The Indianapolis times. [volume] (Indianapolis [Ind.]) 1922-1965, 1928-03-31


Il which only travel can make
real. The sojourner in England
will feast upon the Gothic cathe-
drals at Ely, and Canterbury, and
Lincoln, and Salisbury, and York,
and Exeter; and he will marvel at
the ornate complexity of Henry
WIS Chapel in Westminster Alb
hey.
Perhaps some day we shall have
leisure enough to return to the BIZ
cycle and wheel at whim through
peaceful Flanders, not stopping so
much for the cathedrals at Antwerp
and Malines. but studying the signs
of splendid merchant power and
sturdy bourgeois taste in the belfry
of BrugeS. the city halls of Brus-
sells and Louvain and Client, and
that famous cloth hall of Yp-eS
("the greatest monument of the
civic architecture of the middle
ages'D which the French armies
partly destroyed in 1872, and the
German armies completely de-
Stroyed in 1914.
Then at Cologne we may stop to
see that great cathedral which it
took 600 years to build 1280-l8S0) q.
and which is married by its inferior
modern glass. and by the crowded
buildings that hem it in; then We
shall steam down the Rhine, COM
pairing natures architecture with
that of the castles on the hills, I'M
til we come to StrasSburg, whose
cathedral seemed so fair to Goethe
in his youth. and so "barbarouS" to
him when Rome had made him
classical.
Or shall we sail south through
warmer seas to Spain, and see in
Salamanca's old cathedral the Ro-
manesque becoming Gothic in
splendid union; and at Barcelona
the Gothic mingled strangely with
the Moorish and Byzantine styles;
and at Burgos 1.-The elements Of stu
pendous size, of mysterious gloom,
of grotesque and yet realistic en-
ergy, which are the dominant char
acteristics alike of Spanish archi-
lecture and Of medieval romance"
(Iavelock Ellis; and at Seville, ris-
ing from mosque whose minaret
still graces it, the vast cathedral
whose interior (the largest in the
world, except st. Peters, reminds
us that once not merely the women,
but all the city came together to
worship the same God in the same
way?
ITALY had less need of Gothic
Il than the North; deprecating
light, it cared little for windows,
and stunning heat, it loved thick
walls; hence it was not driven by
circumstances to flying buttresses,
pointed arches. or ribbed vaults; it
was not Gothic by nature.
There are Gothic churches at
Siena, Pisa, Bologna. Naples and
Rome, but they are secondary; the
great Duomo, or Cathedral, at
Florence, is partly Gothic, but
mostly Renaissance; but Palazzo
Vecchio, built there in 1898 by the
greatest of Florence architects,
has a sombre simplicity of its own,
while at Venice the Doges' Palace
rises from the Grand Canal in all
the grace of Gothic, and with a
delicacy of proportions, and a
nobility of design, which compare
with the best of civic Gothic IN
France.
And at Milan stands powerful
cathedral, gigantic and ornate, IN
which all the potential faults OF
Gothic leap to the wearied eye.
Let us stand for a moment before
this last masterpiece of Gothic
1885, 157D, and see Why the great
style at last came to an end. This,
you feel, is romanticism, an excess
of feeling and ornament, the pre-
dominance of imagination over in
telligence, a wanton eXuberance
which stands at the other end OF
the world from the Apollonian
measure and calm of the Parthenon.
The Parthenon is a naked attn
lete, but this cathedral is a lace
Haunting courtesan; it is like the
language of Shakespeare, barbar-
ously unrestrained; it is Gothic in
the racial sense of the word. 1t has
no supreme unity to which every
part has been subjected in coneep-
ton and construction; the indie
pendence of the individual worker
has here brought the same chaos
which comes in a soul when some
instinct or passion dominates the
personality. and a part overides the
whole.
Other defects lay more inherent
in Gothic, but one has hardly the
heart to name theme The flying