History of art . er the cross of the transept. And if theliving decoration of the French provinces still animatesthe Norman churches, their sharply cut and voluntarymovement gives us a foretaste of the geometricaldecoration of England. The diadem raised by the merchants of the BritishIsles above their rude industrial cities seemed to bemade by the hands of goldsmiths and, in contrast withthe enthusiasm expressed in the monuments which onthe other side of the Channel derive their life from thehouses and the fields in order to exalt it, the Englishcathedral is very obviously conceived as a proud
History of art . er the cross of the transept. And if theliving decoration of the French provinces still animatesthe Norman churches, their sharply cut and voluntarymovement gives us a foretaste of the geometricaldecoration of England. The diadem raised by the merchants of the BritishIsles above their rude industrial cities seemed to bemade by the hands of goldsmiths and, in contrast withthe enthusiasm expressed in the monuments which onthe other side of the Channel derive their life from thehouses and the fields in order to exalt it, the Englishcathedral is very obviously conceived as a proud horn- THE EXPANSION OF THE FRENCH IDEA 353 age to the emancipation of a hard and egoistic wings spread out above the naves of the Con-tinental churches in which the vibrant columns rosefrom the soil, here a wooden roof supported by corbelsdominated the low naves, which were arrested on allsides by implacable horizontals. Often, tight sheavesof parallel ribbing choked all the lines of the nave whose. England (xiii Century). Carnarvon Castle. profiles and curves disappeared among the tense clus-ters which they formed—a forest composed of a thou-sand dead branches without the leafage of the vaultand without space and without air above them. In theapse, where the French builder allowed the darkness todeepen, where the wall was rounded like a cradleabout the living god that it inclosed so lovingly, thewall fell away like a portcullis, permitting the light topass through the straight-lined colonnades as if theywere iron railings. The supreme expression of the English ogival style. 354 MEDIAEVAL ART the perpendicular, appeared at the time when, amongus, the flame of stone, crackHng as it launched skyward,was announcing the last flicker of the exhausted lifearound which a fatal twilight was rapidly the one hand we have the end of a dream, on theother an affirmation of the will; on one side the abrupt
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Keywords: ., boo, bookcentury1900, bookdecade1920, booksubjectart, bookyear1921
