Gothic Sculpture

GOTHIC SCULPTURE The monastic carvings formed the basis from which the com munes of northern France developed the superb sculptural art of the i3th, 14th, and 15th centuries. The great cathedrals de manded sculpture in order that the abstract and mechanical rhythms of their architecture might be informed with some meas ure of life and of sensual beauty. No doubt some of this sculp ture, like that of the monasteries, was doctrinal, or even didactic in origin. Symbolism, an "algebra of art," was certainly an im portant source of inspiration wherever the Church controlled the design. But these were not the primary impulses from which Gothic art sprung. Those impulses lay very deep in the emotional life of the time. Gothic sculpture, like Gothic architecture, is the concrete expression of that great wave of joyousness and health, of spiritual unity and heroic exaltation that was born with the rise of the great communes. It is an art, not of dogma, but of a natural and human society. It expresses, in its great period, the collective soul of a Europe that for a moment found in an exalted faith an escape from tyranny and despair.

13th Century.

The remarkable characteristic of 13th cen tury sculpture is its recovery of the plastic sense. Romanesque sculpture, essentially an art of relief and of ornament, remained, in the monasteries, almost wholly decorative and symbolic in char acter; but the patronage that created Gothic art—that of the communes of northern France—desired almost from the begin ning a sculpture of three dimensions. At Chartres, at Bourges, and at the Abbey of St. Denis we find as early as the third quarter of the 12th century, figures cut in the round, true statues, which announce unmistakably their character as stone monuments. Rigid in contour and with the forms revealed by definite clear planes, surrounded by light and space, the Gothic figures of the 13th cen tury possess in a remarkable degree a quality of beauty that is unmistakably glyptic.

Even more remarkable is the humanization of this sculpture. When the solid architecture of the first cathedrals had imposed simplicity and breadth, concreteness and balance, upon the Ro manesque forms, the free spirit of the communes re-endowed them with natural beauty. In the great portals of the 13th century

cathedrals, a stone population, imprisoned still in vast architec tural frames, takes on gradually the aspect of reality, as the sculptor turns from symbolic pictures to nature. The bodily semblances of men and women emerge from the shaft-like forms that stand along the doorways; they assume attitudes of life, turning the head, raising an arm, planting the feet firmly upon the ground. Their angular planes soften into effects of warmth and energy; their draperies lose their geometric stiffness to hang in graceful folds that reveal the action of the bodies beneath ; and their faces, still ideal and generalized, assume a physiognomy and expressiveness that interpret character and mind. An equilibrium between architecture and nature is once more established. As in the pediments of the Parthenon and the Temple of the Olympian Zeus, an enframement of noble architecture imposes order and a mystic beauty upon an ensemble of forms which are at once sym bolic and human.

This new art had to be developed step by step from experi mental beginnings. It grows from archaism to scientific mastery, in a manner which curiously parallels the development of Greek sculpture. The earliest statues, like those from Corbeil (now at St. Denis) or in the Porte Royale of Chartres, seem to have been cut from columns—as though the sculptor had merely revealed, by the removal of an outside covering, the living forms imprisoned within the shaft. Rigid and compact in form, these statues have the "frontality" of primitive Greece. Their angular immobile bodies are wrapped in thin draperies whose parallel folds are delicately incised. The gestures are stiff and awkward. The faces, with prominent eyes, have the curious ironic smile of archaic art. Like the draped figures erected on the Acropolis in the 6th cen tury, the "kings and queens" of Chartres charm us with a naïve and natural technique, quite free from the austere conventionality of Romanesque carvings. Ranged in their architectural enframe ment, they possess also a tense and mystic dignity—like appari tions, existing in a world of dreams.