The traditions of classic Roman painting were apparently snuffed out by the barbarian invasions and the ensuing centuries of poverty. When Italian mural painting revived it took its lead not from antiquity but from the half-Greek, half-Oriental methods of Byzantium. Early in the thirteenth century we find Greek painters working in Italy—Theophanes at Venice, Apollonius at Florence, Melormus at Siena…. The earliest signed panel pictures in the Italian art of this period bear Greek names. Such men brought with them Byzantine themes and styles—symbolic figures religio-mystical, making no claim to the representation of natural attitudes and scenes.
Gradually, as wealth and taste rose in thirteenth-century Italy, and the higher rewards of art drew better talents to their quest, Italian painters—Giunta Pisano at Pisa, Lapo at Pistoia, Guido at Siena, Pietro Cavallini at Assisi and Rome—began to abandon the dreamy Byzantine manner, and to infuse their painting with the color and passion of Italy. In the church of San Domenico at Siena Guido (1271) painted a Madonna whose “pure, sweet face”14 left far behind it the frail and lifeless forms of the Byzantine painting of that age; this picture almost begins the Italian Renaissance.
A generation later Duccio di Buoninsegna (1273–1319) carried Siena to a kind of civic-esthetic frenzy with his Maestà or “Majesty” of the Virgin enthroned. The thriving citizens decided that the Divine Mother, their feudal queen, should have her picture painted on an imposing scale by the greatest artist available anywhere. They found it pleasant to choose their townsman Duccio. They promised him gold, gave him food and time, and watched every step of his work. When, after three years, it was complete (1311), and Duccio had added a touching signature—“Holy Mother of God, give Siena peace and Duccio life because he painted thee thus”—a procession of bishops, priests, monks, officials, and half the population of the city escorted the picture (fourteen feet long and seven wide) to the cathedral, amid the blare of trumpets and the ringing of bells. The work was still half Byzantine in style, aiming at religious expression rather than realistic portraiture; the Virgin’s nose was too long and straight, her eyes too somber; but the surrounding figures had grace and character; and the scenes from the life of Mary and Christ, painted on the predellas and pinnacles, had a new and vivid charm. Altogether this was the greatest painting before Giotto.*
Meanwhile at Florence Giovanni Cimabue (1240?-1302) had inaugurated a dynasty of painters that would rule Italian art for almost three centuries. Born of a noble family, Giovanni doubtless saddened them by abandoning law for art. He was a proud spirit, apt to cast aside any of his works in which he or another had found a defect. While stemming, like Duccio, from the Italian-Byzantine school, he poured his pride and energy into his art to revolutionary effect; in him, more than in the greater artist Duccio, the Byzantine style was superseded, and a new path of advance was cleared. He bent and softened the hard lines of his predecessors, gave flesh to spirit, color and warmth to flesh, human tenderness to gods and saints; and by using bright reds, pinks, and blues for the drapery, he endowed his paintings with a life and brilliance unknown before him in medieval Italy. All this, however, we must accept on the testimony of his time; not one of the pictures attributed to him is unquestionably his; and the Madonna and Child with Angels, painted in tempera for the Rucellai Chapel of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, is more probably by Duccio.15 A tradition disputed, but probably true, assigns to Cimabue a Virgin and Child Between Four Angels in the Lower Church of San Francesco at Assisi. This colossal fresco, usually dated 1296, and restored in the nineteenth century, is the first extant masterpiece in Italian painting. The figure of St. Francis is bravely realistic—a man frightened to emaciation by visions of Christ; and the four angels begin the Renaissance alliance of religious subjects with feminine beauty.
In the closing years of his life Cimabue was appointed capomaestro of mosaics at the cathedral of Pisa; and there, it is said, he designed for the apse a mosaic of Christ in Glory Between the Virgin and St. John. Vasari tells a pretty tale how Cimabue once found a shepherd lad of ten, called Giotto di Bondone, drawing a lamb on a slate with a piece of coal, and took him to Florence as a pupil.16 Certainly Giotto worked in Cimabue’s studio, and occupied his master’s house after Cimabue’s death. So began the greatest line of painters in the history of art.
4. Stained Glass
Italy was a century ahead of the North in murals and mosaics, a century behind in architecture and stained glass. The art of painting glass had been known to antiquity, but chiefly in the form of glass mosaic. Gregory of Tours (538?-93) filled the windows of St. Martin’s with glass “of varied colors”; and in the same century Paul the Silentiary remarked the splendor of sunlight as filtered through the variously colored windows of St. Sophia’s at Constantinople. In these cases, so far as we know, there was no attempt at making pictures with the glass. But about 980 Archbishop Adalbero of Reims adorned his cathedral with windows “containing histories”;17 and in 1052 the chronicle of St. Benignus described a “very ancient painted window,” representing St. Paschasius, in a church at Dijon.18 Here was historiated glass; but apparently the color was painted upon the glass, not fused into it. When Gothic architecture reduced the strain on walls and made space for larger windows, the abundant light thereby admitted into the church allowed—indeed, demanded—the coloring of the panes; and every stimulus was present to find a method of more permanently painting glass.
Stain-fused glass was probably an offshoot of the art of enameled glass. Theophilus described the new technique in 1190. A “cartoon” or design was laid upon a table, and was divided into small sections, each marked with a symbol of the desired color. Pieces of glass were cut, seldom more than an inch long or wide, to fit the sections of the cartoon. Each piece of glass was painted in the designated color with a pigment consisting of powdered glass mixed with varying metallic oxides—cobalt for blue, copper for red or green, manganese for purple…. The painted glass was then fired to fuse the enamel oxides with the glass; the cooled pieces were laid upon the design, and were soldered together with thin strips of lead. In viewing a window of such mosaic glass the eye hardly notices the leads, but makes of the parts a continuous colored surface. The artist was interested in color above all, and aimed at a fusion of color tones; he sought no realism, no perspective; he gave the queerest hues to the objects in his pictures—green camels, pink lions, blue-faced knights.19 But he achieved the effect he aimed at: a brilliant and lasting picture, a softening and coloring of the light admitted to the church, and the instruction and exaltation of the worshiper.
The windows—even the great “roses”—were in most cases divided into panels, medallions, circles, lozenges, or squares, so that one window might show several scenes in a biography or theme. Old Testament prophets were pictured opposite their New Testament analogues or fulfillments; and the New Testament was amplified from the apocryphal gospels, whose picturesque fables were so dear to the medieval mind. Stories of the saints were even more frequent in the windows than episodes from the Bible; so the adventures of St. Eustace were narrated on the windows of Chartres, and again at Sens, Auxerre, Le Mans, and Tours. Events of profane history rarely appeared in stained glass.
Within a half century of its oldest known occurrence in France, stained glass reached perfection at Chartres. The windows of that cathedral served as models and goals for those at Sens, Laon, Bourges, and Rouen. Thence the art crossed to England, and inspired the glass of Canterbury and Lincoln; a treaty between France and England specified that one of the glass painters of Louis VII (1137–80) should be allowed to come to England.20 In the thirteenth century the component parts of the pane were made larger, and the color lost something of the vibrating subtlety of the earlier work. Painting in grisaille—decorative tracery with thin lines of red or blue on a gray monochrome base—replaced, towards the end of that century, the color symphonies of the great cathedrals; the mullions themselves, in ever more complex designs, played a larger part in the picture; and though such window tracery became in its turn a lovely art, the skill of the glass painter declined. The splendor of stained glass had come with the Gothic cathedral; and when the Gothic glory faded, the ecstasy of color died away.
IV. SCULPTURE
Much Roman sculpture had been destroyed as loot by victorious barbarism, or as obscene idolatry by nascent Christianity; something had remained, especially in France, to excite the imagination of barbarism tamed and a Christian culture coming of age. In this art, as in others, the Eastern Roman Empire had preserved old models and skills, had overlaid them with Asiatic conventions and mysticism, and had redistributed to the West the seeds that had come to it from Rome. Greek carvers went to Germany after Theophano married Otto II (972); they went to Venice, Ravenna, Rome, Naples, Sicily, perhaps to Barcelona and Marseille. From such men, and from the Moslem artists of his Regno, the sculptors of Frederick II may have learned their trade. When barbarism became rich it could afford to wed beauty; when the Church became rich she took sculpture, like the other arts, into the service of her creed and ritual. That, after all, was the way the major arts had developed in Egypt and Asia, in Greece and Rome; great art is the child of a triumphant faith.
Like mural painting, mosaic, and stained glass, sculpture was conceived not as independent, but as one phase of an integrated art for which no language has a name—the adornment of worship. Primarily the sculptor’s function was to beautify the house of God with statuary and reliefs; secondarily to make images or icons to inspire piety in the home; after that, if time and funds remained, he might carve the likeness of secular persons or adorn profane things. In church sculpture the preferred material was some lasting substance like stone, marble, alabaster, bronze; but for statuary the Church favored wood: such figures could be borne without agony by Christians marching in religious pageantry. Statues were painted, as in ancient religious art, and they were more often realistic than idealized. The worshiper was to feel the presence of the saint through the image; and so well was this end attained that the Christian, like the devotee of older faiths, expected miracles of the statue, and raised few doubts on hearing that the arm of an alabaster Christ had moved in benediction, or that the breast of a wooden Virgin had given milk.
Any study of medieval sculpture should begin with an act of contrition. A great part of that sculpture was destroyed in England by Puritan zealots—sometimes by act of Parliament; and in France by the Art Terror of the Revolution. In England the reaction was against what seemed to the new iconoclasts the pagan ornamentation of Christian shrines; in France it attacked the collections, effigies, and tombs of the hated aristocracy. All through these countries we find headless statues, broken noses, battered sarcophagi, smashed reliefs, shattered cornices and capitals; a fury of accumulated resentment against ecclesiastical or feudal tyranny vented itself at last in a Satanic demolition. As if enlisting in a conspiracy of ruin, time and its servant elements wore away surfaces, melted stone, effaced inscriptions, waged against the works of man a cold and silent war that never granted truce. And man himself, in a thousand campaigns, sought victory through competitive devastation. We know medieval sculpture only in its desolation.
We add misunderstanding to injury when we view its scattered members in museums. It was not meant to be seen in isolation; it was part of a theological theme and an architectural whole; and what might seem crude and ungainly in separation may have been skillfully suited to its context in stone. The cathedral statue was an element in a composition; it was adjusted to its place, and tended to follow, by elongation, the vertical lift of the cathedral lines: the legs were kept together, the arms were pressed to the body; sometimes a saint was thinned and stretched through all the length of a portal jamb. Less often a horizontal effect was stressed, and the figures over a door might be fattened and flattened as over the portal of Chartres, or a man or a beast might be crumpled into a capital like a Greek god cornered in a pediment. Gothic sculpture was fused in an unrivaled unity with the architecture it adorned.
This subordination of sculptural to structural line and aim especially marked the art of the twelfth century. The thirteenth witnessed an exuberant rebellion of the sculptor, who now ventured out of formalism into realism, out of piety into humor and satire and the zest of earthy life. At Chartres, in the twelfth century, the figures are somber and stiff; at Reims, in the thirteenth, they are caught in natural conversation or spontaneous action, their features are individual, there is grace in their pose. Many figures on the cathedrals of Chartres and Reims resemble the bearded peasants that still meet us in French villages; the shepherd warming himself at the fire on the west portal of Amiens might be in a Norman or Gaspé field today. No sculpture in history rivals the whimsical veracity of Gothic cathedral reliefs. At Rouen, crowded into little quatref oils, we find a meditative philosopher with the head of a pig; a doctor, half man and half goose, studying another phial of urine; a music teacher, half man and half rooster, giving a lesson on the organ to a centaur; a man changed by a sorcerer into a dog, whose feet still wear his boots.21 Funny little figures crouch under the statues at Chartres, Amiens, Reims. A capital in Strasbourg cathedral, since reformed, showed the burial of Reynard the Fox: a boar and a goat carried his coffin, a wolf bore the cross, a hare lighted the way with a taper, a bear sprinkled holy water, a stag sang Mass, an ass chanted the funeral service from a book resting on the head of a cat.22 In Beverley Minster a fox cowled like a monk preaches from a pulpit to a congregation of pious geese.23
The cathedrals are, among other things, menageries in stone; almost all animals known to man, and many known only to medieval fancy, find somewhere room in those tolerant immensities. At Laon sixteen bulls lower on the cathedral towers; they represent, we are told, the mighty beasts that through patient years transported the stone blocks from the quarries to the hilltop church. One day, said a genial legend, an ox laboring upward fell in exhaustion; the load was precariously poised on a slope when a miraculous ox appeared, slipped into the harness, drew the cart to the summit, and then vanished into the supernatural air.24 We smile at such fiction, and return to our tales of sex and crime.
The cathedrals found place, too, for a botanical garden. Next to the Virgin, the angels, and the saints, what better ornament could there be for the house of God than the plants, fruits, and flowers of the French or English or German countryside? In Romanesque architecture (800–1200) the old Roman floral motives persisted—acanthus leaves and the vine; in Gothic these formalized motives yielded to an amazing profusion of indigenous plants, carved into bases, capitals, spandrels, archivolts, cornices, columns, pulpits, choirs, doorposts, stalls…. These forms are not conventional; they are often individualized varieties locally loved, and rendered to the life; sometimes they are composite plants, another play of Gothic imagination, but still fresh with the feel of nature. Trees, branches, twigs, leaves, buds, flowers, fruit, ferns, buttercups, plantains, watercress, celandine, rosebushes, strawberry plants, thistle and sage, parsley and chicory, cabbage and celery—all are here, falling from the never-emptied cornucopia of the cathedral; the intoxication of spring was in the heart of the sculptor, and guided the chisel into the stone. Not only spring; all the seasons of the year are in these carvings, all the toil and solace of sowing, reaping, and vintage are here; and in the whole history of sculpture there is nothing finer in its kind than the “Vintage Capital” in the cathedral of Reims.25
But this world of plants and flowers, birds and beasts, was ancillary to the main theme of medieval sculpture—the life and death of man. At Chartres, Laon, Lyons, Auxerre, Bourges, some preliminary reliefs tell the story of the creation. At Laon the Creator counts on His fingers the days left Him for His task; and in later scenes we see Him, tired with His cosmic toil, leaning on His staff, sitting down to rest, going to sleep; this is a god whom any peasant can understand. Other cathedral reliefs show the months of the year, each with its distinctive work and joy. Others show the occupations of man: peasants in the field or at the wine press; some guiding horses or oxen in breaking furrows or pulling carts; others shearing sheep or milking cows; and there are millers, carpenters, porters, merchants, artists, scholars, even a philosopher or two. The sculptor portrays abstractions through examples: Donatus is grammar, Cicero is oratory, Aristotle is dialectic, Ptolemy is astronomy. Philosophy sits with her head in the clouds, a book in her right hand, a scepter in her left; she is Regina scientiarum, Queen of the Sciences. Paired figures personify Faith and Idolatry, Hope and Despair, Charity and Avarice, Chastity and Lechery, Peace and Discord; a portal at Laon shows a combat of the Vices and the Virtues; and on the west front of Notre Dame at Paris a graceful figure with bandaged eyes represents the Synagogue, while opposite her is an even lovelier woman, with royal mantle and commanding air—the Church as the Bride of Christ. Christ Himself appears sometimes tender, sometimes terrible; taken down from the cross by His mother; rising from the tomb while near by, in symbol, a lion brings her cubs to life with a breath; or sternly judging the quick and the dead. That Last Judgment is everywhere in the sculpture and painting of the churches; man was never allowed to forget it; and here, too, only one intercessor could be relied upon to win forgiveness for his sins. So in the sculpture, as in the litanies, Mary took the leading place, the mother of infinite mercy, who would not let her Son take too literally those awful words about the many called, the few chosen.
There is a depth of feeling in this Gothic sculpture, a variety and energy of life, a sympathy with all the forms of the plant and animal world, a tenderness, gentleness, and grace, a miracle of stone revealing not flesh but the soul, that move and satisfy us when the bodily excellence of Greek statuary has lost—perhaps through our aging—something of its traditional lure. Beside the living figures of medieval faith the heavy gods of the Parthenon pediment seem cold and dead. Gothic sculpture is technically deficient; there is nothing in it that can match the perfection of the Parthenon frieze, or the handsome gods and sensuous goddesses of Praxiteles, or even the matrons and senators of the Ara Pacis at Rome; and doubtless those comely ephebi and pliant Aphrodites once meant the joy of healthy life and love. But the prejudices of our native creed, remembering its loveliness and forgetting its terror, bring us back again and again to the great cathedrals, and tip the scales to the Beau Dieu of Amiens, the Smiling Angel of Reims, and the Virgin of Chartres.
As the skill of the medieval sculptor grew, he aspired to free his art from architecture, and produce works that could please the increasingly secular taste of princes and prelates, nobles and bourgeoisie. In England the “marblers” of Purbeck, using the excellent material quarried in that Dorsetshire promontory, earned high repute in the thirteenth century for ready-made shafts and capitals, and for the recumbent effigies they carved on the sarcophagi of the affluent dead. About 1292 William Torel, a London goldsmith, cast in bronze the images of Henry III and his daughter-in-law Eleanor of Castile for their marble tombs in Westminster Abbey; these are as fine as any bronze work of the age. Remarkable schools of sculpture gathered in this period at Liége, Hildesheim, and Naumburg; and some unknown master, about 1240, made the strong and simple figures—with magnificent drapery—of Henry the Lion and his lioness in the cathedral of Brunswick. France led Europe in the quality of her Romanesque (twelfth-century) and Gothic (thirteenth-century) statuary; but most of it is integrated with her cathedrals, and is best studied there.
Sculpture in Italy was not so intimately bound up with architecture, the commune, and the guild as in France; and there, in the thirteenth century, we begin to get individual artists whose personality dominates their work and preserves their names. Niccolò Pisano embodied a diversity of influences fused into a unique synthesis. Born in Apulia about 1225, he enjoyed the stimulating air of Frederick II’s regime; there, apparently, he studied the remains and restorations of classic art.26 Moving to Pisa, he inherited the Romanesque tradition, and heard of the Gothic style then at its apex in France. When he carved a pulpit for Pisa’s baptistery he took for his model a Roman sarcophagus of Hadrian’s time. He was deeply moved by the firm but graceful lines of the classic forms; though his pulpit showed Romanesque and Gothic arches, most of its figures bore Roman features and dress; the face and robes of Mary in the panel of the Presentation were those of a Roman matron; and in one corner a nude athlete proclaimed the spirit of ancient Greece. Jealous of this masterpiece, Siena (1265) engaged Niccolo, his son Giovanni, and his pupil Arnolfo di Cambio to carve a still finer pulpit for the cathedral. They succeeded. Standing on columns with Gothic flowered capitals, this pulpit of white marble repeated the themes of the Pisan work, with a crowded panel of the Crucifixion. Here the Gothic influence won over the classical; but in the feminine figures that crowned the columns the antique mood found voice in the frank portrayal of rosy health. As if to underscore his classic sentiments, Niccolò chiseled upon the tomb of the ascetic St. Dominic at Bologna virile forms in pagan style, full of the joy of life. In 1271 he joined his son and Arnolfo to carve the marble font still standing in the public square of Perugia. He died seven years later, still relatively young; but in one lifetime he had made straight the way for Donatello and the rebirth of classic sculpture in the Renaissance.
