Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/330

 312 THE CLASSICAL HERITAGE [chap. perfects it and renders it articulate. The strength of the building is in its ribs and arches, columns, piers, and flying buttresses. Their sustaining forms render this strength visible. The lines and points of sculp- tured ornament show forth these forms of power dis- tinct and excellent in beauty. Leaves of veritable plants crown the columns, making them as living branches. Beasts and birds live enforested in the capitals of the great pillars ; and the pinnacles of the flying buttresses, which are the final fastenings of the giant structure, are exquisitely chiselled, so that their beauty may be equal to the importance of their function. The sculpturesque ornament is also strong in truth- fulness. For the workman has broken away from the old conventions ; he has opened his eyes and has seen living plants with living foliage ; and he has wrought in stone their life-giving and life-emblematic beauty. Gothic sculptors rival nature's exhaustlessness of de- sign. Festoons and clusters grow and hang in infinite variety. Likewise in the grouping of living figures. Byzantine art had been formal and conventional. For real grouping, the artist must look to life, where the Byzantines did not look, nor with much confidence the hesitating Romanesque artists. But the Gothic sculptor follows life and evokes it in his statuary as in his leaf decoration.^ 1 A prodigious realism enters some of the fantastic animal crea- tions of (Jothic, often the realism of caricature, which consists in the unreal and impossible combination of elements that, separately, actually exist. This gives the fantastic reality to the devils and other evil beings in Gothic sculpture.