CENTURY: TRANSITION TO THE GOTHIC.
We left the development of French architecture in the middle of the twelfth century (p. 169). The nave of the church at Vezelav was built about this time. It presents the appearance of a new motif ill France: it has a groin-vaulted nave. It shows that the Cistercians, whose influence increased with the extension of the order, had brought this manner of ceiling the nave from the Rhine into France. It needed, however, but this one element to give an impulse to the development of architecture, causing it to make within a brief period progress such as is scarcely afforded in another instance in the history of art.
Constructional have before stated (p. 167) that French architecture had not that harmonious unity, that expression of rest, exhibited by the German: the character of the people gave it, rather, an expression of unrest. To this it is owing that the architects no longer allowed the walls to surround the church in all their greatness and unity, varied only with light artistic detail, but strengthened them with buttresses which destroyed this unity. These were the less required since the barrel vaults which covered the aisles exercised an equal thrust upon every point of the walls, and the transverse arches conveyed so inconsiderable a por tion of the lateral thrust to the points supported by buttresses that the latter were of scarcely any constructive use when the walls were not them selves sufficiently strong, and thus the r.esthetic expression was exactly the reverse of what it ought to have been, according to the usual architectonic requirements.
Grained groined vaulting, on the contrary, the thrust is concentrated on certain points. There is a constructive need to strengthen these points; to make that strengthening visible was to do what was authorized by internal needs, and the outward effect was that which really expressed the system of vaulting. As soon as groined vaulting was employed to cover wide spaces the pillars had to bear all the weight; the walls between them had no more to carry, and simply limited the enclosed spaces: they might even be dispensed with without altering the constructive relations of the system. Groined vaulting, therefore,
conduced to the realization of a pure pillar system. This corresponded with French taste; it was in technique what chivalry was in life: certain props did the entire work for the building, and upon these supports all significance was centred.
Transition to external conditions are always neces sary to enable Architecture to take a new flight; these were present to a high degree in France. A series of grand edifices rose one after another, and in them progress was made step by step. A few years later than the Church of Vezelay is its great narthex, which is itself a fully-formed nave. The transverse ribs of the vaulting are pointed; galleries still rise above the side-aisles, but these have also groined vaulting, the cross-ribs of which serve as abutments for those of the centre aisle.
Pointed purely technical grounds the pointed arch had pro cured a place beside the round arch in France somewhere about the middle of the twelfth century. In every arch and part of an arch the lateral thrust increases as the rise diminishes, and in a semicircular arch the rise is much less in the two lower thirds than in the horizontal upper third. It must also have soon become evident to a people whose gaze was not so completely fixed upon harmonious repose as was that of the Germans that the pointed arch offered constructive advantages over the round arch which were all the more necessary in a barrel-vaulted nave whose but tresses could not be strengthened, and which were the more welcome where a series of arches concentrated the thrust upon one point. The energetic effect had something more chivalric than the softly-curving line of the round arch, and there was thus reason enough for the French to adopt the pointed arch with alacrity.