His son Giovanni Pisano (c. 1240-c. 1320) rivaled him in influence, and surpassed him in technical skill. In 1271 Pisa commissioned Giovanni to build a cemetery fit for men who were then dividing the western Mediterranean with Genoa. Holy earth was brought from Mt. Calvary for the Campo Santo, or Sacred Field; around a grassy rectangle the artist raised graceful arches in mingled Romanesque and Gothic styles; masterpieces of sculpture were brought in to adorn the cloisters, and the Campo Santo remained a monument to Giovanni Pisano until the Second World War shattered half its arches into a neglected ruin.* When the Pisans were defeated by the Genoese (1284) they could no longer afford Giovanni; he went to Siena, and helped to design and execute the sculpture of the cathedral façade. In 1290 he chiseled some reliefs for the bizarre face of the Orvieto Cathedral. Thence he returned north to Pistoia, and carved for the church of Sant’ Andrea a pulpit less virile than his father’s at Pisa, but excelling it in naturalness and grace; this, indeed, is the loveliest product of Gothic sculpture in Italy.
The third member of this famous trio, Arnolfo di Cambio (c. 1232-c. 1300), continued the Gothic style under the patronage of the popes, several of whom had a French background. At Orvieto he shared in cutting the façade, and made a handsome sarcophagus for Cardinal de Braye. In 1296, with the multidextrous versatility of Renaissance artists, he designed, and began to execute, three of the glories of Florence: the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, the church of Santa Croce, and the Palazzo Vecchio.
But with Arnolfo and these works we pass from sculpture to architecture. All the arts had now returned to life and health; the old skills were not only restored, but were breeding new ventures and techniques with almost reckless fertility. The arts were united as never before or since—in the same enterprise and the same man. Everything had been prepared for the culminating medieval art that would combine them all in perfect co-operation, and would give its name to a style and an age.
CHAPTER XXXII
The Gothic Flowering
1095–1300
I. THE CATHEDRAL
WHY did Western Europe build so many churches in the three centuries after 1000? What need was there, in a Europe with hardly a fifth of its present population, for temples so vast that they are now rarely filled even on the holiest days? How could an agricultural civilization afford to build such costly edifices, which a wealthy industrialism can barely maintain?
The population was small, but it believed; it was poor, but it gave. On holydays, or in pilgrimage churches, the worshipers were so numerous, said Suger of St. Denis, that “women were forced to run toward the altar on the heads of men as a pavement”;1 the great abbot was raising funds to build his masterpiece, and could be forgiven a little exaggeration. In towns like Florence, Pisa, Chartres, York it was desirable on occasion to gather the entire population into one edifice. In populous monasteries the abbey church had to accommodate monks and nuns and laity. Relics had to be guarded in special shrines, with room for intimate devotion, and a spacious sanctuary was needed for major rituals. Side altars were required in abbeys and cathedrals whose many priests were expected to say Mass every day; a separate altar or chapel for each favored saint might incline his ear to petitioners; and Mary had to have a “Lady Chapel” if the whole cathedral was not hers.
The construction was financed largely by the accumulated funds of the episcopal see. In addition the bishop solicited gifts from kings, nobles, communes, guilds, parishes, and individuals. The communes were stirred to a wholesome rivalry, in which the cathedral became the symbol and challenge of their wealth and power. Indulgences were offered to those who contributed; relics were carried about the diocese to stimulate giving; and generosity might be prodded by an occasional miracle.2 Competition for building funds was keen; bishops objected to collections made in their dioceses for undertakings in another; in some cases, however, bishops from many parts, even from foreign lands, sent aid to an enterprise, as at Chartres. Though some of these appeals verged on pressure, they hardly rivaled the intensity of the influences mobilized for the public financing of a modern war. The cathedral chapters exhausted their own funds, and almost bank-rupted the French Church, in the Gothic ecstasy. The people themselves did not feel exploited when they contributed; they hardly missed the mite they individually gave; and for that mite they received, as a collective achievement and pride, a home for their worship, a meeting place for their community, a school of letters for their children, a school of arts and crafts for their guilds, and a Bible in stone whereby they might contemplate, in statue and picture, the story of their faith. The house of the people was the house of God.
Who designed the cathedrals? If architecture is the art of designing and beautifying a building and directing its construction, we must reject, for Gothic, the old view that the priests or monks were the architects. Their function was to formulate their needs, conceive a general plan, secure a location, and raise funds. Before 1050 it was usual for the clergy, especially the Cluniac monks, to design and superintend as well as to plan; but for the great cathedrals—all after 1050—it was found necessary to engage professional architects who, with rare exceptions, were neither monks nor priests. The architect would not receive that title till 1563; his medieval name was “master builder,” sometimes “master mason”; and these terms reveal his origin. He began as an artisan physically engaged in the work that he directed. In the thirteenth century, as wealth permitted greater edifices and specialization, the master builder was one who—no longer sharing in the physical work —submitted designs and competitive estimates, accepted contracts, made ground plans and working drawings, procured materials, hired and paid artists and artisans, and supervised the construction from beginning to end. We know the names of many such architects after 1050—of 137 Gothic architects in medieval Spain alone. Some of them inscribed their names on their buildings, and a few wrote books about their craft. Villard de Honne-court (c. 1250) left an album of architectural notes and sketches made on the travels that he undertook, in the practice of his profession, from Laon and Reims to Lausanne and Hungary.
The artists who did the more delicate work—who carved the figures and reliefs, or painted the windows or the walls, or decorated the altar or the choir—were not distinguished from the artisans by any special name; the artist was a master artisan, and every industry strove to be an art. Much of the work was distributed by contract among the guilds to which artists and artisans alike belonged. The unskilled labor was provided by serfs or hired migratory workers; and when time pressed, the government conscripted men —even skilled artisans—to complete the task.3 Hours of labor were from sunrise to sunset in winter, from a little after sunrise to a little before sundown in summer, with time allowed for a substantial meal at noon. English architects, in 1275, received twelve pence ($12) a day, with traveling expenses and occasional gifts.
The ground plan of the cathedral was still essentially that of the Roman basilica: a longitudinal nave terminating in a sanctuary and an apse, and rising above and between two aisles to a roof supported by walls and colonnades. By a complex but fascinating evolution this simple basilica became first the Romanesque, and, then the Gothic, cathedral. The nave and aisles were cut by a transept—a transverse nave—giving the plan the figure of a Latin cross. The ground area was enlarged by rivalry or devotion until Notre Dame at Paris covered 63,000 square feet, Chartres or Reims 65,000, Amiens 70,000, Cologne 90,000, St. Peter’s 100,000. The Christian church was almost always oriented—built with the head or apse pointing eastward—toward Jerusalem.
Hence the main portal was in the west façade, whose special decoration received the light of the setting sun. In the great cathedrals each portal was an archway with “recessed orders”: i.e., the innermost arch was topped with a larger arch overlapping outward, and this again with a larger arch, until there might be as many as eight such overreaching layers or “orders,” the whole forming an expanding shell. A similar “subordination of orders,” or gradation of parts, enhanced the beauty of nave arches and window jambs. Each order or stone band of the compound arch could receive statuary or other sculptural ornament, so that the portal, above all in the west front, became a profuse chapter in the stone book of Christian lore.
The dignity of the west façade was heightened by flanking it with towers. Towers are as old as the records of history. In Romanesque and Gothic they were used not only to house bells, but to support the lateral pressure of the façade and the longitudinal pressure of the aisles. In Normandy and England a third tower had many windows, or was largely open at the base, and served as a “lantern” to give a natural light to the center of the church. Gothic architects, enamored of verticality, aimed to add a spire to every tower; funds or skill or spirit failed; some spires fell, as at Beauvais; Notre Dame, Amiens, and Reims received no spires, Chartres only two of its intended three, Laon one of five—and that was destroyed in the Revolution. As the spire pointed the landscapes of the North, so the campanile or bell tower dominated the cities of Italy. There they were usually separate from the church, like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, or Giotto’s campanile at Florence. Possibly they took some hints from Moslem minarets; in turn they spread their style into Palestine and Syria; and they became the civic belfries of the northern towns.
Within the church the central aisle, if its flanking colonnades supported arches curving to meet across the ceiling vault, looked like the inner hull of an inverted ship, whence its name of nave. The full impression of its length was sometimes weakened, particularly in England, by a marble or iron grille, beautifully carved or cast, thrown across the nave to protect the sanctuary from lay intrusion during services. In the sanctuary were choir stalls, always works of art; two pulpits, sometimes called ambos from the Latin word for both; seats for the officiating priests; and the main altar, often displaying an adorned rear screen or reredos. Around the sanctuary, continuing the aisles into the apse, ran an ambulatory, designed to allow processions to make full circuit of the edifice. Beneath the altar some churches, as if recalling the burial chambers of the Roman catacombs, built a crypt to hold the relics of a patron saint, or the bones of the distinguished dead.
The central problem of Romanesque and Gothic architecture was how to support the roof. Early Romanesque churches had wooden ceilings, usually of well-seasoned oak; such timbers, if properly ventilated and yet guarded from damp, would last indefinitely; so the south transept of Winchester Cathedral still has its eleventh-century ceiling of wood. The disadvantage of such structures lay in the danger of fires, which, once ignited, were hard to reach. By the twelfth century nearly all major churches had ceilings of masonry. The weight of these roofs determined the evolution of medieval European architecture. Much of this weight had to be borne by the columns that flanked the nave. These had therefore to be strengthened or multiplied; and this was done by combining several columns into a cluster, or replacing them by massive piers of masonry. The column, cluster, or pier was crowned with a capital, perhaps also with an impost to provide a larger surface to bear the superincumbent weight. From each pier or column cluster rose a fan of masonry arches: a transverse arch thrown athwart the nave to the opposite pier; another transverse arch crossing over the aisle to a pier in the wall; two longitudinal arches to the next pier forward and the next to the rear; two diagonal arches connecting the pier with diagonally opposite piers across the nave; and perhaps two diagonal arches to diagonally opposite piers across the aisle. Usually each arch had its own individual support on the impost or capital of the pier. Better still, each might be continued in unbroken line to the ground to form a component of a column cluster or compound pier; the vertical effect so produced was among the fairest features of the Romanesque and Gothic styles. Each quadrangle of piers in nave or aisle constituted a “bay,” from which the arches rose in graceful inward curvature to form a section of the vault. Externally this ceiling was covered by a gabled roof of wood, itself hidden and shielded by slate or tiles.
The vault became the crowning achievement of medieval architecture. The principle of the arch allowed a greater space to be spanned than had been practical with timbered ceiling or architrave. The nave could now be widened to harmonize with greater length; the widened nave required for proportion a greater height; this allowed the raising of the level at which the arches sprang inward from piers or walls; and this further prolongation of the direct shaft again enhanced the breath-taking verticality of the cathedral lines. The vault became a clearer harmony when its groins—the lines where the masonry arches met—were edged with “ribs” of brick or stone. These ribs in turn led to a major improvement in structure and style: the masons learned to begin the vault by erecting one rib at a time on an easily movable “centering” or wooden frame; they filled in with light masonry, one at a time, the triangles between each pair of ribs; this thin web of masonry was made concave, thereby shifting most of its weight to the ribs; and the ribs were made strong to channel the downward pressure to specific points—the piers of nave or wall. The groined and ribbed vault became the distinctive feature of medieval architecture at its height.
The problem of supporting the superstructure was further met by building the nave higher than the aisles; the roof of the aisle, with the outer wall, thus served as a buttress for the vault of the nave; and if the aisle itself was vaulted its ribbed arches would channel half their weight inward to counter the outward pressure of the central vault at the weakest points of the nave supports. At the same time, that part of the nave which rose beyond the roofs of the aisles became a clerestory or clearstory, whose unimpeded windows would illuminate the nave. The aisles themselves were usually divided into two or three stories, of which the uppermost constituted a gallery, and the second a triforium so called because the arched spaces by which it faced the nave were normally divided by two columns into “three doors.” In Eastern churches the women were expected to worship there, leaving the nave to the men.
So, stage by stage, through ten or twenty or a hundred years, the cathedral rose, defying gravity to glorify God. When it was ready for use it was dedicated in a ceremonious ritual that brought together high prelates and dignitaries, pilgrims and sightseers, and all the townsfolk except the village atheist. Years more would be spent in finishing exterior and interior, and adding a thousand embellishments. For many centuries the people would read on its portals, windows, capitals, and walls the sculptured or painted history and legends of the faith—the story of the Creation, the Fall of Man and the Last Judgment, the lives of the prophets and patriarchs, the sufferings and miracles of the saints, the moral allegories of the animal world, the dogmas of the theologians, even the abstractions of the philosophers; all would be there, in a vast stone encyclopedia of Christianity. When he died, the good Christian would want to be buried near those walls, where demons would be loath to roam. Generation after generation would come to pray in the cathedral; generation after generation would file out from the church into the tombs. The gray cathedral would look upon their coming and their passing with the silent calm of stone, until, in the greatest death of all, the creed itself would die, and those sacred walls would be surrendered to omnivorous time, or be ravished to raise new temples to new gods.
II. CONTINENTAL ROMANESQUE: 1066–1200
We should misjudge the variety of Western architecture in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries if we allowed the foregoing sketch of cathedral structure to stand as valid for all Latin Christendom. In Venice the Byzantine influence continued; St. Mark’s added ever new decorations, pinnacles, and spoils, but always in the manner of Constantinople crossed with that of Baghdad. Probably through Venice, perhaps through Genoa or Marseille, the Byzantine style of domes placed with pendentives upon a Greco-cruciform base entered France and appeared in the churches of St. Étienne and St. Front at Périgueux, and in the cathedrals of Cahors and Angoulême. In 1172, when Venice decided to restore and enlarge the Palace of the Doges, she took a medley of styles—Roman, Lombard, Byzantine, Arabic—and united them in a masterpiece that Villehardouin in 1202 thought moult riche et bictux, and which still remains the chief glory of the Grand Canal.
No definition of an architectural style has ever escaped exceptions; the works of man, like those of nature, resent generalizations, and flaunt their individuality in the face of every rule. Let us accept the round arch, thick walls and piers, narrow windows, attached buttresses or none, and predominantly horizontal lines, as characterizing Romanesque; and let us keep an open mind for deviations.
Almost a century after the foundation of its duomo, Pisa commissioned Diotisalvi to erect a baptistery across a square from the cathedral (1152). He adopted a circular plan, faced the structure with marble, disfigured it with blank arcades, encompassed it with colonnades, and crowned it with a dome that might have been perfect but for its conical cupola. Behind the cathedral Bonanno of Pisa and William of Innsbruck raised the Leaning Tower as a campanile (1174). It repeated the style of the cathedral façade—a series of superimposed Romanesque arcades, with the eighth story housing the bells. The Tower sank on the south side after three stages had been built upon a foundation only ten feet deep, and the architects tried to offset this by inclining the later stories toward the north. In a height of 179 feet the Tower now deviates 16½ feet from the perpendicular—an increase of one foot between 1828 and 1910.
Italian monks migrating into France, Germany, and England brought Romanesque fashions in their train. Perhaps because of them most French monasteries were Romanesque, so that in France Romanesque has the second name of the monastic style. The Benedictines of Cluny built a magnificent abbey there (1089–1131), with four side aisles, seven towers, and such an array of zoological sculpture as roused St. Bernard’s ire.
In the cloisters, under the eyes of the monks who read, what do these ridiculous monsters seek to do? What do these unclean monkeys mean, these dragons, centaurs, tigers, and lions … these soldiers fighting, these hunting scenes? … What business here have these creatures who are half beast and half man? … We can see here several bodies under one head, and several heads on one body. Here we observe a quadruped with the head of a serpent, there a fish with the head of a quadruped; here an animal is a horse in front and a goat behind.4
The abbey of Cluny was destroyed in the Jacqueries of the Revolution, but its architectural influence spread to its 2000 affiliated monasteries. Southern France is still rich in Romanesque churches; the Roman tradition was strong there in art as in law, and long resisted the “barbaric” Gothic that came down from the North. Marble was rare in France, and the cathedrals atoned for lack of external brilliance by a profusion of sculpture. Startling, in the churches of southern France, is the expressionism of the statuary—the resolve to convey a feeling instead of copying a scene; so the figure of St. Peter on a portal of the abbey of Moissac (1150), with its tortured face and arachnid legs, must have aimed not so much to accentuate structural lines as to impress and terrify the imagination. That the sculptors deliberately distorted such figures appears from the minute realism of the foliage in the Moissac capitals. The best of these French Romanesque façades is the west portal of St. Trophime’s at Aries (1152), crowded with animals and saints.
Spain raised a lordly Romanesque shrine in the church of Santiago de Compostela (1078–1211), whose Portico de la Gloria contains the finest Romanesque sculpture in Europe. Coimbra, soon to be the university city of Portugal, built a handsome Romanesque cathedral in the twelfth century. But it was in its more northern migrations that Romanesque reached its apogee. The Île de France rejected it, but Normandy welcomed it; its rough power accorded well with a people recently Viking and still buccaneers. As early as 1048 the Benedictine monks of Jumièges, near Rouen, built an abbey reputedly larger than any edifice that had been raised in Western Europe since Constantine; the Middle Ages too were proud of size. It was half destroyed by the fanatics of the Revolution, but its surviving façade and towers preserve a bold and virile design. There, indeed, was formed the Norman style of Romanesque, relying for its effect on mass and structural form rather than on ornament.
In 1066 William the Conqueror, to expiate the sin of marrying Matilda of Flanders, provided funds for a church of St. Étienne at Caen, known as the Abbaye aux Hommes; and Matilda, perhaps with like motives, financed there the church of La Trinité, known as the Abbaye aux Dames. About 1135, in a restoration of the Abbaye aux Hommes, each bay of the nave was divided with an extra column on each side, bound with a transverse arch; in this way the usual “quadripartite” became a “sexpartite” vault, a form that proved popular throughout the twelfth century.
From France the Romanesque style passed into Flanders, raising a handsome cathedral at Tournai (1066); and from Flanders, France, and Italy it entered Germany. Mainz had begun its cathedral in 1009, Trier in 1016, Speyer in 1030; these were rebuilt before 1300, still in the rounded style. Cologne built in this period the church of St. Maria im Kapitol, famous for its interior, and the church of St. Maria, famous for its towers; both buildings were destroyed in the Second World War. The cathedral of Worms, dedicated in 1171 and restored in the nineteenth century, is still a monument of Rhenish Romanesque. These churches had an apse at each end, and cared little for sculptured façades; they adorned their exterior with colonnades, and buttressed the towers with slender turrets of very pleasing form. The non-German critic praises these Rhenish shrines with patriotic moderation, but they have a charming gemütlich beauty quite in harmony with the inviting loveliness of the Rhine.
III. THE NORMAN STYLE IN ENGLAND: 1066–1200
When Edward the Confessor came to the throne in 1042 he brought with him many friends and ideas from the Normandy in which he had spent his youth. Westminster Abbey began in his reign as a Norman church with round arches and heavy walls; that structure was buried under the Gothic abbey of 1245, but it inaugurated an architectural revolution. The rapid replacement of Saxon or Danish by Norman bishops ensured the triumph of the Norman style in England. The Conqueror and his successors lavished upon the bishops much of the wealth confiscated from Englishmen who had not appreciated conquest; the churches became instruments of mental pacification; soon the Norman English bishops matched the Norman English nobles in wealth; and cathedrals and castles multiplied as allies in the conquered land. “Nearly all tried to rival one another in sumptuous buildings in the Norman style,” wrote William of Malmesbury; “for the nobles felt that day lost which they had not celebrated with some deed of magnificence.”5 Never had England seen such a frenzy of building.
Norman English architecture was a variation of the Romanesque theme. It followed French exemplars in supporting the roof by round arches on fat piers, and by heavy walls—though its ceilings were usually of wood; when the vault was of stone the walls were from eight to ten feet thick. It was largely monastic, and rose in out-of-the-way places rather than in cities. It used very little external statuary, fearing the effect of a damp climate, and even the capitals of the columns were simply or poorly carved; in sculpture England never caught up with the Continent. But not many towers could match the mighty structures that dominated the Norman castles, or guarded the façade—or covered the transept crossing—of the Norman church.
