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From the Middle Ages through the Renaissance Essay The earliest monument of the High Gothic was the cathedral of Notre-Dame at Chartres, where flying buttresses were designed from the beginning so that the balconies were needless. This simplified the interior elevations to three partitions; the nave arcade, the triforium passage and the clerestory windows. In the process, the clerestory windows improved noticeably in size and vaulting shifted from sexpartite, over two bays, to quadripartite, over one bay. Chartres Cathedral has an additional complex chronology than the cathedral of Paris. The side had long been sanctified to the Virgin Mary and the church wealth included, along with other precious relics, a tunic thought to have been used or worn by Mary. Chartres turned out to be the core of pilgrimage, and from 1020 to 1037 a Romanesque basilica with three profound radiating chapels was built to restore the previous church ruined by fire. By the twelfth century, this church increased in size however a fire in 1134 had damaged the westwork. Work started the same year to put up a new west front and narthex in much the same manner that Abbot Suger was to extend St. Denis Sculptors from the workshops at St. Denis came to Chartres, in 1145 to 1150 to carve the three portals of the new west facade, and the three lancet windows overhead were filled with stained glass depicting themes pioneered at Suger’s church; infancy of Christ, the Passion story and the Tree of Jesse or the genealogy of Christ. Fire again struck the Chartres on the night of June 10, 1194. The fire again struck the cathedral and town, destroying the wooden-roofed basilica and eight per cent of the city. Even though the new west front survived without major damage, the people of Chartres interpreted the fire as a sign of divine displeasure. The Gothic cathedral at Chartres was built in the span of twenty-six years from 1192 to 1220, and the sculpted north and south transport porches were finished between 1224 and 1250. However, the north tower on the west front was completed only in 1513, giving the west front at last a balanced asymmetry of form and style. Builders of the great French cathedrals of the early thirteenth century gave the impression on a determined pushing of Gothic technology to achieve soaring interior heights. The nave vaults at Chartres rise 113 feet over a fifty-three-foot-wide nave; at Reims (begun 1211), the vaults are 122 feet high over a forty-five-foor-wide nave; at Amiens (begun 1220), the vaulting is 139 feet high for the same nave width; and at Beauvais (begun 1225), the most daring venture of all, the choir vaults rose 158 feet over a choir that is forty-five-feet wide before collapsing and being rebuilt in a strengthened form. The cathedral of St. Pierre at Beauvais was never finished, and only the choir and transept stand today to indicate the scale of the intended Gothic building. Although structural disappointment was only part of the problem at Beauvais, it is a recurring element in the history of the cathedral’s construction. The design called for a string of seven radiating chapels off the ambulatory, with paired aisles in the choir that continued beyond the aisled transepts as double aisles in the nave. Work on the choir began in 1225, with choir vaulting being completed in about 1260. These vaults collapsed in 1284, probably because wind forces went over load capacities on slender transitional buttress piers, causing them to rotate and fall. Despite this checkered building history, the interior of the cathedral is stunning. The extreme verticality of the arcade is corresponded by an attenuated glazed triforium, above which rises the fragile cage of the clerestory, where solid wall dissolves into glass, generating the illusion that the vault overhead rests on air alone. In the windows, plate tracery used at Chartres has been replaced by bar tracery, thin stone sections carved into geometrical shapes based on circles. Tracery on the enormous transept roses moves into even more elaborate, flame-like shapes. Seen from the east, the exterior is overwhelmingly vertical. Even though the Gothic style started off in France, it stretched to other parts of Europe and became the principal style of northern Europe until the fifteenth century. English designers and builders soon formed their own Gothic esthetic and within a century had shaped Gothic churches that varied significantly from those built in France. Nineteenth century historians who initially studied the Gothic buildings of England classified the work in three overlapping phases, which are still practical or helpful for describing the progressive improvement of English medieval structural design. Early English built from 1175 to 1265, keeps up a correspondence approximately to High Gothic work in France. Salisbury Cathedral shows a rare example of an English Gothic cathedral assembled just about exclusively in homogenous style, Early English. Salisbury adds in features from monastic plans taking account of double transepts of Cluny III and the square east end of the Cistercians, in a lengthy angular building that is unquestionably English. On the interior, quadripartite vaults ascend from three-story nave elevations; nevertheless the constant vertical line exploited by the French has been substituted by a horizontal importance formed by a string course under the triforium and another under the clerestory windows. Even the ribs of the vaults do not extend down the wall but spring instead from wall corbels at the base of the clerestory. Surfaces are articulated by shafts and trim in black Purbeck marble. The exterior receives the same horizontal emphasis as the interior. Flying buttresses do not have a strong vertical character, and the walls are coursed in horizontal bands that extend across the west front. With all this horizontality, the 404-foot tower and spire offered the essential vertical counterpoint, and their great weight has obviously turned aside the piers at the crossing. The covered passages are excellent illustrations of early festooned tracery, and off the east range one comes across an attractive octagonal chapter house (King et al. , 2003). References Moffett, M. , Fazio, M. , Wodehouse, L. (2003). A World History of Architecture. London: Laurence King Publishing Ltd.