The
spires and the flying-buttresses of the Northern cathedrals cannot be
defended on the ground of thrifty construction. The Italian churches
accomplished that as well without either. How remote the reference to
use in the mighty portals of Rheims, or the soaring vaultings of Amiens
and Beauvais! Does anybody suppose that Michel Angelo, when he undertook
to raise the dome of the Pantheon into the air, was thinking of the most
economical way of roofing a given space? These fine works have their
whole value as expression; it is with their visible contempt of thrift
that our admiration begins. They pared away the stone to the minimum
that safety demanded, and beyond it,--yet not from thrift, but to make
the design more preeminent and necessary, and to owe as little as
possible to the inert strength of the material.
But though we admire the result, we have grown out of sympathy with the
cause, the state of mind that produced it, and so the root wherefrom the
like should be produced is cut off. There is no reason to suppose that
the old builders were men of a different kind from ours, more earnest,
more poetical. The stories about the science of the medieval masons are
rubbish. All men are in earnest about something; our men are as good as
they, and would have built as well, had they been born at the right time
for it.
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