Hardly any ecclesiastical architecture in England is still purely Romanesque. Most cathedrals underwent a Gothic lifting of arch and vault in the thirteenth century, and only the basic Norman form remains. In 1067 fire destroyed the old cathedral of Canterbury; Lanfranc rebuilt it (1070–7) along the lines of his former Abbaye aux Hommes at Caen; nothing survives of Lanfranc’s cathedral except a few patches of masonry where Becket fell. In 1096–1110 the priors Ernulf and Conrad built a new choir and crypt; they kept the round arch, but channeled the strains to points supported by external buttresses. The transition to Gothic had begun.
York Minster,* built in 1075 on a Norman plan, disappeared in 1291 under a Gothic edifice. Lincoln Cathedral, originally Norman (1075), was rebuilt in Gothic after the earthquake of 1185; but the two great towers and sumptuously carved portals of the west façade survive from the Norman church, and reveal the skill and power of the older style. At Winchester the transepts and crypt remain of the Norman cathedral of 1081–1103. Bishop Walkelin built it to receive the flow of pilgrims to the tomb of St. Swithin.† Walkelin appealed to his cousin the Conqueror for timber to roof the enormous nave; William agreed to let him take from Hempage Forest as much wood as he could cut in three days; Walkelin’s flock cut down and carried off the entire forest in seventy-two hours. When the cathedral was finished nearly all the abbots and bishops of England attended its consecration; we may readily imagine the competitive stimulus aroused by such an enormous edifice.
Some echo of the scope of Norman building comes down to us when we note that St. Alban’s Abbey was begun in 1075, Ely Cathedral in 1081, Rochester in 1083, Worcester in 1084, Old St. Paul’s in 1087, Gloucester in 1089, Durham in 1093, Norwich in 1096, Chichester in 1100, Tewkesbury in 1103, Exeter in 1112, Peterborough in 1116, Romsey Abbey in 1120, Fountains Abbey in 1140, St. David’s, in Wales, in 1176. These are not names, they are masterpieces; shame bows us at leaving them after a few hours, or dismissing them in a line. All but one were later rebuilt or re-clothed in Gothic. Durham is still predominantly Norman, and remains the most impressive Romanesque structure in Europe.
Durham is a little mining town of some 20,000 souls. At a turn of the river Wear a rocky promontory rises; on that strategic elevation stands the gigantic mass of the cathedral, “half church of God, half castle against the Scots.”6 Monks from the island of Lindisfarne, fleeing from Danish raiders, built a stone church there in 995. In 1093 its second Norman bishop, William of St. Carilef, demolished this building, and with incredible courage and mysterious wealth raised the present edifice. The work continued till 1195, so that the cathedral represents the aspiration and labor of a hundred years. The lofty nave is Norman, with a double arcade of round arches resting on uncarved capitals and stout piers. The vault of Durham introduced to England two vital innovations: the groins were ribbed, helping to localize pressures; and the transverse arches were pointed, while the diagonals were round. If the transverse arches had been round, their crowns would not have reached the same height as the diagonals, which are longer, and the apex of the vault would have been a disturbingly uneven line. By lifting the crowns of the transverse arches to a point, they could be made to reach the desired height. This structural consideration, and no esthetic aim, apparently fathered the most prominent feature of the Gothic style.
In 1175 Bishop Pudsey added at the west end of Durham Cathedral an attractive porch or narthex, which for some unknown reason received the name of galilee. Here—where lies the tomb of the Venerable Bede—the arches are round, but the slender columns approach the Gothic form. Early in the thirteenth century the vault of the choir collapsed; in rebuilding it the architects supported the nave arcade with flying buttresses hidden in the triforium. In 1240–70 a Chapel of the Nine Altars was added to hold the remains of St. Cuthbert; and in that shrine the arches were pointed, and the transition to Gothic was complete.
IV. THE EVOLUTION OF GOTHIC
Gothic architecture might be defined as a localization and balancing of structural strains, emphasizing vertical lines, ribbed vaults, and pointed forms. It evolved through the solution of mechanical problems set by ecclesiastical needs and artistic aspiration. Fear of fire led to vaults of stone or brick; heavier ceilings necessitated thick walls and clumsy piers; the ubiquity of downward pressure limited window space, the thick walls shadowed the narrow windows, and the interior was left too dark for northern climes. The invention of the ribbed vault lessened the ceiling weight, allowing slenderer columns and localized strains; the concentration and balancing of pressures gave the building stability without heaviness; the localization of support through buttresses allowed longer windows in thinner walls; the windows offered inviting scope for the already existing art of stained glass; and the stone frames surmounting compound windows aroused the new art of pierced design or tracery. The arches of the vault became pointed to allow arches of uneven length to reach their crowns at an even height; and other arches, and window forms, became pointed to harmonize with the arches of the vault. Better ways of bearing pressure permitted higher naves; the towers and spires and pointed arches emphasized verticality of line, and produced the soaring flight and buoyant grace of the Gothic style. All these together made the Gothic cathedral the supreme achievement and expression of the soul of man.
But it is presumptuous to concentrate a century of architectural evolution into a paragraph. Some steps in the development invite calmer scrutiny. The problem of reconciling light grace with stable strength was better solved by Gothic than by any architecture before our time; and we do not know how long our own bold challenges to gravity will escape the leveling jealousy of the earth. Neither did the Gothic architect always succeed; Chartres is still without a crack, but the choir of Beauvais Cathedral crumbled twelve years after it was built. The essential feature of the Gothic style was the functional rib: the transverse and diagonal arch ribs rising from each bay of the nave united to form a light and graceful web upon which a thin vault of masonry could rest. Each bay of the nave became a structural unit, bearing the weight and thrusts brought down by the arches rising from its piers, and supported by counter pressures from the corresponding bays of the aisles, and by outer buttresses applied to the walls at the inward springing of each transverse arch.
The buttress was an old device. Many pre-Gothic churches had pillars of masonry externally added at points of special strain. A flying buttress, however, carries a thrust or strain over open space to a base support and to the ground. Some Norman cathedrals used half arches in the triforium to prop up the arches of the nave; but such internal buttresses reached the nave wall at too low a point, and gave no strength to the clerestory where the explosive pressure of the vault was most intense. To apply support at this high point it was necessary to take the buttress out of its hiding place, let it rise from the solid ground and throw it through open space over the aisle roof to directly sustain the clerestory wall. The earliest known use of such an external flying buttress was in the cathedral of Noyon about 1150.7 By the end of that century it had become a favorite device. It had serious faults: sometimes it gave the impression of a structural skeleton, a scaffolding negligently unremoved, or the makeshift afterthought of a designer whose building sagged; “the cathedral had crutches,” said Michelet. The Renaissance would reject the flying buttress as an unsightly obstruction, and would support by other means such burdens as St. Peter’s dome. The Gothic architect thought differently; he liked to expose the lines and mechanisms of his art; he developed a fondness for buttresses, and perhaps multiplied them beyond need; he compounded them, so that they would give support at two or more points, or to one another; he beautified their stabilizing piers with pinnacles; and sometimes, as at Reims, he proved that at least one angel could stand on the point of a pinnacle.
The balancing of strains was far more vital to Gothic than the ogive or pointed arch, but this became the outward and visible sign of an inward grace. The pointed arch was a very old form. At Diarbekr in Turkey it appears on a Roman colonnade of uncertain date. The earliest dated example is at Qasr-ibn-Wardan in Syria in 561.8 The form is found in the Dome of the Rock and the Mosque of el-Aqsa at Jerusalem in the seventh century; on a Nilometer in Egypt in 861; in the Mosque of Ibn Tulun at Cairo in 879; it was in frequent use among Persians, Arabs, Copts, and Moors before its first appearance in Western Europe in the second half of the eleventh century.9 It may have come to Southern France from Moslem Spain or through pilgrims returning from the East; or it may have arisen spontaneously in the West to meet mechanical problems in architectural design. It should be noted, however, that the problem of bringing arches of uneven length to an even crown could be solved without the ogive by “stilting” the shorter arches, i.e., raising their point of inward springing from pier or wall. This, too, had an esthetic effect, as emphasizing vertical lines; and the device was widely adopted, seldom as a substitute for the pointed arch, often as a helpful accompaniment. The ogive solved a further problem: since the aisles were narrower than the nave, an aisle bay had more length than width, and the crowns of its transverse arches would fall far short of those of its diagonals, unless the transverse arches were either pointed, or stilted so high as to prevent their harmonious inward movement with the diagonals. The ogive offered a similar solution for the difficult task of vaulting with arches of even crown the ambulatory of the apse, where the outer wall was longer than the inner, and each bay formed a trapezoid whose vault could not be forgivably designed without the pointed arch. That this was not at first chosen for its grace appears from the large number of buildings in which it was used to meet these problems, while the round arch continued to be used in windows and portals. Gradually the vertical lift of the ogive, and perhaps a desire for harmonized form, gave the pointed arch the victory. The ninety years of struggle between the round and the pointed arch—from the appearance of the ogive in the Romanesque cathedral of Durham (1104) to the final building of Chartres (1194)—constitute, in French Gothic, the period of the transition style.
The application of the pointed arch to windows created new problems, new solutions, and new charms. The channeling of strains through ribs from vault to piers, and from piers to specific points supported by buttresses, ended the need for thick walls. The space between each point of support and the next bore relatively little pressure; the wall there could be thinned, could even be removed. So large an opening could not be safely fitted with a single pane of glass. The space was therefore divided into two or more pointed windows (lancets), surmounted by an arch of stone; in effect the outer wall, like that of the nave, became a series of arches, an arcade. The four-pointed “shield” of masonry left between the upper ends of the paired and pointed windows and the top of the enclosing stone arch made an ugly blank, and cried out for decoration. About 1170 the architects of France responded with plate tracery; i.e., they pierced this shield in such a way as to leave stone bars or mullions in ornamental designs—circular, cusped, or lobed; and they filled the interstices, as well as the windows, with stained glass. In the thirteenth century the sculptors cut away more and more of the stone, and inserted into the opening little bars of stone carved into cusps or other forms. This bar tracery took on ever more complex paterns, whose predominating lines gave names to styles and periods of Gothic architecture: lancet, geometrical, curvilinear, perpendicular, and flamboyant. Similar processes applied to wall surfaces over the portals produced the great “rose windows,” whose radiating tracery generated the term rayonnant for the style that began at Notre Dame in 1230 and reached perfection in Reims and Sainte Chapelle. In the Gothic cathedral only the soaring articulation of the vault transcends the beauty of the “rose.”
Stone tracery, in the large sense of any piercing of stone in a decorative design, passed from the walls to other parts of the Gothic cathedral—the buttress pinnacles, the gables above the portals, the soffits and spandrels of arches, the triforium arcade, the sanctuary screen, the pulpit and reredos; for the Gothic sculptor, in the joy of his art, could scarcely touch a surface without adorning it. He crowded façades and cornices and towers with apostles, devils, and saints, with the saved and the damned; he cut his fancy into capitals, corbels, moldings, lintels, frets, and jambs; he laughed in stone with the whimsical or terrifying animals that he invented as gargoyles (“little throats”) to carry staining rain away from the walls or channel it into the ground through buttresses. Never elsewhere have wealth and skill, piety and lusty humor combined to provide such a feast of ornament as revels in the Gothic cathedral. Undeniably the decoration was sometimes too profuse, the tracery was carried to a fragile excess, the statues and capitals must have been too gaudy with the paint that time has cleansed away. But these are the signs of a vital exuberance, to which almost any fault can be forgiven. Wandering in these jungles and gardens of stone, it dawns upon us that Gothic art, despite its heaven-pointing lines and spires, was an art that loved the earth. Amid these saints proclaiming the vanity of vanities and the terror of the Judgment soon to come, we perceive the unseen but omnipresent medieval artisan, proud of his skill, joyful in his strength, laughing at theologies and philosophies, and drinking with relish, and to the last drop, the bubbling, brimming, lethal cup of life.
V. FRENCH GOTHIC: 1133–1300
Why did the Gothic revolution begin and culminate in France?
The Gothic style was not a virgin birth. A hundred traditions joined in a fertilizing flow: Roman basilicas, arches, vaults, and clerestories; Byzantine themes of ornament; Armenian, Syrian, Persian, Egyptian, Arabic ogives, groined vaults, and clustered piers; Moorish motifs and arabesques; Lombard ribbed vaults and façade towers; the Germanic flair for the humorous and grotesque…. But why did these streams of influence converge in France? Italy, as in wealth and heritage the favored country of Western Europe, might have led the Gothic flowering, but she was the prisoner of her classic inheritance. Italy excepted, France was in the twelfth century the richest, and most advanced, nation of the West. She above all others had manned and financed the Crusades, and profited from their cultural stimulus; she led Europe in education, literature, and philosophy; and her craftsmen were conceded to be the best this side of Byzantium. By the time of Philip Augustus (1180–1223) the royal power had triumphed over feudal disunity, and the affluence, power, and intellectual life of France were congregating in the king’s own domain—that lie de France loosely definable as the region of the middle Seine. Along the Seine, Oise, Marne, and Aisne a fruitful commerce moved, leaving behind it a wealth that turned to stone in cathedrals at Paris, St. Denis, Senlis, Mantes, Noyon, Soissons, Laon, Amiens, and Reims. The manure of money had prepared the soil for the growth of art.
The first masterpiece of the transition style was the magnificent abbey church of St. Denis, in the Paris suburb of that name. It was the work of one of the most complete and successful personalities in French history. Suger (1081?-1151), Benedictine abbot and regent of France, was a man of refined tastes, who, while living simply, thought it no sin to love beautiful things and to gather them for the adornment of his church. “If the ancient law,” he replied to St. Bernard’s criticisms, “ordained that cups of gold should be used for libations, and to receive the blood of rams … how much rather should we devote gold, precious stones, and the rarest of materials to vessels designed to hold the blood of Our Lord?”10 So he tells us proudly of the beauty and cost of the gold and silver, the jewels and enamels, the mosaics and stained windows, the rich vestments and vessels, which he gathered or had made for his church. In 1133 he brought together artists and artisans “from all lands” to raise and adorn a new home for France’s patron St. Denis, and to house the tombs of the kings of France; he persuaded King Louis VII and the court to contribute the necessary funds; “following our example,” he says, “they took the rings from their fingers” to pay for his costly designs.11 We picture him rising early to superintend the construction, from the felling of the trees that he chose for timbers to the installation of the stained glass whose subjects he had selected and whose inscriptions he had composed. When he dedicated his edifice in 1144 twenty bishops officiated; the King, two queens, and hundreds of knights attended; and Suger might well have felt that he had won a crown more glorious than any king’s.
Of his church only parts remain in the present edifice: the west front, two bays of the nave, the chapels of the ambulatory, and the crypt; most of the interior is a reconstruction by Pierre de Montereau between 1231 and 1281. The crypt is Romanesque; the west façade mingles round and pointed arches; its sculptures, mostly from Suger’s time, include a hundred figures, many well individualized, and all centering about one of the best conceptions of Christ the Judge in the whole sweep of medieval art.
Twelve years after Suger’s death Bishop Maurice de Sully paid him the compliment of bettering his instruction, and Notre Dame de Paris rose on an island in the Seine. Its chronology suggests the immensity of the task: the choir and transepts were built in 1163–82; the nave in 1182–96, the westernmost bays and the towers in 1218–23; the cathedral was finished in 1235. In the original design the triforium was to be Romanesque, but in the completion the whole structure adopted the Gothic style. The west front is unusually horizontal for a Gothic cathedral, but that is because the spires that were meant to top the towers were never built; perhaps for that reason there is a firm and simple dignity in this façade that has led able students to rank it as “the noblest architectural conception of man.”12 The rose windows of Our Lady of Paris are masterpieces of bar tracery and coloring; but they were not meant to be described by words. The sculptures, though injured by time and revolution, represent the finest work in that art between the age of Constantine and the building of Reims Cathedral. In the tympanum over the main portal the Last Judgment is carved with greater calm than in most later renderings of that ubiquitous theme; the Christ is a figure of quiet majesty; and the angel at His right is one of the triumphs of Gothic sculpture. Better still is La Vierge du trumeau—the Virgin of the Pillar—on the north portal: here is a new delicacy of treatment, finish of surface, naturalness of drapery; a new ease and grace of stance, with the weight on one foot and the body thereby freed from stiff verticality; in this lovely figure Gothic sculpture almost declared its independence from architecture, and produced a masterpiece quite capable of being taken from its context and standing triumphantly alone. In Notre Dame at Paris the transition was ended, and Gothic came of age.
The story of Chartres illuminates the medieval scene and character. It was a small town fifty-five miles southwest of Paris, just outside the royal domain, a market for the plain of Beauce, the “granary of France.” But the Virgin was said to have visited the place in person; the pious lame or blind or sick or bereaved made it a goal of pilgrimage; some were healed or comforted at her shrine; Chartres became a Lourdes. Furthermore, its Bishop Fulbert, a man mingled of goodness, intellect, and faith, made it in the eleventh century a shrine of higher education, alma mater to some of the most brilliant figures in early Scholastic philosophy. When Fulbert’s ninth-century cathedral burned down in 1020 he set himself at once to rebuild it, and lived long enough to see it finished. This, in turn, was destroyed by fire in 1134. Bishop Theodoric made the construction of a new cathedral a veritable crusade; he aroused such devotion to the task, financial and physical, that in 1144, according to the eye-witness account of Abbot Haimon of Normandy,
kings, princes, mighty men of the world, puffed up with honors and riches, men and women of noble birth, bound bridles upon their proud and swollen necks, and submitted themselves to wagons which, after the fashion of brute beasts, they dragged with loads of wine, corn, oil, lime, stones, beams, and other things necessary to sustain life or build churches…. Moreover, as they draw the wagons we may see this miracle, that although sometimes a thousand men and women … are bound in the traces … yet they go forward in such silence that no voice, no murmur, is heard…. When they pause on the way no words are heard but confessions of guilt, with supplication and pure prayer…. The priests preach peace, hatred is soothed, discord is driven away, debts are forgiven, unity is restored.13
This cathedral of Bishop Theodoric had hardly been completed (1180) when, in 1194, fire gutted the nave, brought vault and walls to the ground, and left, as scarred survivors, only the subterranean crypt and the west façade with its two towers and spires. We are told that every house in the town was destroyed in that awful conflagration, whose traces are visible on the cathedral today. The discouraged people for a time lost faith in the Virgin, and wished to abandon the town. But the indomitable papal legate Melior told them that the calamity had been sent by God to punish their sins; he commanded them to rebuild their church and their homes; the clergy of the diocese contributed nearly all their income for three years; new miracles were reported of the Virgin of Chartres; faith was rekindled; multitudes came again, as in 1144, to help the paid workers pull the carts and set the stones; funds were contributed by every cathedral in Europe;14 and by 1224 toil and hope completed the cathedral that makes Chartres again a goal of pilgrimage.
The unknown architect had planned to top with towers not merely the flanks of the west front but also the transept portals and the apse. Only the two façade towers were built. Le Clocher vieux—the Old Bell-Tower (1145–70)—rose with its spire to 351 feet at the south end of the façade; it is simple and unadorned, and wins the preference of professional architects.15 Its northern mate—Le Clocher neuf—twice lost its wooden spire by fire; the spire was rebuilt in stone (1506–12) by Jean le Texier in flamboyant Gothic style of crowded and delicate ornament; Fergusson thought it “the most beautifully designed spire on the continent of Europe”;16 but it is generally agreed that so ornate a spire mars the unity of an austere façade.17
The fame of Chartres rests on its sculpture and its glass. In this palace of the Virgin live 10,000 carved or pictured personages—men, women, children, saints, devils, angels, and the Persons of the Trinity. There are 2000 statues in the portals alone;18 additional statues stand against columns in the interior; visitors who climb the 312 steps to the roof are astonished to see carefully carved life-size figures where none but the vigorous curious can ever notice them. Over the central portal is a splendid Christ, not, as in later façades, sternly judging the dead, but seated in calm majesty amid a happy throng, His hand held out as if to bless the entering worshipers. Attached to the recessed “orders” of the portal arch are nineteen prophets, kings, and queens; they are slender and stiff as befits their station as literally pillars of the church; many are crude and unfinished, perhaps injured or worn; but some of the faces have the philosophic depth, the gentle repose, or the maiden grace, that were to be perfected at Reims.
