The Cathedrals and Churches of the Rhine. Mansfield Milburg Francisco

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СКАЧАТЬ round churches – St. Gérêon's at Cologne, the Mathias Kapelle at Kobern, and, above all, Charlemagne's Münster at Aix-la-Chapelle, and others elsewhere, notably in Italy – are doubtless a survival of a pagan influence; certainly the style of building was a favourite with the Romans, and was common even among the Greeks, where the little circular pagan temples were always a most fascinating part of the general ensemble.

      It would hardly be appropriate in a book such as this to attempt to trace the origin of Gothic, as we have come to know that twelfth and thirteenth century variety of pointed architecture, which, if anything, is French pointed. It has been plausibly claimed that, after its introduction into France and England, it developed into the full-blown style of the fourteenth century, which so soon fell before the Renaissance in the century following.

      In Germany the process, with differences with regard to its chronology, was much the same.

      It has been the fashion among writers of all weights of opinion to break into an apparently irresistible enthusiasm with regard to Gothic architecture in general, and this, so far as it goes, is excusable. Most of us will agree that "the folk of the middle ages had fallen in love with church-building, and loved that their goldsmith's work, and ivories, their seals, and even the pierced patterns of their shoes should be like little buildings, little tabernacles, little 'Paul's windows.' Some of their tombs and shrines must have been conceived as little fairy buildings; and doubtless they would have liked little angels to hop about them all alive and blow fairy trumpets."

      In the building of the great cathedrals it must certainly be allowed that there is an element that we do not understand. Those who fashioned them worked wonder into them; they had the ability which children have to call up enchantment. "In these high vaults, and glistening windows, and peering figures, there was magic even to their makers."

      Gothic art must ever, in a certain degree, be a mystery to us, because we cannot entirely put ourselves in the place of the men of those times. "We cannot by taking thought be Egyptian or Japanese, nor can we again be Romanesque or Gothic," nor indeed can we explain entirely the motif of Burmese architecture, which, appearing as a blend of Chinese and Indian, stands out as the exotic of the Eastern, as does the Gothic of the Western, world.

      Only in these latter two species of architectural art does stone-carving stand out with that supreme excellence which does not admit of rivalry, though one be pagan and the other Christian.

      Germany, above all other nations of the middle ages in Europe, excelled in the craftsmanship which fashioned warm, live emotions out of cold gray stone, and to-day such examples of this as the overpowering and splendid cathedrals at Cologne, Ratisbon, Strasburg, and Münster rank among the greatest and most famous in all the world, in spite of the fact that their constructive elements were reminiscent of other lands.

      The distinction between French and German building cannot better be described than by quoting the following, the first by James Russell Lowell on Notre Dame de Chartres, and the second by Longfellow on the cathedral at Strasburg:

CHARTRES

      "Graceful, grotesque, with every new surprise of hazardous caprices sure to please, heavy as nightmare, airy, light as fun, imagination's very self in stone."

STRASBURG

      ".. A great master of his craft,

      Ervin von Steinbach; but not he alone,

      For many generations laboured with him,

      Children that came to see these saints in stone,

      As day by day out of the blocks they rose,

      Grew old and died, and still the work went on,

      And on and on and is not yet completed."

      The first is typical of the ingenuity and genius of the French, the second of the painstaking labour of the Teuton; what more were needed to define the two?

      "In Germany and throughout all the territory under the spell of Germanic influence the growth of Gothic was not so readily accomplished as in France," says Gonse.

      "At best such Gothic as is to be seen at Bacharach, Bonn, Worms, etc., is but a variety, so far as the vaulting goes, of superimposed details on a more or less truthful Romanesque framework. At Mayence, Roermond, and Sinzig, too, it is the domical vault which still qualifies the other Gothic essentials, and so depreciates the value of the Gothic of the Rhine valley when compared with that of the Royal Domain of France."

      The range of mediæval art and architecture has been said to run between the fourth century and the fourteenth, or from the peace of the Church to the coming of the Renaissance.

      This is perhaps definite enough, but the scope is too wide to limit any special form of art expression, so that one may judge it comparatively with that which had gone before or was to come after.

      Mostly, mediæval art groups itself around the two distinct styles of Byzantine and Gothic, and they are best divided, one from the other, by the two centuries lying between the tenth and the twelfth.

      In truth, the architecture of Germany, up to the end of the tenth century, was as much Byzantine as it was Romanesque, and the princes and prelates alike drew the inspiration for their works from imported Italians and Greeks, a procedure which gave the unusual blend that developed the distinct Rhenish architecture.

      The Popes themselves gave a very material aid when they sent or allowed colonies of southern craftsmen to undertake the work on these great religious edifices of the Rhine valley.

      The grander plan of the cathedrals at Speyer, Worms, Mayence, Basel, and even Trèves are all due somewhat to this influence, and for that reason they retain even to-day evidences of these foreign and even Eastern methods, though for the most part it is in the crypt and subterranean foundations only that this is found.

      Carlovingian architecture was perhaps more indigenous to Germany than to any other part of the vast Empire. "This extraordinary man," as the historians speak of Charlemagne, did much toward developing the arts.

      In the southeast, the Grecian Empire was already become decrepit in its influences, and a new building spirit was bound to have sprung up elsewhere. "If Charlemagne," says Gibbon, "had fixed the seat of his empire in Italy, his genius would have aspired to restore, rather than violate the works of the Cæsars." He confined his predilections to the virgin forests of Germany, however, and he despoiled Lombardy to enrich his northern possessions; as witness the columns which he brought from Ravenna and Rome wherewith to decorate his palace and church at Aix-la-Chapelle.

      No country has preserved finer or more numerous examples of Romanesque architecture than Germany. The Rhine was so powerfully under Roman sway that it adopted as a matter of course and without question quite all of the tenets and principles of the Romanesque; not only with respect to ecclesiastical structures, but as regards civil and military works as well.

      On the Rhine, as in Lorraine, Lyonnaise, and Central France, the Romanesque endured with little deviation from Latin traditions till quite the end of the thirteenth century.

      Later, in the Gothic period, Germany returned the compliment and sent Zamodia of Freiburg and Ulric of Ulm to lend their aid in the construction of the grand fabric at Milan; and John and Simon of Cologne to Spain to erect that astonishingly bizarre cathedral at Burgos.

      Beginning with the revival of the arts in Italy, the Renaissance German architects, in other countries than Germany, were apparently few in number and not of their former rank.

      Not alone did Italy aid Germany in the erection of ecclesiastical monuments, but France as well, with the Norman variation of the Romanesque and the later developed Gothic, sent many monkish craftsmen to lend their aid and skill. Their work, however, was rather the СКАЧАТЬ