers. The transverse ribs alone are pointed, and the round-arched longitudinal ribs are so much stilted as to bring their crowns up nearly to the level of the crowns of the diagonal ribs. There is, therefore, hardly any doming in these vaults. Three vaulting shafts, resting on the capitals of the ground-story piers, sustain the transverse and diagonal ribs respectively. The piers of the ground-story are, in the choir proper (with exception of two massive clustered ones, which were designed to support towers against the east side of the transept), plain round columns with a single engaged shaft (as in the section, Fig. 21). In the sanctuary the columns are more slender and have no engaged