FIG. 26—Cathedral Rheims
FIG. 27—St. Nicaise Between Two Angels Rheims Cathedral
FIG. 28—“The Annunciation and Visitation” Rheims Cathedral
FIG. 29—Wrought lron Grille Abbey of Ourscamp
FIG. 30—Cathedral Canterbury
FIG. 31—Hôtel de Ville Ypres
FIG. 32—Cathedral Salisbury
FIG. 33—Cathedral Interior Durham
FIG. 34—Cathedral Interior Winchester
FIG. 35—Westminster Abbey London
FIG. 36—Cathedral Strasbourg
FIG. 37-“The Church” Strasbourg Cathedral
FIG. 38—“The Synagogue” Strasbourg Cathedral
FIG. 39—Saint Elizabeth Detail from “The Visitation” Bamberg Cathedral
FIG. 40—Mary Detail from “The Visitation,” Bamberg Cathedral
FIG. 41—Ekkehard and His Wife Uta Naumburg Cathedral
FIG. 42—Rose Façade Orvieto Cathedral
FIG. 43—Façade Siena Cathedral
FIG. 44—Pulpit of Pisano Siena Cathedral
FIG. 45—Rear View of Cathedral Salamanca
FIG. 46—Cathedral Interior Santiago di Compostela
The transept façades and porches are the fairest in Europe. Each has three portals, flanked and separated by beautifully carved columns and jambs, and almost covered with statues every one of which is so individualized that several have received names from the folk of Chartres. The south porch centers its 783 figures around Christ enthroned on His judgment seat. Here Notre Dame de Chartres is subordinated to her Son; but in compensation she is endowed, as in Albertus Magnus, with all the sciences and philosophy, and in her service, on this portal, appear the Seven Liberal Arts—Pythagoras as Music, Aristotle as Dialectic, Cicero as Rhetoric, Euclid as Geometry, Nicomachus as Arithmetic, Priscian as Grammar, Ptolemy as Astronomy. St. Louis, in the words of his charter of 1259, caused the north porch to be completed “by reason of his particular devotion to the church of Our Lady of Chartres, and for the saving of his soul and the souls of his forefathers.”19 In 1793 the French Revolutionary Assembly defeated by a narrow margin a motion to destroy the statues of Chartres Cathedral in the name of philosophy and the Republic; “philosophy” compromised by chopping off some of the hands.20 This north porch belongs to the Virgin, and tells her story with reverent affection. The statues here stand out in the round, as fully matured sculpture; the drapery is as graceful and natural as in any Greek carving; the figure of Modesty is French girlhood at its best, where modesty gives to beauty a double power; there is nothing finer in all the history of sculpture. “These statues,” said Henry Adams, “are the Aeginetan marbles of French art.”21
As one enters the cathedral, four impressions mingle: the simple lines of the nave and vault, hardly comparable in size or beauty with the nave of Amiens or Winchester; the ornate choir screen, begun in 1514 by the flamboyant Jean le Texier; the peaceful figure of Christ on a pillar of the south transept, and, suffusing all with soft color, the unequaled stained glass. Here, in 174 windows, are 3884 figures from legend and history, ranging from cobblers to kings. It is medieval France seen through the richest colors ever developed—dark reds, soft blues, emerald greens, saffron, yellow, brown, white; here above all is the glory of Chartres. We must not look to these windows for realistic portraiture; the figures are ungainly, sometimes absurd; Adam’s head, in the medallion of the Expulsion from Eden, is painfully askew, and the bilateral charms of Eve could hardly divert the worshiper to concupiscence. It seemed to these artists enough that the pictures told a story while the colors fused in the viewer’s vision, and in their mingling painted the cathedral air. Excellent in design is the window of the Prodigal Son; famous for color and line the window of the symbolic Tree of Jesse; but better than all the rest is Notre Dame de la belle verrière—“Our Lady of the Beautiful Window.” Tradition holds that this lovely panel was rescued from the fire of 1194.22
Standing at the crossing of transept and nave, one may see the major roses of Chartres. In the main façade the central rose spans forty-four feet, almost as wide as the nave that it surveys; some have called it the finest work in glass known to history.23 Flooding the north transept is the “Rose of France,” given by Louis IX and Blanche of Castile, and dedicated to the Virgin; facing it across the church is the “Rose of Dreux,” in the south transept façade, given by Blanche’s enemy, Pierre Mauclerc of Dreux, and opposing Mary’s Son to Blanche’s Mother of God. Thirty-five lesser roses and twelve still smaller roselets complete the roster of Chartres’ circular glass. The modern spirit, too hurried and nervous to achieve patient and placid perfection, stands in wonder before works that must be ascribed not to the genius of singular individuals, but to the spirit and industry of a people, a community, an epoch, and a faith.
We have taken Chartres as typifying mature or rayonnant Gothic, and we must not indulge in similar tarrying over Reims, Amiens, and Beauvais. But who could pass hurriedly by the west front of Reims? If the original spires still rose from the towers, that façade would be the noblest work of man. Astonishing are the unity and harmony of style and parts in a structure raised by six generations. The cathedral finished by Hincmar in 841 was burned down in 1210; on the first anniversary of that fire a new cathedral was begun, designed by Robert de Coucy and Jean d’Orbais to be fit for the crowning of France’s kings. After forty years of labor, funds ran out; the work was stopped (1251), and the great church was not completed till 1427. A fire in 1480 destroyed the spires; the savings of the cathedral were used up in repairing the main structure, and the spires were not rebuilt. In the First World War shells smashed several buttresses, and tore huge gaps in roof and vault; the outer roof was destroyed by fire, and many statues were ruined. Other figures have been mutilated by fanatics, or by the erosion of centuries. History is a duel between art and time.
The sculptures of Reims, like its façade, mark the acme of Gothic art. Some are archaically crude; those in the central doorway are unsurpassed; and at various points on the portals, the pinnacles, the interior, we come upon figures that have almost the finish of Periclean statuary. Some, like the Virgin in the pillar of the central portal, are perhaps too graceful, and suggest a weakening of Gothic force; but the Virgin of the Purification at the left of the same portal, and the Virigin of the Visitation at the right, are among those achievements, of conception and execution, before which tongue and pen are stilled. More renowned, but not so near perfection, are the smiling angels in the Annunciation group of this façade. How different those joyous faces are from the St. Paul of the north portal!—itself one of the most powerful portraits ever carved in stone.
The sculptures of Amiens Cathedral excel those of Reims in elegance and finish, but fall short of them in dignity of conception and depth of revelation. Here on the western porch is the famous Beau Dieu, a little formal and lifeless after the living figures of Reims; here also is St. Firmin, no frightened ascetic but a firm, calm man, who never doubted right would triumph; and ‘here is a Virgin holding her child in her arms with all the absorbed tenderness of young motherhood. On the south portal the Vierge dorée, the Golden Virgin, smiles as she watches her child playing with a ball; she is a bit prettified, but too gracious to deserve Ruskin’s ungallant epithet, the “soubrette of Picardy.” Pleasant it is to see how the Gothic sculptors, after a century of serving theology, discovered men and women, and carved the joy of life on church façades. The Church, which also had learned to enjoy the earth, winked at the discovery, but thought it wise to have a Last Judgment on the main façade.
Amiens Cathedral was built in 1220–88 by a succession of architects-Robert de Luzarches, Thomas de Cormont, and his son Regnault. The towers were not completed till 1402. The interior is the most successful of Gothic naves; it rises to a vault 140 feet high, and seems rather to be drawing the church upward than to be bearing a weight. Continuous shafts from ground to vault bind the three-storied arcades of the nave into a majestic unity; the vaulting of the apse is a triumph of harmonious design over baffling irregularities; and the heart stands still at first sight of the clerestory windows and the roses of transepts and façade. But the nave seems too narrow for its height, the walls too frail for the roof; an element of insecurity enters into the awe aroused by this buoyant stone.
In Beauvais Cathedral this vaulting ambition of Gothic overleaped itself and reached its fated fall. The magnificence of Amiens stirred the citizens of Beauvais to jealousy. In 1227 they began to build, and vowed to raise the vault of their shrine thirteen feet higher than Amiens’. They brought the choir to the promised height; but hardly had they roofed it when it fell. In 1272a recuperating generation built the choir again as high as before, and in 1284 it fell again. Once more they built the choir, this time to 157 feet from the ground; then their funds ran out, and they left the church for two centuries without transepts or nave. In 1500, when France had at last recovered from the Hundred Years’ War, the gigantic transepts were begun; and in 1552—to top the spire of St. Peter’s in Rome—a lantern tower was raised over the transept cross to a height of 500 feet. In 1573 this tower collapsed, and brought down with it large sections of the transepts and the choir. The brave Beauvaisois at last compromised: they repaired the choir to its precarious pitch, but never added a nave. Beauvais Cathedral is therefore all head and no body; externally two rich transept façades and an apse engulfed in buttresses; internally a cavernous choir aglow with magnificent stained glass. If, ran an old French saying, one could combine the choir of Beauvais with the nave of Amiens, the façade of Reims, and the spires of Chartres, one would have a perfect Gothic cathedral.
In later ages men would look back to that thirteenth century and wonder what fountain of wealth and faith had poured out such glory upon the earth. For no man can know what France accomplished in that century—besides her universities, her poets, her philosophers, and her Crusades—unless he stands in person before one after another of the Gothic audacities that can here be only names: Notre Dame and Chartres and Reims and Amiens and Beauvais; Bourges (1195–1390) with its vast nave and four aisles and famed glass and lovely sculptured Angel with the Scales; Mont St. Michel with its marvel of a monastery (La Merveille, 1204–50) set in a fortress towering on an island rock off the coast of Normandy; Coutances (1208–1386) with its noble spires; Rouen (1201–1500) with its ornate Portail des libraires; and Sainte Chapelle in Paris—a “jewel box” of Gothic glass built (1245–8) by Pierre de Montereau as a chapel adjunct to the palace of St. Louis, to house the relics that the King had purchased from the East. It is good to remember, in ages of destruction, that men, when they will, can build as once they built in France.
VI. ENGLISH GOTHIC: 1175–1280
From Chartres and the Île de France the Gothic style swept into the French provinces, and crossed frontiers into England, Sweden, Germany, Spain, at last into Italy. French architects and craftsmen accepted foreign commissions, and everywhere the new art was called opus Francigenum—work born in France. England welcomed it because she was in the twelfth century half French; the Channel was but a river between two sides of a British realm that included half of France; and of that realm Rouen was the cultural capital. English Gothic derived from Normandy rather than from the Île de France, and kept in a Gothic frame the Norman massiveness. The transition from Romanesque to Gothic was almost simultaneous in England and France; about the same time that the pointed arch was being used at St. Denis (1140) it was appearing in Durham and Gloucester cathedrals, at Fountains Abbey and Malmesbury.24 Henry III (1216–72) admired everything French, envied the architectural glory of St. Louis’ reign, and taxed his people into poverty to rebuild Westminster Abbey, and to pay the school of artists—builders, sculptors, painters, illuminators, goldsmiths—whom he gathered near his court to execute his plans.
Of the three periods into which English Gothic falls—Early English (1175–1280), Decorated (1280–1380), and Perpendicular (1380–1450) —we confine ourselves here to the first. The long and pointed form of Early English windows and arches gave the style another name—Lancet. Façades and portals were simpler than in France; Lincoln and Rochester had some sculptures, Wells many more; but these were exceptional, and could not be compared, in quality or quantity, with the portal statuary of Chartres, Amiens, or Reims. Towers were massive rather than tall; but the steeples of Salisbury, Norwich, and Lichfield show what the English builder could do when he preferred elegance and height to dignity and mass. Interior elevation likewise failed to lure the architects of England; sometimes they tried it, as at Westminster and Salisbury; but more often they allowed the vault to lie oppressively low, as at Gloucester and Exeter. The great length of English cathedrals discouraged the effort to attain proportionate height; Winchester is 556 feet long, Ely 517, Canterbury 514, Westminster Abbey 511; Amiens is 435, Reims 430, even Milan only 475. But Winchester’s internal height was but 78 feet, Canterbury’s 80, Lincoln’s 82, Westminster’s 103, while Amiens rose to 140 feet.
The east end of the English Gothic church retained the square apse of the Anglo-Saxon style, ignoring the convenient French development of the polygonal or semicircular apse. In many cases the east end was expanded into a Lady Chapel for the special worship of the Virgin; but the adoration of Mary never reached in England the enthusiasm that marked it in France. Often in England the chapter house of the cathedral canons, and the palace of the bishop, were attached to the church and constituted with it the “cathedral close,” usually surrounded by a wall. In the Gothic monasteries of England and Scotland—as at Fountains, Dryburgh, Melrose, Tintern—the spread of dormitories, refectories, abbey, and cloistered walks formed in one enclosure an impressive artistic whole.
The essential principle of Gothic architecture—the balancing and channeling of pressures to reduce ungainly massiveness of support—seems never to have won full acceptance in England. The old Romanesque thickness of wall was only slightly moderated in English Gothic, even when, as at Salisbury, the design did not have to adapt itself to a Romanesque base. English architects, like the Italian, were repelled by the flying buttress; they adopted it here and there, but halfheartedly; they felt that the supports of a building should be contained in the structure itself, and not in excrescences. Perhaps they were right; and though their cathedrals lack the feminine grace of the French chef-d’oeuvres, they have a firm and masculine power that reaches beyond the beautiful to the sublime.
Four years after the murder of Becket at Canterbury, the choir of the cathedral burned down (1174). The people of the town beat their heads against the walls in anger and bewilderment that the Almighty had permitted such disaster to a shrine that had already become a goal of religious pilgrimage.25 The monks entrusted the work of rebuilding the choir to William of Sens, a French architect who had made a name for himself with the cathedral that he had built for his city. William worked at Canterbury from 1175 to 1178; a fall from a scaffolding disabled him, and the undertaking was carried on by William the Englishman, a man “small in body,” says the monk Ger-vase, “but in workmanship of many kinds acute and honest.”26 Much of the Romanesque cathedral of 1096 remained; round arches survived amid the generally Gothic renovation; but the old wooden ceiling of the choir was replaced by a ribbed vault of stone, the columns were lengthened to a graceful height, the capitals were exquisitely carved, and the windows were filled with brilliant stained glass. Gathered in its cathedral close, and yet towering over its quaint and lovely town, Canterbury Cathedral is today one of the most inspiring sights of the earth.
Its example, seen by countless prelates and pilgrims, spread the Gothic style through Britain. In 1177 Peterborough fronted the west transept of its cathedral with a splendid Gothic portico. In 1189 Bishop Hugh de Lacy built the handsome retrochoir of Winchester Cathedral. In 1186 an earthquake rent Lincoln Cathedral from top to base; six years later Bishop Hugh began its reconstruction on a Gothic design by Geoffrey de Noyers; the noble Grosseteste finished it about 1240. It stands on a hill overlooking a typically beautiful English countryside. Seldom has sublimity of mass been so well reconciled with delicacy of detail. The three great towers, the broad façade with its sculptured portal and complex arcades, the lordly nave, seemingly light despite its mass and span, the graceful shafts and carving of the piers, the rose windows, the palmlike vaulting of the chapter house, the magnificent arches of the cloisters—these would have made Lincoln Cathedral a credit to mankind even had there been no “Angel Choir.” In 1239 an old Norman tower fell and crushed Bishop Hugh’s choir; a new choir rose in 1256–80 in the nascent Decorated style, ornate but exquisite; legend ascribed its name to the angels who were said to have built it, since no human hands could have compassed such perfection; but probably the name came from the smiling angel musicians sculptured on the spandrels of the triforium. On the south portal of this choir English sculptors almost rivaled the carvings of Reims and Amiens. Four statues there, beheaded and otherwise mutilated by the Puritans, can bear such comparison; one representing the Synagogue and another representing the Church are the finest English statuary of the thirteenth century. A great scientist, Sir William Osier, thought this Angel Choir the fairest of all products of human art.27
In 1220 Bishop Poore engaged Elias de Derham to design and build Salisbury Cathedral. It rose to completion in the unusually short space of twenty-five years; it is Early English throughout, and breaks the rule that English cathedrals mingle several styles. The unity of design, the harmony of mass and line, the simple majesty of the transept tower and spire, the grace of the vault in the Lady Chapel, and the lovely windows of the chapter house redeem the squat heaviness of the nave piers and the oppressive shallowness of the vault. Ely Cathedral still has a wooden ceiling, but not unpleasing; there is a warm and living quality in wood that never comes to architecture in stone. To Ely’s fine Norman nave the Gothic architects added a pretty west porch, or galilee (c. 1205); a presbytery with handsome column clusters of Purbeck marble; and, in fourteenth-century Decorated Gothic, a Lady Chapel, a choir, and, over the transept crossing, a gorgeous lantern tower—the “Ely Octagon.” Wells Cathedral (1174–91) was one of the earliest examples of English Gothic; its nave was not too well designed; but the west front added (1220–42) by Bishop Jocelyn “narrowly escaped being the most beautiful in England.”28 In the niches of this façade were 340 statues; 106 are missing, victims of Puritanism, vandalism, and time; those that remain constitute the largest collection of figure sculpture in Britain. We cannot say as much for their quality.
The culminating achievement of Early English Gothic was Westminster Abbey. Henry III, who had made Edward the Confessor his patron saint, felt that the Norman church built by Edward (1050) was unworthy to house Edward’s bones; he ordered his artists to replace it with a Gothic edifice in the French style; and for this purpose he raised by taxation £750,-000, which we may diffidently equate at $90,000,000 today. The work began in 1245, and continued till Henry’s death in 1272. The design followed Reims and Amiens, even to admitting the Continental polygonal apse. The sculptures of the north porch, portraying the Last Judgment, were influenced by those of Amiens’ west front. In the spandrels of the transept triforium are remarkable reliefs of angels; one angel in the south transept offers to the centuries a tender, gracious face rivaling the cherubim of Reims. Over the doorway of the chapter house are two figures representing the Annunciation, and showing the Virgin in a charming gesture of modest deprecation. Even finer are the early royal tombs in the Abbey, and, best of all, that of Henry III himself—an ideally handsome and well-proportioned improvement upon the stout and stunted King. The crimes of a score of rulers are in those splendid tombs forgotten, and half redeemed by the English genius that lies buried under the stones of this sovereign sepulcher.
VII. GERMAN GOTHIC: 1200–1300
Flanders imported Gothic from France at an early date. St. Gudule’s, proud on its hill in Brussels, was begun in 1220; its chief glory is its stained glass. St. Bavon’s, at Ghent, built a Gothic choir in 1274; and St. Rombaut’s, at Mechlin, surveyed the countryside from huge towers never finished but still too ornate. Flanders was more interested in textiles than in theology; its characteristic architecture was civic; and its earliest Gothic triumphs were the cloth halls at Ypres, Bruges, and Ghent. That of Ypres (1200–1304) was the most majestic: a 450-feet-long façade of three-storied arcades, with colonnaded corner pinnacles and stately central tower; it was reduced to ruins in the First World War. The Cloth Hall of Bruges (1284f) still dominates its square with a superb and world-famous belfry. These fine buildings, and those of Ghent (1325f), suggest the prosperity and just pride of the Flemish guilds, and constitute some part of the charm of these now quiet and pleasant towns.
As Gothic spread eastward into Holland and Germany it encountered increasing resistance. In general the grace of the Gothic style did not accord with the sturdy force of the Teutonic frame and mind; Romanesque was more congenial, and Germany clung to it till the thirteenth century. The great cathedral of Bamberg (1185–1237) is transitional: the windows are small and round-arched, and there are no flying buttresses; but the vault is in ribbed and pointed form. Here at the outset of German Gothic we find a remarkable development of sculpture: at first imitating the French, but soon advancing to a style of splendid naturalism and power; indeed, the figure of the Synagogue on the Bamberg church is more satisfying than the similar figure at Reims.29 The Elizabeth and Mary in the choir are far from replicas of like subjects in France; Elizabeth has the face and form of a togaed Roman senator, and Mary is a woman of physical substance and vigor, such as Germany has always loved.
Almost every German cathedral surviving from this period contains outstanding statuary. The best is in the cathedral of Naumburg (c. 1250). In the west choir is a series of twelve statues portraying local dignitaries with a ruthless realism that suggests that the artists were underpaid; as if in atonement, the portrait of Uta, the margrave’s wife, is a wistful German’s conception of an ideal woman. A frieze on the screen of the choir shows Judas taking money to betray Christ; the figures are crowded together in bold composition, but without damage to their individuality; Judas is represented with some sympathy, and the Pharisees are powerful personalities. This is the masterpiece of German sculpture in the thirteenth century.
In 1248 Conrad of Hochstaden, Archbishop of Cologne, laid the foundation stone of the most famous and least German of German cathedrals. The work progressed slowly in the chaos that followed the death of Frederick II; the cathedral was not consecrated till 1322; much of it dates from the fourteenth century; the elegant spires, complex with crockets and open-work tracery, were built in 1880 from fifteenth-century designs. Modeled on Amiens, Cologne followed French style and methods closely. The lines of the façade are too straight and hard, but the tall, slender pillars of the nave, the brilliant windows, and the fourteen statues on the piers of the choir make an attractive interior, almost miraculously spared by the Second World War.
The cathedral of Strasbourg is more satisfying. There, as at Cologne, proximity to France made a French style seem no more foreign than it would seem in Strasbourg today (1949). The exterior is French grace, the interior is German force. The cathedral is approached through a picturesque congestion of gabled houses. Statues adorn the façade, but are outshone by a rose window of great compass and splendor. The single tower at one corner of the front gives the structure a crippled look. But the combination of dignity and decoration is here perfectly successful; we come to understand Goethe’s description of this façade as “frozen music,” though we should use a warmer phrase. “Brought up as I was,” Goethe wrote, “to looking upon Gothic architecture with contempt, I despised it; but when I went inside I was struck with wonder, and I felt the attraction of its beauty.”30 The stained glass here is very old, perhaps older than any in France. The sculptures of the south transept portal (1230–40) are of rare excellence. The tympanum over the door is a deep relief of the Virgin’s death; the apostles gathered at her bedside are inadequately individualized; but the figure of Christ is well conceived and skillfully carved. Rising alongside this portal are two pre-eminent statues: one representing the Church—a buxom German queen; the other a slim and graceful figure, blindfold but beautiful, symbolizing the Synagogue; remove the bandage, and the Synagogue would win the argument. The French Revolutionary Convention, in 1793, ordered the destruction of the cathedral’s statues to transform it into a “Temple of Reason”; a naturalist known to us merely as Hermann rescued the figures of Church and Synagogue by concealing them in his botanical garden, and saved the tympanum reliefs by covering them with a board bearing a French inscription: Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité.31
VIII. ITALIAN GOTHIC: 1200–1300
Medieval Italians called Gothic lo stile Tedesco; and Renaissance Italians, equally mistaken about its origin, invented the name Gothic for it, on the ground that only the transalpine barbarians could have developed so extravagant an art. The decorative exuberance and exalted audacity of the style offended the classic and long-chastened tastes of the Italian soul. If Italy at last adopted Gothic, it was with a reluctance verging on contempt; and only after she had transformed it to her own needs and mood could she produce not only the exotic brilliance of Milan Cathedral, but the strange Byzantine-Romanesque Gothic of Orvieto and Siena, Assisi and Florence. Her soil and her ruins alike abounded in marble, with which she could face her shrines in slabs of many tints; but how could she carve a marble façade into the complex portals of the freestone North? She did not need the enormous windows by which the chill and cloudy North invited light and warmth; she preferred the small windows that made her cathedrals cool sanctuaries against the sun; she thought thick walls, even iron braces, no uglier than stilted buttresses. Not needing pinnacles or pointed arches as devices of support, she used them as ornaments, and never quite appropriated the constructive logic of the Gothic style.
In the North that style had been, before 1300, almost entirely ecclesiastical; and the few exceptions were in such commercial cities as Ypres, Bruges, and Ghent. In northern and Central Italy, even richer than the Lowlands in manufacturing and trade, civic architecture played a prominent role in the Gothic development. Town halls, city walls, gates, and towers, feudal castles and merchant palaces took on Gothic form or ornament. Perugia began its Palazzo del Municipio in 12 81, Siena its Palazzo Pubblico in 12 89, Bologna its Palazzo Comunale in 1290, Florence its unique and graceful Palazzo Vecchio in 1298—all in Tuscan Gothic style.
At Assisi in 1228 Brother Elias, to accommodate his numerous Franciscan monks and the swelling crowd of pilgrims to St. Francis’ tomb, ordered the erection of the spacious convent and church of San Francesco—the first Gothic church in Italy. The commission was given to a German master builder whom the Italians named Iacopo d’Alemannia; perhaps it was for this reason that Gothic was known in Italy as “the German style.” Iacopo built a Lower Church in Romanesque groined-vault style, and upon this an Upper Church with traceried windows and ribbed and pointed vault. The churches and the convent make an imposing mass, not quite as interesting as the remarkable frescoes by Cimabue, Giotto, and Giotto’s pupils, or the tourists and worshipers who daily flock from a hundred towns to the shrine of Italy’s favorite and least-heeded saint.
Siena is still a medieval city: a public square with government buildings, open market stands, and modest adjoining shops that make no effort to attract the eye. From this center a dozen alleys pick their shady, hazardous way between dark and ancient tenements hardly ten feet apart, filled with a kindly and volatile people to whom water is a luxury rarer and more dangerous than wine. On a hill behind the tenements rises La Metropolitana—the cathedral of the city—in an unpleasant striation of black and white marble. Begun in 1229, it was completed in 1348. In 1380, from plans left by Giovanni Pisano, a new and gorgeous façade was added, all of red, black, or white marble, with three Romanesque portals flanked by jambs of splendid carving and surmounted by gables of crocketed design; a vast rose window filtered the setting sun; arcades and colonnades running along the front presented a parade of statuary; pinnacles and towers of white marble softened the corners; and in the high pediment a vast mosaic showed the Virgin Mother floating up to paradise. The Italian architect was interested in a bright and colorful surface; not, like the French, in the subtle play of light and shade upon recessed portal orders and deeply sculptured façades. There are no buttresses here; the choir is topped with a Byzantine dome; the weight is borne by thick walls and by round arches of gigantic span rising from clustered columns of marble to a vault of round and pointed ribs. Here is a Tuscan Gothic still predominantly Romanesque, all the world apart from the heavy miracles of Amiens and Cologne. Within is the white marble pulpit of Niccolò and Giovanni Pisano, a bronze Baptist by Donatello (1457), frescoes by Pinturicchio, an altar by Baldassare Peruzzi (1532), richly carved choir stalls by Bartolomeo Neroni (1567); so an Italian church could grow from century to century through the never-ending stream of Italian genius.
While Siena’s cathedral and campanile were taking form, a miracle reported from the village of Bolsena had architectural results. A priest who had doubted the doctrine of transubstantiation was convinced by seeing blood on the consecrated Host. In commemoration of this marvel, Pope Urban IV not only instituted the Feast of Corpus Christi (1264), but ordered the erection of a cathedral at neighboring Orvieto. Arnolfo di Cambio and Lorenzo Maetani designed it, engaged forty architects, sculptors, and painters from Siena and Florence, and worked on it from 1290 to its completion in 1330. The façade followed the style of Siena’s, but with finer finish of execution and better proportion and symmetry; it is a vast painting in marble, whose every element is itself a painstaking masterpiece. Incredibly detailed and yet precise reliefs on the broad pilasters between the portals tell again the story of creation, the life of Christ, the Redemption, and the Last Judgment; one of these reliefs, the Visitation, has already the perfection of Renaissance sculpture. Delicately carved colonnades divide the three stages of the lofty façade, and shelter a population of prophets, apostles, Fathers, and saints; a rose window dubiously ascribed to Orcagna (1359) centers the whole complex composition; and above it a dazzling mosaic (now removed) portrayed the Coronation of the Virgin. The strangely striated interior is a simple basilican arcade under a low wooden ceiling; the light is poor, and one can hardly do justice to the frescoes by Fra Angelico, Benozzo Gozzoli, and Luca Signorelli.
But it was in opulent Florence that the fury of building which swept through Italy in the thirteenth century worked its greatest marvels. In 1294 Arnolfo di Cambio began the church of Santa Croce; he retained the traditional basilican plan without transepts and with flat wooden ceiling, but he adopted the pointed arch for the windows, the nave arcade, and the marble façade. The beauty of the church consisted less in its architecture than in the wealth of sculptures and frescoes within, showing all the skill of a maturing Italian art. In 1298 Arnolfo refaced the baptistery with that tasteless alternation of black and white marble layers which disfigures so many works of the Tuscan style by crushing the vertical elevation under a plethora of horizontal lines. But the proud spirit of the age—another cockcrow of the Renaissance—can be heard in the edict (1294) by which the Signoria commissioned Arnolfo to build the great cathedral:
Whereas it is sovereign prudence on the part of a people of high origin to proceed in its affairs in such wise that the wisdom and magnanimity of its proceedings may shine forth in its visible works, it is ordered that Arnolfo, master architect of our commune, shall prepare models or designs for the restoration of [the cathedral of] Santa Maria Reparata, with the most exalted and the most prodigal magnificence, in order that the industry and power of men may never create or undertake anything whatsoever more vast and more beautiful; in accordance with that which our wisest citizens have declared and counseled in public session and in secret conclave—that no hand be laid upon the works of the commune without the intention of making them correspond to the noble soul which is composed of the souls of all its citizens united in one will.32
As doubtless this expansive proclamation was intended to do, it stimulated public giving. The guilds of the city joined in financing the enterprise; and when, later on, other guilds proved slack, the wool guild took over the entire cost, contributing as high as 51,500 gold lire ($9,270,000) a year.33 Accordingly, Arnolfo laid out dimensions on a grandiose scale. The stone vault was to be 150 feet high, equal to Beauvais’; the nave 260 by 55; and the weight was to be borne by thick walls, iron braces, and pointed nave arches remarkable for their small number—four—and their enormous sixty-five-foot span and ninety-foot height. Arnolfo died in 1301; the work went on, with considerable alteration of plans, under Giotto, Andrea Pisano, Brunelleschi, and others; and the ugly pile, renamed Santa Maria de Fiore, was not consecrated till 1436. It is a structure immense and bizarre, which spanned six centuries in building, covered 84,000 square feet, and proved inadequate for Savonarola’s audience.
IX. SPANISH GOTHIC: 1091–1300
As the monks of France had brought Romanesque architecture to Spain in the eleventh century, so in the twelfth they carried Gothic over the Pyrenees. In the picturesque little town of Avila the cathedral of San Salvador (1091f inaugurated the transition with round arches, a Gothic portal, and, in the apse, elegant columns rising to pointed ribs in the vault. At Salamanca piety preserved the old transitional cathedral of the twelfth century beside the new one of the sixteenth; the two together form one of the most imposing architectural ensembles in Spain. At Tarragona difficulties of finance prolonged the building of the seo or episcopal see from 1089 to 1375; the simple solidity of the older elements forms a fit background for the Gothic and Moorish decoration; and the cloisters—Romanesque colonnades under a Gothic vault—are among the most beautiful productions of medieval art.
Tarragona is distinctly Spanish; Burgos, Toledo, and Leon are progressively more French. The marriage of Blanche of Castile to Louis VIII of France (1200) widened the road of intercourse already opened by migratory monks. It was her nephew, Fernando III of Castile, who laid the first stone of Burgos Cathedral in 1221; it was an unknown French architect who designed the structure; a German of Cologne—Juan de Colonia—who raised the spires (1442); a Burgundian, Felipé de Borgoña, who rebuilt the great lantern over the transept cross (1539–43); at last his pupil, the Spaniard Juan de Vallejo, completed the edifice in 1567. The ornate traceried spires, the open towers that uphold them, and the sculptured arcade give to the west front of Santa Maria la Mayor a dignity and splendor that one cannot soon forget. Originally all this stone façade was painted; the colors have long since worn away; we can only try to imagine the resplendent mass that here once rivaled the sun.
The same Fernando III provided the funds for the still more magnificent cathedral of Toledo. Few inland cities have a more scenic site—nestling in a bend of the Tagus River, and hidden by protective hills; none would guess from its present poverty that once Visigothic kings, then Moorish emirs, then the Christian monarchs of Leon and Castile made it their capital. Begun in 1227, the cathedral rose in slow installments, and was hardly finished by 1493. Only one tower was executed on the original plan; it is half Moorish in the style of the Giralda at Seville, and almost as elegant. The other tower was capped in the seventeenth century with a dome designed by Toledo’s most famous citizen, Domingo Teotocópuli—El Greco. The interior, 395 feet long and 178 feet wide, is a live-aisled maze of tall piers, ornate chapels, ascetic stone saints, iron grilles, and 750 windows of stained glass. All the energy of the Spanish character, all the gloom and passion of Spanish piety, all the elegance of Spanish manners, and something of the Moslem’s flair for ornament find form and voice in this immense cathedral.
It is a proverb in Spain that “Toledo has the richest of our cathedrals, Oviedo the holiest, Salamanca the strongest, Leon the most beautiful.”34 Begun by Bishop Manrique in 1205, the cathedral of Leon was financed by small contributions rewarded with indulgences, and was completed in 1303. It adopted the French Gothic plan of building a cathedral chiefly of windows; and its stained glass ranks high among the masterpieces of that art. It may be true that the ground plan is taken from Reims, the west front from Chartres, the south portal from Burgos; the result is a charming cento of the French cathedrals—with finished towers and spires.
Many other shrines rose to celebrate the reconquest of Spain for Christianity—at Zamora in 1174, Tudela in 1188, Lerida in 1203, Palma in 1229, Valencia in 1262, Barcelona in 1298. But, excepting Leon, we should hardly describe the Spanish cathedrals of this period as Gothic. They avoided large windows and flying buttresses; they rested their weight on heavy walls and piers; instead of arch ribs running from base to ceiling, the piers themselves rose almost to the vault; and these tall columns, rising like stone giants in the caverns of immense naves, give to Spanish cathedral interiors a dark grandeur that subdues the soul with terror, while Northern Gothic lifts it up with light. Portals and windows, in Spanish Gothic, often kept the Romanesque arch; amid the Gothic ornament the decoration by diverse layers and patterns of colored brick preserved a Moorish element; and the Byzantine influence survived in domes and half domes rising with pendentive modulations from a polygonal base. It was from these varied constituents that Spain evolved a unique style for some of the finest cathedrals in Europe.
Not the least notable achievements of medieval architecture were the castles and fortresses of the countryside, and the walls and gates of the towns. The walls of Avila still stand to prove the medieval sense of form; and such gates as the Puerto del Sol in Toledo typically married beauty to use. From memories of the Roman castellum, and perhaps from observation of Moslem forts,35 the Crusaders built in the Near East mighty fortresses like that of Kerak (1121), superior in both mass and form to anything of their kind in that warlike age. Hungary, the bastion of Europe against the Mongols, raised magnificent castle-fortresses in the thirteenth century. The art flowed west, and left in Italy such masterpieces of military art as the fortress-tower of Volterra, and in France the thirteenth-century castles of Coucy and Pierrefonds, and the famous Château Gaillard that Richard Coeur de Lion constructed (1197) on returning from Palestine. Castles in Spain were no figments of fancy, but powerful masses of masonry that kept back the Moors and gave a name to Castile. When Alfonso VI of Castile (1073–1108) captured Segovia from the Moslems he built there a castle-fortress on the plan of the Alcazar of Toledo. In Italy castles rose as urban citadels for nobles; the towns of Tuscany and Lombardy still bristle with them; San Gimignano alone had thirteen before the Second World War. As early as the tenth century, at Châteaudun, France began to build the châteaux that in the Renaissance period were to form a lordly feature of her art. The technique of erecting stone castles passed into England with the Norman favorites of Edward the Confessor; it was advanced by the offensive and defensive measures of William the Conqueror, under whose iron hand the Tower of London, Windsor Castle, and Durham Castle took their earliest forms. From France, again, castle-building migrated to Germany, where it became a passion with lawless barons, warrior kings, and conquering saints. The monstrous Schloss of Königsberg, built (1257) as a fortress from which the Teutonic Knights might rule a hostile population, was a proper victim of the Second World War.
X. CONSIDERATIONS
Gothic architecture was the supreme achievement of the medieval soul. The men who dared to suspend those vaults on a few stilts of stone studied and expressed their science with greater thoroughness and effect than any medieval philosopher in any summa, and the lines and harmonies of Notre Dame make a greater poem than The Divine Comedy. Comparison of Gothic with classic architecture cannot be made in gross but demands specification. No one city in medieval Europe rivaled the architectural product of either Athens or Rome, and no Gothic shrine has the pure beauty of the Parthenon; but neither has any classic structure known to us the complex sublimity of the Reims façade, or the uplifting inspiration of Amiens’ vault. The restraint and repose of the classic style expressed the rationality and moderation that Greece preached to effervescent Greece; the romantic ecstasy of French Gothic, the somber immensity of Burgos or Toledo, unwittingly symbolized the tenderness and longing of the medieval spirit, the terror and myth and mystery of a religious faith. Classical architecture and philosophy were sciences of stability; the architraves that bound the columns of the Parthenon were the meden agan of the Delphic inscription, laying a heavy hand upon exaltation, counseling steadiness, and almost forcing men’s thoughts back to this life and earth. The spirit of the North was properly called Gothic, for it inherited the restless audacity of the conquering barbarians; it passed insatiate from victory to victory, and finally, with flying buttress and soaring arch, laid siege to the sky. But it was also a Christian spirit, appealing to heaven for the peace that barbarism had alienated from the earth. Out of those contradictory motives came the greatest triumph of form over matter in all the history of art.
Why did Gothic architecture decline? Partly because every style, like an emotion, exhausts itself by complete expression, and invites reaction or change. The development of Gothic into Perpendicular in England, Flamboyant in France, left the form no future except exaggeration and decay. The collapse of the Crusades, the decline of religious belief, the diversion of funds from Mary to Mammon, from Church to state, broke the spirit of the Gothic age. The taxation of the clergy, after Louis IX, depleted the cathedral treasuries. The communes and the guilds that had shared in the glory and the costs lost their independence, their wealth, and their pride. The Black Death and the Hundred Years’ War exhausted both France and England. Not only did new construction diminish in the fourteenth century, but most of the great cathedrals begun in the twelfth and thirteenth were left unfinished. Finally the rediscovery of classic civilization by the humanists, and the revival of classical architecture in Italy, where it had never died, superseded Gothic with a new exuberance. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century Renaissance architecture dominated Western Europe, even through baroque and rococo. When, in its turn, the classic mood paled away, the Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century re-created the Middle Ages in idealizing imagination, and Gothic architecture returned. The struggle between the classic and the Gothic styles still rages in our churches and schools, our marts and capitals, while a new and indigenous architecture, bolder even than Gothic, rides the sky.
Medieval man thought that truth had been revealed to him, so that he was spared from its wild pursuit; the reckless energy that we give to seeking it was turned in those days to the creation of beauty; and amid poverty, epidemics, famines, and wars men found time and spirit to make beautiful a thousand varieties of objects, from initials to cathedrals. Breathless before some medieval manuscript, humble before Notre Dame, feeling the far vision of Winchester’s nave, we forget the superstition and squalor, the petty wars and monstrous crimes, of the Age of Faith; we marvel again at the patience, taste, and devotion of our medieval ancestors; and we thank a million forgotten men for redeeming the blood of history with the sacrament of art.
CHAPTER XXXIII
Medieval Music
326–1300
I. THE MUSIC OF THE CHURCH
WE have done the cathedral injustice. It was not the cold and empty tomb that the visitor enters today. It functioned. Its worshipers found in it not only a work of art but the consoling, strengthening presence of Mary and her Son. It received the monks or canons who many times each day stood in the choir stalls and sang the canonical Hours. It heard the importunate litanies of congregations seeking divine mercy and aid. Its nave and aisles guided the processions that carried before the people the image of the Virgin or the body and blood of their God. Its great spaces echoed solemnly with the music of the Mass. And the music was as vital as the church edifice itself, more deeply stirring than all the glory of glass or stone. Many a stoic soul, doubtful of the creed, was melted by the music, and fell on his knees before the mystery that no words could speak.
The evolution of medieval music concurred remarkably with the development of architectural styles. As the early churches passed in the seventh century from the ancient domed or basilican forms to a simple masculine Romanesque, and in the thirteenth century to Gothic complexity, elevation, and ornament, so Christian music kept till Gregory I (540–604) the ancient monodic airs of Greece and the Near East, passed in the seventh century to Gregorian or plain chant, and flowered in the thirteenth century into polyphonic audacities rivaling the balanced strains of a Gothic cathedral.
The barbarian invasions in the West, and the resurgence of Orientalism in the Near East, combined to break the tradition of Greek musical notation through letters placed above the words; but the four Greek “modes”—Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian—survived, and begot by division the octoechos, or “eight manners” of musical composition—contemplative, restrained, grave, solemn, cheerful, joyful, spirited, or ecstatic. The Greek language persisted for three centuries after Christ in the church music of the West, and still remains in the Kyrie eleison. Byzantine music took form under St. Basil, mated Greek and Syrian chants, reached its height in the hymns of Romanus (c. 495) and Sergius (c. 620), and made its greatest conquest in Russia.
Some early Christians opposed the use of music in religion, but it soon appeared that a religion without music could not survive in competition with creeds that touched man’s sensitivity to song. The priest learned to sing the Mass, and inherited some of the melodies of the Hebrew cantor. Deacons and acolytes were taught to chant responses; some were technically trained in a schola lectorum, which under Pope Celestine I (422–32) became a schola cantorum. Such trained singers formed great choirs; that of St. Sophia’s had 25 cantors and 111 “lectors,” mostly boys.1 Congregational singing spread from East to West; the men alternated with the women in antiphonal song, and joined with them in the Alleluia. The psalms they sang were thought to echo or imitate on earth the hymns of praise sung before God by the angels and saints in paradise. St. Ambrose, despite the apostolic counsel that women should be silent in church, introduced antiphonal singing to his diocese; “psalms are sweet for every age, and becoming to either sex,” said this wise administrator; “they create a great bond of unity when all the people raise their voices in one choir.”2 Augustine wept when he heard the Milan congregation singing Ambrose’s hymns, and verified St. Basil’s dictum that the listener who surrenders to the pleasure of music will be drawn to religious emotion and piety.3 The “Ambrosian chant” is still used in Milan churches today.
A tradition universally accepted in the Middle Ages, and now, after long doubts, generally received,4 ascribes to Gregory the Great and his aides a reform and canonical determination of Roman Catholic music, resulting in the establishment of the “Gregorian chant” as the official music of the Church for six centuries. Hellenistic and Byzantine strains combined with Hebrew melodies of Temple or synagogue to mold this Roman or plain chant. It was monodic—one song—music; no matter how many voices participated, they all sang the same note, though women and boys often sang an octave higher than the men. It was simple music for voices of modest range; now and then it allowed a more complex “melisma”—a melodious wordless embellishment of a note or phrase. It was a free and continuous rhythm, not divided into regular meter or measures of time.
Before the eleventh century the only musical notation used by the Gregorian chant consisted of small signs derived from the Greek accent marks, and placed over the words to be sung. These “neumes” (airs, breaths) indicated a rise or fall of tone, but not the degree of rise or fall, nor the duration of the note; such matters had to be learned by oral transmission and the memorizing of an enormous body of liturgical song. No instrumental accompaniment was allowed. Despite these limitations—perhaps because of them—Gregorian chant became the most impressive feature of the Christian ritual. The modern ear, accustomed to complex harmony, finds these old chants monotonous and thin; they carry on a Greek, Syrian, Hebrew, Arab tradition of monody which only the Oriental ear can appreciate today. Even so, the chants sung in a Roman Catholic cathedral during Holy Week reach to the heart with a directness and weird power withheld from music whose complications divert the ear instead of moving the soul.
Gregorian chant spread through Western Europe like another conversion to Christianity. Milan rejected it, as it likewise resisted papal authority; and southern Spain long preserved its “Mozarabic” chant, formed by Christians under Moslem rule, and still used in a part of Toledo Cathedral. Charlemagne, who loved unity like a ruler, replaced the Gallican with the Gregorian chant in Gaul, and established schools of Roman church music at Metz and Soissons. The Germans, however, with throats formed by climate and needs quite different from the Italian, had trouble with the more delicate strains of the chant. Said John the Deacon: “Their coarse voices, which roar like thunder, cannot execute soft modulations, because their throats are hoarse with too much drinking.”5
Perhaps the Germans deprecated the fioritura that from the eighth century forward embellished the Gregorian chant with “tropes” and “sequences.” The trope or turn began as a composition of words for a melisma, making this easier to remember. Later it became an interpolation of words and music into a Gregorian chant, as when the priest sang not Kyrie eleison but Kyrie (fons pietatis, a quo bona cuncta procedunt) eleison. The Church permitted such embellishments, but never accepted them into the official liturgy. Bored monks amused themselves by composing or singing such interpolations, until there were so many tropes that books known as “tropers” were published to teach or preserve the favored ones. The music of the ecclesiastical drama grew out of such tropes. Sequences were tropes designed to follow the Alleluia of the Mass. The custom had grown of prolonging the final vowel of this word in a long melody known as a iubilus or chant of joy; in the eighth century various texts were written for these inserted melodies. The composition of tropes and sequences became a highly developed art, and gradually changed Gregorian chant into an ornate form uncongenial to its original spirit and “plain” intent.* This evolution ended the purity and dominance of Gregorian chant in that same twelfth century which saw the transition from Romanesque to Gothic in the architecture of the West.
The multiplication of complex compositions demanded for their transmission a better notation than that which plain chant had used. In the tenth century Odo, Abbot of Cluny, and Notker Balbulus, a monk of St. Gall, resurrected the Greek device of naming notes by letters. In the eleventh century an anonymous writer described the use of the first seven capitals of the Latin alphabet for the first octave of a scale, the corresponding lower-case Latin letters for the second octave, and Greek letters for the third.6 About 1040 Guido of Arezzo, a monk of Pomposa (near Ferrara), gave their present strange names to the first six notes of the scale by taking the first syllables of each half-line of a hymn to John the Baptist:
Ut queant laxis resonare floris
Mira gestorum famuli tuorum,
Solve polluti labii reatum.
This “solmization,” or naming of the musical tones by the syllables ut (or do), re, mi, fa, sol, la, became part of the inexorable heritage of Western youth.
More vital was Guido’s development of a musical staff. About 1000 the practice had arisen of using a red line to indicate the note now represented by F; later a second line, yellow or green, was added to represent C. Guido, or someone shortly before him, extended these lines to make a staff of four lines, to which later teachers added a fifth. With this new staff and the ut, re, mi, wrote Guido, his choir boys could learn in a few days what formerly had taken them many weeks. It was a simple but epochal advance, which earned for Guido the title of inventor musicae, and a splendid statue still to be seen in Arezzo’s public square. The results were revolutionary. Singers were free from the task of memorizing the whole musical liturgy; music could be more readily composed, transmitted, and preserved; the performer could now read music at sight and hear it with the eye; and the composer, no longer bound to keep close to traditional melodies lest singers refuse to memorize his work, could venture upon a thousand experiments. Most important of all, he could now write polyphonic music, in which two or more voices could simultaneously sing or play different but harmonizing strains.
We owe to our medieval forebears still another invention that made modern music possible. Tones could now be determined by dots placed on or between the lines of the staff, but these signs gave no hint as to how long a note was to be held. Some system for measuring and denoting the duration of each note was indispensable to the development of contrapuntal music—the simultaneous and harmonious procedure of two or more independent melodies. Perhaps some knowledge had seeped up from Spain of Arab treatises by al-Kindi, al-Farabi, Avicenna, and other Moslems who had dealt with measured music or mensural notation.7 At some time in the eleventh century8 Franco of Cologne, a priest mathematician, wrote a treatise Ars cantus mensurabilis, in which he gathered up the suggestions of earlier theory and practice, and laid down essentially our present system for indicating the duration of musical notes. A square-headed virga or rod, formerly used as a neume, was chosen to represent a long note; another neume, the punctum or point, was enlarged into a lozenge to represent a short note; these signs were in time altered; tails were added; by trial and error, through a hundred absurdities, our simple mensural notation was evolved.
These vital developments opened a wide door to polyphonic music. Such music had been written before Franco, but crudely. Toward the close of the ninth century we find a musical practice called “organizing”—the singing of concords by concurring voices. Little is heard of it again till the end of the tenth century, when we find the names organum and symphonia applied to such compositions for two voices. The organum was a liturgical piece, in which an old monodic strain was carried or “held” by the tenor (who was therefore so named), while another voice added a harmonizing melody. A variant of this form, the conductus, gave the tenor a new or popular tune, and conducted another voice in a concurrent air. In the eleventh century the composers took a step as bold in its way as the Gothic balancing of thrusts: they wrote harmonies in which the “conducted” voice did not slavishly accompany the tenor in the rise or fall of the melody, but ventured upon other harmonies through notes not necessarily moving in a parallel line with the cantus firmus of the tenor. This declaration of independence became almost a rebellion when the second voice accompanied the ascending melody of the tenor with a descending movement. This harmony by contrast, and fluent resolution of momentary discords, became a passion with composers, almost a law; so, about 1100, John Cotton wrote: “If the main voice is ascending, the accompanying part shall descend.”9 Finally, in the motet (apparently a diminutive from the French mot, a word or phrase), three, four, five, even six different voices were made to sing in a complex weave of individual melodies whose diverse but concordant strains crossed and merged in a vertical-horizontal web of harmony as subtle and graceful as the converging arches of a Gothic vault. By the thirteenth century this Ars antiqua of polyphony had built the foundations of modern musical composition.
In that exciting century the enthusiasm for music rivaled the interest in architecture and philosophy. The Church looked askance upon polyphony; she distrusted the religious effect of music becoming a lure and end in itself; John of Salisbury, bishop and philosopher, called a halt to complexity of composition; Bishop Guillaume Durand branded the motet as “disorganized music”; Roger Bacon, a rebel in science, deplored the vanishing of the stately Gregorian chant. The Council of Lyons (1274) denounced the new music; and Pope John XXII (1324) issued a papal condemnation of discantus, or polyphony, on the ground that the innovating composers “chop up the melodies … so that these rush around ceaselessly, intoxicating the ear without quieting it, and disturbing devotion instead of evoking it.”10 But the revolution continued. In one citadel of the Church—Notre Dame de Paris—the choirmaster Leoninus, about 1180, composed the finest organa of his time; and his successor Perotinus was guilty of compositions for three or four voices. Polyphony, like Gothic, spread from France to England and Spain. Giraldus Cambrensis (1146?-1220) reported two-part singing in Iceland, and said of his native Wales what one might say of it today:
In their songs they do not utter the tunes uniformly … but manifoldly—in many manners and many notes; so that in a multitude of singers, such as it is the custom of this people to bring together, as many songs are to be heard as there are singers to be seen, and a various diversity of parts, finally coming together in one consonance and organic melody.11
In the end the Church bowed to the infallibility of the Zeitgeist, accepted polyphony, made it a powerful servant of the faith, and prepared it for its Renaissance victories.
II. THE MUSIC OF THE PEOPLE
The impulse to rhythm expressed itself in a hundred forms of secular music and dance. The Church had her reasons for fearing this instinct uncontrolled; it allied itself naturally with love, the great rival of religion as a source of song; and the hearty earthiness of the medieval mind, when the priest was out of sight, inclined it to a freedom, sometimes an obscenity, of text that shocked the clergy, and provoked councils to vain decrees. The goliards, or wandering scholars, found or composed music for their paeans to woman and wine, and their scandalous parodies of sacred ritual; manuscripts circulated containing solemn music for the hilarious words of the Missa de potatoribus—the Mass of the Topers—and the Officium ribaldorum—a Prayer Book for Roisterers.12 Love songs were as popular as today. Some were as tender as a nymph’s orisons; some were seduction dialogues with delicate accompaniments. And of course there were war songs, calculated to forge unity through vocal unison, or to anesthetize the pursuit of glory with hypnotic rhythm. Some music was folk song, composed by anonymous genius, and appropriated—perhaps transformed—by the people. Other popular music was the product of professional skill using all the arts of polyphony learned in the liturgy of the Church. In England a favorite and complex form was the roundel, in which one voice began a melody, a second began the same or a harmonizing melody when the first had reached an agreed point, a third chimed in after the second was on its way, and so on, until as many as six voices might be running the rounds in a lively contrapuntal fugue.
Almost the oldest roundel known is the famous “Sumer is i-cumen in,” probably composed by a Reading monk about 1240. Its six-part complexity shows polyphony already at home among the people. The words still live with the spirit of a century in which all medieval civilization was coming to flower:
Sumer is i-cumen in;
Llude sing cuccu!
Groweth sed and bloweth med
And springth the wude nu:
Sing cuccu!
Awe bleteth after lomb,
Lhouth after calve cu;
Bulluc sterteth, bucke verteth:
Murie sing cuccu!
Cuccu, cuccu, wel singes thu cuccu;
Ne swik thu naver nu;
Sing cuccu nu, sing cuccu,
Sing cuccu, sing cuccu, nu!
Summer is a-coming in,
Loudly sing cuckoo!
Groweth seed and bloweth mead,
And blossoms the woodland now:
Sing cuckoo!
Ewe bleateth after lamb,
Loweth after calf the cow;
Bullock leapeth, buck turns off;
Merry sing cuckoo!
Cuckoo, cuckoo, well singest thou
cuckoo;
Cease thou not, never now;
Sing cuckoo now, sing cuckoo,
Sing cuckoo, sing cuckoo, now!
Such a song must have been congenial to the minstrels or jongleurs who wandered from town to town, from court to court, even from land to land; we hear of minstrels from Constantinople singing in France, of English gleemen singing in Spain. A performance by minstrels was a usual part of any formal festivity; so Edward I of England engaged 426 singers for the wedding of his daughter Margaret.13 Such minstrel groups often sang part songs, sometimes of bizarre complexity. Usually the songs were composed—words and music—by troubadours in France, trovatori in Italy, minnesingers in Germany. Most medieval poetry before the thirteenth century was written to be sung; “a poem without music,” said the troubadour Folquet, “is a mill without water.”14 Of 2600 troubadour songs extant, we have the music of 264, usually in the form of neumes and ligatures on a four-or five-line staff. The bards of Ireland and Wales probably played instruments, and sang.
In the manuscripts that preserve the Cantigas or canticles collected by Alfonso X of Castile several illustrations show musicians in Arab dress performing on Arab instruments; the pattern of many of the songs is Arabic;15 possibly the music, as well as the early themes and poetic forms, of the troubadours was derived from Moorish songs and melodies passing through Christian Spain into Southern France.16 Returning Crusaders may have brought Arab musical forms from the East; it is to be noted that the troubadours appear about 1100, contemporary with the First Crusade.
Startling is the variety of medieval musical instruments. Percussion instruments—bells, cymbals, timbrels, the triangle, the bombulum, the drum; string instruments—lyre, cithera, harp, psaltery, noble, organistrum, lute, guitar, vielle, viola, monochord, gigue; wind instruments—pipe, flute, hautboy, bagpipe, clarion, flageolet, trumpet, horn, organ: these are a selection out of hundreds; everything was there for hand or finger, foot or bow. Some of them had survived from Greece, some had come, in form and name, from Islam, like the rebec, lute, and guitar; many were precious examples of medieval artistry in metal, ivory, or wood. The usual instrument of the minstrel was the vielle, a short violin played with an archer’s curved-back bow. Before the eighth century most organs were hydraulic; but Jerome in the fourth century described a pneumatic organ;17 and Bede (673–735) wrote of organs with “brass pipes filled with air from bellows, and uttering a grand and most sweet melody.”18 St. Dunstan (c. 925–88) was accused of sorcery when he built an Aeolian harp that played when placed against a crack in the wall.19 In Winchester Cathedral, about 950, an organ was installed having twenty-six bellows, forty-two bellows-blowers, and four hundred pipes; the keys were so Gargantuan that the organist had to strike them with fists protected by thickly padded gloves.20 Milan had an organ whose pipes were of silver; Venice had one with pipes of gold.21
All notion of medieval hell-stricken gloom vanishes before a collection of medieval musical instruments. What remains is again the picture of a people at least as happy as ourselves, full of the bounce and lust of life, and no more oppressed with fear of the end of the world than we with doubts whether civilization will be destroyed before we can complete its history.
CHAPTER XXXIV
The Transmission of Knowledge
1000–1300
I. THE RISE OF THE VERNACULARS
AS the Church had preserved in some measure that political unity of western Europe that the Roman Empire had achieved, so her ritual, her sermons, and her schools maintained a Roman heritage now lost—an international language intelligible to all the literate population of Italy, Spain, France, England, Scandinavia, the Lowlands, Germany, Poland, Hungary, and the western Balkans. Educated men in these countries used Latin for correspondence, business records, diplomacy, law, government, science, philosophy, and nearly all literature before the thirteenth century. They spoke Latin as a living language, which almost daily developed a new word or phrase to denote the new or changing realities or ideas of their lives. They wrote their love letters in Latin, from the simplest billets-doux to the classic epistles of Héloïse and Abélard. A book was written not for a nation but for the continent; it needed no translation, and passed from country to country with a speed and freedom unknown today. Students went from one university to another with no thought of linguistic embarrassments; scholars could lecture in the same language at Bologna, Salamanca, Paris, Oxford, Uppsala, and Cologne. They did not hesitate to import new words into Latin, sometimes to the horror of the Petrarcan-Ciceronian ear; so Magna Carta ruled that no freeman should be dissaisiatus or imprisonatus. Such words make us wince, but they kept Latin alive. Many modern English terms—for instance instance, substantive, essence, entity—descended from medieval additions to the Latin tongue.
Nevertheless the disruption of international intercourse by the collapse of Rome, the introverting poverty of the Dark Ages, the decay of roads and the decline of commerce, developed in speech those variations which segregation soon expands. Even in its heyday Latin had suffered national modifications from diversities of climate and oral physiology. In its very homeland the old language had been changed. The abdication of literature had left the field to the vocabulary and sentence structure of the common man, which had always been different from those of the poets and orators. The influx of Germans, Gauls, Greeks, and Asiatics into Italy brought a multiformity of pronunciation; and the natural laziness of tongue and mind sloughed off the precise inflections and terminations of careful speech. H became silent in late Latin; V, classically pronounced like the English W, acquired the sound of the English V; N before S dropped away—mensa (table) was pronounced mesa-, the diphthongs Æ and Œ, classically pronounced like the English I and OI, were now like long English A or French E. As final consonants were slurred and forgotten (portus, porto, porte; rex, re, roi; coelum, cielo, ciel), case endings had to be replaced by prepositions, conjugational endings by auxiliary verbs. The old demonstrative pronouns ille and illa became definite articles—il, el, lo, le, la-, and the Latin unus (one) was shortened to form the indefinite article un. As declensions disappeared, it sometimes became difficult to tell whether a noun was the subject before, or the object after, the predicate. Viewing this continuous process of change over twenty centuries, we may think of Latin as the still living and literary language of Italy, France, and Spain, no more transformed from the speech of Cicero than his from that of Romulus, or ours from Chaucer’s.
Spain had begun to speak Latin as early as 200 B.C.; by Cicero’s time its dialect had diverged so far from the usage of Rome that Cicero was shocked by what seemed to him the barbarisms of Corduba. Contact with Iberian dialects softened the Latin consonants in Spain: T into D, P into B, K into G; totum into todo, operam into obra, ecclesia into iglesia. French also softened the Latin consonants, and while often keeping them in writing, frequently dropped them in speech: tout, oeuvre, église, est. The oath taken at Strasbourg in 842 by Louis the German and Charles the Bald was sworn in two languages—German and French*—a French still so Latin that it was called lingua romana; not till the tenth century was it sufficiently distinct to receive the name lingua gallica. The lingua romana in turn divided into what France called two languages: the langue d’oc of France south of the Loire, and the langue d’oil of northern France. It was a medieval custom to differentiate dialects by their way of saying yes: South France said it with oc from the Latin hoc, this; the North used oil, a fusion of the Latin hoc ille, this-that. Southeastern France had a dialect of the langue d’oc called Provençal; it became a polished literary language in the hands of the troubadours, and was almost snuffed out by the Albigensian Crusades.
Italy formed her vernacular more slowly than Spain or France. Latin was her native speech; the clergy, who spoke Latin, were especially numerous in Italy; and the continuity of her culture and her schools kept the language from changing so freely as in lands with broken traditions. As late as 1230 St. Anthony of Padua preached to the common people in Latin; however, a Latin sermon delivered at Padua in 1189 by a visiting prelate had to be translated by the local bishop into the popular tongue.2 Italian hardly existed as a language at the beginning of the thirteenth century; there were merely some fourteen dialects continued and variously corrupted from the ancient Latin of the market place, each barely intelligible to the rest, and cherishing its differences with passionate atomism; sometimes different quarters of the same city, as at Bologna, had distinct dialects. The predecessors of Dante had to create a language as well as a literature. The poet, in a pleasant fancy, thought that the Tuscan troubadours chose Italian as their medium because they wrote of love, and the ladies they addressed might not understand Latin.3 Even so, about 1300, he hesitated between Latin and the Tuscan dialect as the language of The Divine Comedy. By the narrow margin of this choice he escaped oblivion.
While Latin was dividing reproductively into the Romance languages, Old German was splitting into Middle German, Frisian, Dutch, Flemish, English, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Icelandic. “Old German” is merely a convenient phrase to cover the many dialects that exercised their tribal or provincial sovereignty in Germany before 1050: Flemish, Dutch, Westphalian, Eastphalian, Alemannic, Bavarian, Franconian, Thuringian, Saxon, Silesian…. Old German passed into Middle German (1050–1500) partly through the influx of new words with the coming of Christianity. Monks from Ireland, England, France, and Italy labored to invent terms to translate Latin. Sometimes they appropriated Latin words bodily into German—Kaiser, Prinz, Legende. This was legitimate thievery; tragic, however, was the influence of Latin sentence structure—keeping the verb to the end-in changing the once simple syntax of the German people into the stiff, inverted, and breath-taking periods of the later German style.4 Perhaps the finest German was the Middle High German written by the great poets of the thirteenth century—Walter von der Vogelweide, Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried of Strasbourg, Wolfram von Eschenbach. Never again, except in Heine and the young Goethe, was German so simple, flexible, direct, clear.
The Teutonic speech of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes went with them to England in the fifth century, and laid the foundations of the English language—gave it almost all its short and racy words. French flooded the land with the Normans, and ruled the court, the courts, and the aristocracy from 1066 to 1362, while Latin continued to preside over religion and education, and (till 1731) remained de rigueur in official documents. Thousands of French words entered into English, above all in costume, cookery, and law; half the terminology of English law is French.5 For three centuries the literatures of France and England were one; and as late as Chaucer (1340–1400) the spirit and language of English letters were half French. After the loss of her French possessions England was thrown back upon herself, and the Anglo-Saxon elements in English speech triumphed. When the French domination passed, the English language had been immeasurably enriched. By adding French and Latin to its German base, English could triply express any one of a thousand ideas (kingly, royal, regal; twofold, double, duplex; daily, journal, diurnal, …); to this it owes its wealth of discriminating synonyms and verbal nuances. He who should know the history of words would know all history.
II. THE WORLD OF BOOKS
How were these diverse languages written? After the fall of Rome in 476 the conquering barbarians adopted the Latin alphabet, and wrote it with a “cursive” or running hand that bound the letters together and gave most of them a curved form instead of the straight lines that had been found convenient in writing upon hard surfaces like stone or wood. The Church preferred in those centuries a “majuscule,” or large-letter writing, to facilitate the reading of missals and books of hours. When the copyists of Charlemagne’s time preserved Latin literature by making many copies of the classics, they saved costly parchment by adopting a “minuscule,” or small-letter writing; they agreed on set forms for the letters, and created the “set minuscule” lettering that became for four centuries the usual medium of medieval books. In the twelfth century, as if in accord with the exuberant decoration then developing in Gothic architecture, the letters acquired flourishes, hairlines, and hooks, and became the “Gothic” lettering that prevailed in Europe till the Renaissance, and in Germany till our time. Very few medieval manuscripts were punctuated; this breath-guiding device, known to the Hellenistic Greeks, had been lost in the barbarian upheaval; it reappeared in the thirteenth century, but was not generally adopted till printing established it in the fifteenth century. Printing was in some measure prepared as early as 1147 by the use of woodcuts, in Rhenish monasteries, for printing initial letters or patterns upon textiles.6 Divers forms of shorthand were practiced, much inferior to the “Tironian notes” developed by Cicero’s slave.
Writing was upon parchment, papyrus, vellum, or paper, with quill or reed pens using black or colored inks. Papyrus disappeared from common use in Europe after the Islamic conquest of Egypt. Vellum, prepared from the skin of young lambs, was expensive, and was reserved for luxurious manuscripts. Parchment, made from coarse sheepskin, was the usual medium of medieval writing. Till the twelfth century paper was a costly import from Islam; but in 1190 paper mills were set up in Germany and France, and in the thirteenth century Europe began to make paper from linen.
Many parchments were scraped to erase an old manuscript and receive a second composition (“palimpsest”). Old works were lost by such erasures, by misplacement of manuscripts, by war and pillage, by fire or decay. Huns sacked monastic libraries in Bavaria, Northmen in France, Saracens in Italy. Many Greek classics perished in the plunder of Constantinople in 1204. The Church had at first discountenanced the reading of the pagan classics; in nearly every century some fearful voice—Gregory I, Isidore of Seville, Peter Damian—was raised against them; Theophilus, Archbishop of Alexandria, destroyed all pagan manuscripts that he could find; and Greek priests, according to Demetrius Chalcondylas,7 persuaded Greek emperors to burn the works of the Greek erotic poets, including Sappho and Anacreon. But in those same centuries there were many ecclesiastics who cherished a fondness for the old pagans, and saw to it that their works were preserved. In some cases, to disarm censure, they read the most Christian sentiments into pagan poetry, and by genial allegory turned even Ovid’s amatory art into moral verse. An abundant heritage of classical literature was preserved by monastic copyists.8 Tired monks were told that God would forgive one of their sins for every line they copied; Ordericus Vitalis informs us that one monk escaped hell by the margin of a single letter.9 Second only to the monks as copyists were private or professional scribes, who were engaged by rich men, or by booksellers, or by monasteries. Their labor was wearisome, and evoked from them strange requests on the final page:
Explicit hoc totum;
This completes the whole;
Pro Christo da mihi potum.
For Christ’s sake give me a drink.10
Another scribe thought he deserved more, and wrote, as his colophon: Detur pro penna scriptori pulchra puella—“For the [work of the] pen let the writer receive a beautiful girl.”11
The medieval Church exercised no regular censorship over the publication of books. If a book proved both heretical and influential, like Abélard’s on the Trinity, it would be denounced by a Church council. But books were then too few to be a prime peril to orthodoxy. Even the Bible was rare outside of monasteries; a year was required to copy it, a year’s income of a parish priest to buy it; few clergymen had a full copy.12 The New Testament, and special books of the Old, had a wider circulation. Bibles of great size, magnificently decorated, were produced in the twelfth century; they could be handled only on a reading desk, usually in a monastic library, and might be chained to the desk for better preservation. The Church took fright when she found that the Waldensians and Albigensians were making and disseminating their own translations of scriptural books; and a Church council at Narbonne (1227), as we have seen, forbade laymen to possess any portion of the Scriptures.13 But in general, before the fourteenth century, the Church was not opposed to Bible reading on the part of the laity. She did not encourage it, for she distrusted popular interpretations of scriptural mysteries.
The size of a book and its pages was determined by the size of the available skins, each of which was folded to make a “folio.” After the fifth century books were no longer issued in rolls as in antiquity;* the skins were cut in rectangular sizes to make four (“quarto”), eight (“octavo”), twelve (“duodecimo”), or sixteen (“sextodecimo”) sheets to a folio. Some sextodecimos, written in a “fine Italian hand,” crowded long works into small compass to fit into the pocket or be a convenient manual. The binding might be of heavy parchment, cloth, leather, or board. Leather covers might be decorated by “blind tooling”—i.e., stamping uncolored designs into them with hot metal dies. Moslem artists settled in Venice introduced into Europe the technique of filling in such depressed parts with gold tints. Wood covers might be decorated with enamel or carved ivory, or inlaid with gold, silver, or gems. St. Jerome rebuked the Romans: “Your books are carved with precious stones, and Christ died naked!”14 Few modern volumes rival the sumptuous bindings of medieval books.
Even simple books were a luxury. An ordinary volume cost between $160 and $200 in the currency of the United States of America in 1949.15 Bernard of Chartres, a leader in the twelfth-century revival of the ancient classics, left a library of only twenty-four volumes. Italy was richer than France, and its famous jurist, the elder Accursius, collected sixty-three books. We hear of a great Bible being sold for ten talents—at least $10,000; of a missal exchanged for a vineyard; of two volumes of Priscian, the fifth-century grammarian, being paid for with a house and lot.16 The cost of books delayed the rise of a booksellers’ trade till the twelfth century; then the university towns engaged men as stationarii and librarii to organize corps of copyists to transcribe books for teachers and students; and these men sold copies to all who cared to pay. They seem never to have dreamed of paying a live author. If a man insisted on writing a new book, he had to pay its costs, or find a king or lord or magnate to grace his palm for a dedication or a laud. He could not advertise his book except by word of mouth. He could not publish it—make it public—except by getting it used in a school, or having it recited before whatever audience he could collect. So Gerald of Wales, on returning from Ireland in 1200, read his Topography of that country before an assemblage at Oxford.
The cost of books, and the dearth of funds for schools, produced a degree of illiteracy which would have seemed shameful to ancient Greece or Rome. North of the Alps, before 1100, literacy was almost confined to “clerics”—clergymen, accountants, scribes, governmental officials, and professional men. In the twelfth century the business classes must have been literate, for they kept elaborate accounts. In a household a book was a precious thing. Usually it was read aloud to several listeners; many later rules of punctuation and style were determined by convenience for oral reading. Books were carefully exchanged from family to family, monastery to monastery, country to country.
Libraries, though small, were numerous. St. Benedict had ruled that every Benedictine monastery should have a library. Carthusian and Cistercian houses, despite St. Bernard’s aversion to learning, became sedulous collectors of books. Many cathedrals—Toledo, Barcelona, Bamberg, Hildesheim—had substantial libraries; Canterbury had 5000 books in 1300. But this was exceptional;17 most libraries had less than a hundred; Cluny, one of the best, had 570 volumes.18 Manfred, King of the Sicilies, had a valuable collection, which passed to the papacy and became the nucleus of the Greek collections in the Vatican. The papal library began with Pope Damasus (366–84); its precious manuscripts and archives were mostly lost in the turmoil of the thirteenth century; the present Vatican Library dates from the fifteenth century. The universities—or, rather, their college halls—began to have libraries in the twelfth century. St. Louis founded the library of Sainte Chapelle in Paris, and enriched it with books copied for him from a hundred monasteries. Many libraries, like those of Notre Dame, St. Germain des Près, and the Sorbonne, were open to responsible students, and volumes might be taken out on adequate security. The student of today can hardly appreciate the literary wealth that city and college libraries lay freely at his feet.
There were, here and there, private libraries. Even in the darkness of the tenth century we find Gerbert collecting books with true bibliophile passion. Some other churchmen, like John of Salisbury, had their own collections, and a few nobles had small libraries in their châteaux. Frederick Barbarossa and Frederick II had considerable collections. Henry of Aragon, lord of Villena in Spain, gathered a great library, which was publicly burned on the charge that he had intercourse with the Devil.19 About 1200 Daniel of Morley brought to England from Spain “a precious multitude of books.”20 In the twelfth century Europe discovered the wealth of Spain in books; scholars descended upon Toledo, Cordova, and Seville; and a flood of new learning poured up over the Pyrenees to revolutionize the intellectual life of the adolescent North.
III. THE TRANSLATORS
Medieval Europe, partly united by a common language, was still divided into Latin and Greek halves, mutually hostile and ignorant. The Latin heritage, except of law, was forgotten in the Greek East; the Greek heritage, except in the Sicilies, was forgotten in the West. Part of the Greek heritage was hidden beyond the walls of Christendom—in Moslem Jerusalem, Alexandria, Cairo, Tunis, Sicily, and Spain. As for the vast and distant world of India, China, and Japan, long rich in literature, philosophy, and art, Christians, before the thirteenth century, knew almost nothing.
Some of the work of linking the diverse cultures was performed by the Jews, who moved among them like fertilizing subterranean streams. As more and more Jews migrated from Moslem realms into Christendom, and lost knowledge of Arabic, their scholars found it desirable to translate Arabic works (many written by Jews) into the only language generally understood by the savants of the scattered race—Hebrew. So Joseph Kimchi (c. 1105–c. 1170), at Narbonne, translated the Jewish philosopher Bahya’s Guide to the Duties of the Heart. Joseph was the father of brilliant sons; but even more important, as translators, were the progeny of Judah ben Saul ibn Tibbon (c. 1120-c. 1190). He too, like Kimchi, had moved from Moslem Spain to southern France; and though he was one of the most successful physicians of his time, he found energy to translate into Hebrew the Judeo-Arabic works of Saadia Gaon, Ibn Gabirol, and Jehuda Halevi. His son Samuel (c.1150–c. 1232) stirred the Jewish world by translating into Hebrew Maimonides’ Guide to the Perplexed. Samuel’s son Moses ibn Tibbcn translated from the Arabic Euclid’s Elements, Avicenna’s smaller Canon, al-Razi’s Antidotary, three works of Maimonides, and Averroës’ shorter commentaries on Aristotle. Samuel’s grandson Jacob ibn Tibbon, besides leading the fight for Maimonides in Montpellier, and earning fame as an astronomer, translated several Arabic treatises into Hebrew, and some into Latin. Samuel’s daughter married a still more famous scholar, Jacob Anatoli. Born in Marseille about 1194, Jacob was invited by Frederick II to teach Hebrew at the University of Naples; there he translated into Hebrew the larger commentaries of Averroës, profoundly affecting Jewish philosophy. A like stimulus was given to Hebrew medicine through the translation of al-Razi’s Kitab al-Mansuri by the physician and philosopher Shem Tob at Marseille (1264).
Many Hebrew translations from the Arabic were rendered into Latin; so a Hebrew version of Avenzoar’s Tay sir, or Aid to Health, was turned into Latin at Padua (1280). Early in the thirteenth century a Jew translated the entire Old Testament directly and literally into Latin. The devious routes of cultural migration are exemplified by the Fables of Bidpai, which were translated into English from a Spanish translation of a Latin translation of a Hebrew translation of an Arabic translation of a Pahlavi translation of the supposedly original Sanskrit.21
The main stream whereby the riches of Islamic thought were poured into the Christian West was by translation from Arabic into Latin. About 1060 Constantine the African translated into Latin al-Razi’s Liber Experimentorum, the Arabic medical works of Isaac Judaeus, and Hunain’s Arabic version of Hippocrates’ Aphorisms and Galen’s Commentary. At Toledo, soon after its conquest from the Moors, the enlightened and tolerant Archbishop Raymond (c. 1130) organized a corps of translators under Dominico Gundisalvi, and commissioned them to translate Arabic works of science and philosophy. Most of the translators were Jews who knew Arabic, Hebrew, and Spanish, sometimes also Latin. The busiest member of the group was a converted Jew, John of Spain (or “of Seville”), whose Arabic patronymic, ibn Daud (son of David), was remodeled by the Schoolmen into Avendeath. John translated a veritable library of Arabic and Jewish works by Avicenna, al-Ghazali, al-Farabi … and al-Khwarizmi; through this last work he introduced the Hindu-Arabic numerals to the West.22 Almost as influential was his rendering of a pseudo-Aristotelian book of philosophy and occultism, the Secretum Secretorum, whose wide circulation is indicated by the survival of 200 manuscripts. Some of these translations were made directly from Arabic into Latin; some were made into Castilian and then translated into Latin by Gundisalvi. In this way the two scholars transformed Ibn Gabirol’s Mekor Hayim into that Fons Vitae, or Fountain of Life, which made “Avice-bron” into one of the most famous philosophers in the Scholastic ken.
Minor tributaries fed the Arabic-Latin current. Adelard of Bath, having learned Arabic in Antioch, Tarsus, and Toledo, made from an Arabic version the first Latin rendering of Euclid (1120), and introduced Moslem trigonometry to the West by translating the astronomical tables of al-Khwarizmi (1126).23 In 1141 Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny, with the aid of three Christian scholars and an Arab, turned the Koran into Latin. Moslem alchemy and chemistry entered the Latin world through a translation of an Arabic text by Robert of Chester in 1144. A year later an Italian, Plato of Tivoli, translated the epochal treatise Hibbur ha-meshihah of the Jewish mathematician Abraham bar Hiyya.
The greatest of the translators was Gerard of Cremona. Arriving in Toledo about 1165, he was impressed by the wealth of Arabic literature in science and philosophy. He resolved to translate the best of it into Latin, and spent the remaining nine years of his life in the task. He learned Arabic, and apparently had the help of a native Christian and a Jew;24 it seems incredible that he should have made his seventy-one translations unaided. To him the West owed Latin versions of Arabic versions of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, On the Heavens and the Earth, On Generation and Corruption, and Meteorology, several commentaries by Alexander of Aphrodisias; Euclid’s Elements and Data; Archimedes’ On the Measurement of the Circle; Apollonius of Perga’s Conies; eleven works ascribed to Galen; several works of Greek astronomy; four volumes of Greco-Arabic physics; eleven books of Arabic medicine, including the largest works of al-Razi and Avicenna; al-Farabi On the Syllogism; three works by al-Kindi, and two by Isaac Israeli; fourteen works of Arabic mathematics and astronomy; three sets of astronomical tables; and seven Arabic works on geomancy and astrology. No other man in history has ever done so much to enrich one culture with another. We can only compare Gerard’s industry with that of Hunain ibn Ishaq and al-Mamun’s “House of Wisdom,” which in the ninth century had poured Greek science and philosophy into an Arabic mold.
Next to Spain as donor in this transfusion of culture was the Norman kingdom of the Sicilies. Soon after their conquest of the island (1091) the Norman rulers employed translators to turn into Latin the Arabic or Greek works on mathematics and astronomy then current in Palermo. Frederick II, at Foggia, carried on the work, and partly for that purpose brought to his court one of the strangest and most active minds of the early thirteenth century. Michael Scot derived his cognomen from his native Scotland. We find him at Toledo in 1217, in Bologna in 1220, in Rome in 1224–7, thereafter at Foggia or Naples. His first important translation was al-Bitruji’s Spherics, a critique of Ptolemy. Fascinated by discovering the scope and freedom of Aristotle’s thought, Scot translated into Latin, from Arabic versions, the History of Animals, including On the Parts of Animals and On the Generation of Animals; and an unverified tradition ascribed to him translations of the Metaphysics, the Physics, On the Soul, On the Heavens, perhaps also the Ethics. Michael’s versions of Aristotle reached Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon, and stirred the development of science in the thirteenth century. Charles of Anjou continued the royal patronage of translators in southern Italy; the Jewish savant Moses of Salerno worked for him, and it was probably Charles who financed the Latin translation (1274) of al-Razi’s medical leviathan, the Liber Continens, by the Jewish scholar Faraj ben Salim of Girgenti.
All the Latin translations, so far mentioned, of Greek science and philosophy were made from Arabic versions—sometimes from Arabic versions of Syriac versions—of the already obscure originals. They were not as inaccurate as Roger Bacon charged, but there was clearly need of more direct renderings. Among the earliest such versions were those made of Aristotle’s Topics, Elenchi, and Posterior Analytics by James, known to us only as “a clerk of Venice,” at some time before 1128. In 1154 Eugene “the Emir” of Palermo translated the Optics of Ptolemy; and in 1160 he shared in a Latin translation of the Almagest directly from the Greek. Meanwhile Aristippus of Catania had translated (c. 1156) The Lives of the Philosophers by Diogenes Laërtius, and the Meno and Phaedo of Plato. The capture of Constantinople by the Crusaders had less result in translations than might have been expected; we hear only of a partial version of Aristotle’s Metaphysics (1209). A fallow interval ensued; then, about 1260, William of Moerbeke, Flemish Archbishop of Corinth, began, probably with aides, a series of direct translations from the Greek whose number and importance rank him only next to Gerard of Cremona among the heroes of cultural transmission. It was partly at the request of his friend and fellow Dominican Thomas Aquinas that he translated so many of Aristotle’s works: the History of Animals, On the Generation of Animals, Politics, and Rhetoric, and completed or revised earlier direct versions of the Metaphysics, the Meteorology, and On the Soul. For St. Thomas he translated several Greek commentaries on Aristotle or Plato. For good measure he added versions of Hippocrates’ Prognostics, Galen On Foods, and divers works in physics by Hero of Alexandria and Archimedes. Perhaps we owe to him also a translation—formerly ascribed to Robert Grosseteste—of Aristotle’s Ethics. These translations provided part of the material from which St. Thomas built his magistral Summa Theologica. By 1280 Aristotle had been almost completely transmitted to the Western mind.
The effects of all these translations upon Latin Europe were revolutionary. The influx of texts from Islam and Greece profoundly stirred the reawakening world of scholarship, compelled new developments in grammar and philology, enlarged the curriculum of the schools, and shared in the astonishing growth of universities in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It was merely an incident that, through the inability of the translators to find Latin equivalents, many Arabic words were now introduced into the languages of Europe. It was more important that algebra, the zero, and the decimal system entered the Christian West through these versions; that the theory and practice of medicine were powerfully advanced by the translation of the Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Jewish masters; and that the importation of Greek and Arabic astronomy compelled an expansion of theology, and a reconception of deity, prefacing the greater change that would follow Copernicus. The frequent references of Roger Bacon to Averroës, Avicenna, and “Alfarabius” give one measure of the new influence and stimulation; “philosophy,” said Bacon, “has come down to us from the Arabs”;25 and we shall see that Thomas Aquinas was led to write his Summas to halt the threatened liquidation of Christian theology by Arabic interpretations of Aristotle. Islam had now repaid to Europe the learning that it had borrowed through Syria from Greece. And as that learning had aroused the great age of Arabic science and philosophy, so now it would excite the European mind to inquiry and speculation, would force it to build the intellectual cathedral of Scholastic philosophy, and would crack stone after stone of that majestic edifice to bring the collapse of the medieval system in the fourteenth century, and the beginnings of modern philosophy in the ardor of the Renaissance.
IV. THE SCHOOLS
The transmission of culture from generation to generation was undertaken by the family, the Church, and the school. Moral education was stressed in the Middle Ages at the expense of intellectual enlightenment, as intellectual education is today stressed at the expense of moral discipline. In England it was not unusual, in the middle and upper classes, to send a boy of seven or so to be brought up for a time in another home, partly to cement family friendships, partly to offset the laxity of parental love.26 The splendid school system of the Roman Empire had decayed in the tumult of invasion and the depopulation of the towns. When the tidal wave of migration subsided in the sixth century a few lay schools survived in Italy; the rest were mostly schools for training converts and prospective priests. For some time (500–800) the Church gave all her attention to moral training, and did not reckon the transmission of secular knowledge as one of her functions. But under the prodding of Charlemagne cathedrals, monasteries, parish churches, and convents opened schools for the general education of boys and girls.
At first the monastic schools bore nearly all this burden. A schola interior provided instruction for novices or oblates, and a schola exterior offered education to boys, apparently without charge.27 In Germany these monastic schools survived the disorders of the ninth century, and shared productively in the Ottoman Renaissance; in the ninth and tenth centuries Germany led France in the graces of the mind. In France the disintegration of the Carolingian house, and the raids of the Northmen, struck cruel blows at the monastic schools. The palace school that Charlemagne had established at the Frank court did not long outlive Charles the Bald (d. 877). The French episcopacy grew stronger as the kings grew weaker; when the Norse raids subsided the bishops and secular clergy were richer than the abbots and the monasteries; and while the monastic schools declined in the tenth century, cathedral schools rose at Paris, Chartres, Orléans, Tours, Laon, Reims, Liege, and Cologne. When the good and great Fulbert died at Chartres, Bishop Ivo (1040?–1116) maintained the standards and renown of its cathedral school in classical studies; and this fine tradition was carried on by Ivo’s successor Bernard of Chartres, whom John of Salisbury, in the twelfth century, described as “in modern times the most astounding spring of letters in Gaul.”28 In England the cathedral school of York was famous even before it gave Alcuin to Charlemagne. The school of Canterbury became almost a university, with an abundant library, and no less a man as secretary than the aforesaid John of Salisbury, one of the sanest scholars and philosophers of the Middle Ages. In such schools those students who were preparing for the priesthood were apparently supported by cathedral funds, while others paid a modest fee. The Third Lateran Council (1179) decreed that “in order that the opportunity of reading and making progress may not be taken away from poor children … let some sufficient benefice be assigned in every cathedral church for a master who shall teach gratis the clerks of the same church, and poor scholars.”29 The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) required the establishment of a chair of grammar in every cathedral of the Christian world, and instructed each archbishop to maintain also chairs of philosophy and canon law.30 The decretals of Pope Gregory IX (1227–41) directed every parish church to organize a school of elementary instruction; and recent researches indicate that such parochial schools—chiefly devoted to religious instruction—were common throughout Christendom.31
What proportion of the adolescent population went to school? Of girls apparently only the well-to-do. Most convents maintained schools for girls, like that which at Argenteuil gave such excellent classical training to Héloïse (c. 1110); but these schools probably reached only a modest percentage of girls. Some cathedral schools admitted girls; Abélard speaks of the “women of noble birth” who attended his school at Notre Dame in Paris in 1114.32 Boys had a better chance, but it was presumably difficult for the son of a serf to get an education;33 however, we hear of serfs who managed to get sons into Oxford.34 Much that is now taught in schools was then learned at home or through apprenticeship in shops; certainly the spread and excellence of medieval art suggest wide opportunities for training in arts and crafts. One calculation reckons the number of boys in elementary schools in England in 1530 at 26,000 in an estimated population of 5,000,000—about one thirtieth of the proportion in 1931;35 but a recent study concludes that “the thirteenth century made a closer approach to popular and social education than the sixteenth.”36
Normally the cathedral school was directed by a canon of the cathedral chapter, variously called archiscola, scolarius, or scholasticus. The teachers were clerks in minor orders. All instruction was in Latin. Discipline was severe; flogging was considered as necessary in education as hell in religion; Winchester School greeted its students with a frank hexameter: Aut disce aut discede; manet sors tertia caedi—“Learn or depart; a third alternative is to be flogged.”37 The curriculum began with the “trivium”—grammar, rhetoric, logic—and passed on to the “quadrivium”—arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy; these were the “seven liberal arts.” These terms did not then bear quite their modern meaning. Trivium, of course, meant three ways. Liberal arts were those that Aristotle had defined as the proper subjects for freemen who sought not practical skills (which were left to apprentices) but intellectual and moral excellence.38 Varro (116–27 B.C.) had written Nine Books of Disciplines, listing nine studies as constituting the Greco-Roman curriculum; Martianus Capella, a North African scholar of the fifth century A.D., in a widely used pedagogical allegory On the Marriage of Philology and Mercury, had barred medicine and architecture as too practical; and the famous seven remained. “Grammar” was not the dull study that loses the soul of a language in studying its bones; it was the art of writing (grapho, gramma); Cassiodorus defined it as such study of great poetry and oratory as would enable one to write with correctness and elegance. In medieval schools it began with the Psalms, passed to other books of the Bible, then to the Latin Fathers, then to the Latin classics—Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Statius, Ovid. Rhetoric continued to mean the art of speaking, but again included considerable study of literature. Logic seems a rather advanced subject for the trivium, but perhaps it was good that students should learn to reason as early as they loved to argue.
The economic revolution brought some changes in the educational scene. Cities that lived by commerce and industry felt a need for employees with practical training; and against much ecclesiastical opposition they established secular schools in which lay teachers gave instruction in return for fees paid by the parents of the pupils. In 1300 the fee for a year in a private grammar school in Oxford was four or five pence ($4.50). Villani in 1283 reckoned 9000 boys and girls in the church schools of Florence, 1100 in six “abacus” schools that prepared them for a business career, and 575 pupils in secondary schools. Secular schools appeared in Flanders in the twelfth century; by the second half of the thirteenth the movement had spread to Lübeck and the Baltic cities. In 1292 we hear of a schoolmistress keeping a private school in Paris; soon she was one of many.39 The secularization of education was on its way.
V. UNIVERSITIES OF THE SOUTH
Secular schools were especially numerous in Italy; teachers there were usually laymen, not clerics as beyond the Alps. In general the spirit and culture of Italy were less ecclesiastical than elsewhere; indeed, about the year 970, one Vilgardus organized at Ravenna a movement for the restoration of paganism.40 There were, of course, many cathedral schools; those of Milan, Pavia, Aosta, and Parma were particularly competent, as we may judge from such graduates as Lanfranc and Anselm; and Monte Cassino under Desiderius was almost a university. The survival of municipal institutions, the successful resistance of the Lombard cities to Barbarossa (1176), and the rising demand for legal and commercial knowledge worked together to give Italy the honor of establishing the first medieval university.
In 1925 the University of Pavia celebrated the eleven hundredth anniversary of its foundation by Lothair I. Probably this was a school of law rather than a university; it was not till 1361 that it received its charter as a studium generale—the medieval name for a university uniting diverse faculties. It was one of many schools that from the ninth century onward revived the study of Roman law: Rome, Ravenna, and Orléans in the ninth century, Milan, Narbonne, and Lyons in the tenth, Verona, Mantua, and Angers in the eleventh. Bologna was apparently the first of the West European cities to enlarge its school into a studium generale. In 1076, says the chronicler Odofredus, a “certain master Pepo began by his own authority to lecture on the laws … at Bologna, and he was a man of the greatest renown.”41 Other teachers joined him; and by the time of Irnerius the Bologna school of law was by common consent the best in Europe.
Irnerius began to teach law at Bologna in 1088. Whether his studies of Roman law convinced him of the historical and practical arguments for the supremacy of the imperial over the ecclesiastical power, or whether the rewards of imperial service attracted him, he turned from the Guelf to the Ghibelline side, and interpreted the revived jurisprudence to favor imperial claims. Appreciative emperors contributed funds to the school, and a swarm of German students came down to Bologna. Irnerius composed a volume of glosses, or comments, on the Corpus iuris of Justinian, and applied scientific method to the organization of law. The Summa codicis Irnerii, compiled by him or from his lectures, is a masterpiece of exposition and argument.
With Irnerius began the golden age of medieval jurisprudence. Men from every country in Latin Europe came to Bologna to learn the rejuvenated science of the law. Irnerius’ pupil Gratian applied the new methods to ecclesiastical legislation, and published the first code of canon law (1139). After Irnerius the “Four Doctors”—Bulgarus, Martinus, Iacobus, and Hugo—in a series of famous glosses, applied the Justinian Code to the legal problems of the twelfth century, and secured the adoption of Roman law in an ever-widening sphere. Early in the thirteenth century the elder Accursius (1185?-1260), the greatest of the “glossators,” summed up their work and his own in a Glossa ordinaria, which became the standard authority by which kings and communes broke the sway of feudal law, and fought the power of the popes. The papacy did what it could to halt this exhumation of a code that made religion a function and servant of the state; but the new study fed and expressed the bold rationalism and secularization of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and raised a proliferating class of lawyers who labored to reduce the role of the Church in government, and to extend the authority of the state. St. Bernard complained that the courts of Europe rang with the laws of Justinian and no longer heard the laws of God.42 The spread of the new jurisprudence was as strong a stimulus as the Arabic and Greek translations in generating that respect and passion for reason which was to beget and bedevil Scholasticism.
We do not know when a school of arts—i.e., the seven liberal arts—arose in Bologna, nor when was founded its celebrated school of medicine. So far as we know, the only connection among the three schools was in the fact that the graduates of any of them received their degrees from the archdeacon of Bologna. The professors organized themselves into a collegium or guild. About 1215 the students, in whatever faculty, associated themselves into two groups: a universitas citramontanorum or union of students from south of the Alps, and a universitas ultramontanorum or union of students from beyond the Alps. From the beginning of the thirteenth century there were women students in these “universities,” and in the fourteenth century there were women professors on the Bologna faculties.43
The student guilds, originated to provide mutual protection and self-government, came in the thirteenth century to exercise extraordinary power over the teaching staffs. By organized boycotts of unsatisfactory teachers, the students could end the pedagogical career of any man at Bologna. In many cases the salaries of the professors were paid by the student “universities,” and the professors were compelled to swear obedience to the “rectors” of the “universities”—i.e., to the head officers of the student guilds.44 A teacher desiring leave of absence, even for a day, was obliged to obtain permission from his pupils through their rectors, and he was expressly forbidden to “create holidays at his pleasure.”45 Regulations established by the student guilds determined at what minute the teacher should begin his lecture, when he should end it, and what penalties he should pay for deviations from these rules. If he overtalked his hour the students were instructed by the guild statutes to leave. Other guild regulations fined a teacher for skipping a chapter or decretal in his exposition of the laws, and determined how much of the course was to be given to each part of the texts. At the outset of each academic year the professor was required to deposit ten pounds with a Bologna bank; from this sum the fines laid upon him by the rectors were deducted; and the remainder was refunded to him at the close of the year on instruction from the rectors. Committees of students were appointed to observe the conduct of each teacher, and report irregularities or deficiencies to the rectors.46 If these arrangements seem to the modern student unusually sensible, it should be remembered that the law students at Bologna were men between seventeen and forty years of age, old enough to provide their own discipline; that they came to study, not to play; that the professor was not the employee of trustees, but a free-lance lecturer whom the students in effect engaged to instruct them. The teacher’s salary at Bologna consisted of fees paid him by his students and fixed by agreement with them. This system of payment was changed toward the end of the thirteenth century when Italian cities eager to have universities of their own offered municipal salaries to certain Bolognese professors; the city of Bologna thereupon (1289) promised to pay two professors an annual stipend; but the choice of professors was still left to the students. Gradually the number of these municipal salaria increased; and in the fourteenth century the selection of professors passed, with their payment, to the city. When Bologna became part of the Papal States in 1506 the appointment of the teachers became a function of the ecclesiastical authorities.
In the thirteenth century, however, the University of Bologna, and in less degree the other universities of Italy, were marked by a lay spirit, almost an anticlericalism, hardly to be found in other centers of European education. Whereas in these others the chief faculty was theology, there was at Bologna no theological faculty at all before 1364; theology there was replaced by canon law. Even rhetoric took the form of law, and the art of writing became—at Bologna, Paris, Orléans, Montpellier, Tours …—the ars dictaminis or ars notaria, the art of writing legal, business, or official documents; and special degrees were given in this art.47 It was a common saying that the most realistic education obtainable was to be had in Bologna; a favorite story told how a Parisian pedagogue unlearned at Bologna what he had taught at Paris, and then came back to Paris and untaught it.48 In the twelfth century Bologna led the movement of the European mind; in the thirteenth it allowed its teaching to stiffen into a stagnant scholasticism of law; the Accursian gloss became a sacred and almost unchangeable text, impeding the progressive adaptation of law to the flux of life. The spirit of inquiry fled to freer fields.
Italy broke out into universities in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Some of them were spawned by Bologna through the emigration of professors or students; so in 1182 Pillius left to set up a school in Modena; in 1188 Iacobus de Mandra went to Reggio Emilia and brought his pupils with him; in 1204 another migration, probably from Bologna, established a studium generale, or union of several faculties, at Vicenza; in 1215 Roffredus left the University of Bologna to open a law school at Arezzo; in 1222 a large secession of teachers and students from Bologna expanded an old school at Padua. Faculties of medicine and the arts were added to this school of law at Padua; Venice sent her students there, and contributed to the professorial salaries paid by the city; and in the fourteenth century Padua became one of the most vigorous centers of European thought. In 1224 Frederick II founded the University of Naples to keep the students of South Italy from flocking north. Perhaps for like reasons, as well as to train men for ecclesiastical diplomacy, Innocent IV established the University of the Court of Rome (1244), which followed the papal court in its migration, even to Avignon. In 1303 Boniface VIII founded the University of Rome, which rose to glory under Nicholas V and Leo X, and won the name of Sapienza under Paul III. Siena inaugurated its municipal university in 1246, Piacenza in 1248. By the end of the thirteenth century schools of law and the arts, and sometimes schools of medicine too, were to be found in every major city of Italy.
The universities of Spain were unique in being founded and chartered by the kings, serving them, and submitting to governmental control. Castile developed a royal university at Palencia (1208), later at Valladolid (1304); Leon had one at Salamanca (1227), the Baleares at Palma (1280), Catalonia at Lerida (1300). Despite this royal connection the Spanish universities accepted ecclesiastical supervision and funds, and some, like Palencia, grew out of cathedral schools. The University of Salamanca was richly endowed in the thirteenth century by San Fernando and Alfonso the Wise, and soon stood on an equal footing of fame and learning with Bologna and Paris. Most of these institutions gave instruction in Latin, mathematics, astronomy, theology, and law; some in medicine, Hebrew, or Greek. A School of Oriental Studies was opened at Toledo in 1250 by Dominican monks to teach Arabic and Hebrew; good work must have been done there, for one of its graduates, Raymond Martin (c. 1260), showed familiarity with all major philosophers and theologians of Islam. Arabic studies were prominent also at the University of Seville, founded by Alfonso the Wise in 1254. At Lisbon, in 1290, the poet-king Diniz gave a university to Portugal.
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