THE EARLY AND CLASSIC GOTHIC STYLE C. II5<X. 1250
carvers could now portray the loveliest leaves, the thorn, the oak,
the maple, the vine (pi. xxxiv). When St. Peter Damiani wrote,
ornament was abstract or severely stylised. Now youthful life pulses
in it, as it pulses in shafts and ribs. But the ornament of the I3th
century is even at its most naturalistic, neither petty, nor pedantic.
It is still subordinate, never forward, always ministering to a greater
cause, that of religious architecture.
Yet it would not have been possible at an earlier age than that of
St. Francis's song to Brother Sun and Sister Earth and Brother
Wind, than that of die "dolce stil nuovo"9 and the French epics of
chivalry. The earlier monastic orders had lived in the seclusion of
their cloisters, the new orders of the isth century, the Dominicans
and Franciscans, had their monasteries in towns and preached to the
burghers. The first Crusades had been called up to liberate the Holy
Land, the fourth, the one of 1203, was deflected by the Venetians to
Constantinople, which they needed for the benefit of their com-
merce. But still in the fifth there was in the person of the French
King Louis IX, St. Louis, a true Christian knight, a hero in whom
the ideals of religion and chivalry burned with equal ardour.
Wolfram's Parsifal is the greatest epic of the istli century. Here at
the moment when Rheims Cathedral was begun, the young knight
is taught to "keep his soul pledged to God, without losing his hold
on the world". And he is taught that "in joy and in grief right
measure" should always be his guide. That sounds like the Greek
"Nothing in excess", but it is not. It is just as in architecture, a
balance gained as the ultimate prize by him who indefatigably strives
for his redemption. A noble and upright ideal worthy of the great
cathedrals and the superb sculptures of their portals. At Chartres,
under the name of St. Theodore, one can see him, th<^ knight of the
Parsifal virtues, standing in the porch of the south transept, and at
Rheims, as an unknown king, tinder a canopy of one of the buttresses,
and on horseback at Bamberg, and again with the most beautiful
young women that Western sculptors ever carved, women both
vigorous and maidenly, around the choir of Nauniburg Cathedral.
In England the emissaries of Henry VIII and of Cromwell have
destroyed the majority of what there was of cathedral sculpture. A
few pieces that are left, such as a headless figure at Winchester, are of
the same character and quality as 13th-century sculpture in France.
But neither the facade of Wells nor the surviving statues at Lincoln
and Westminster are up to the standards of Chartres and RJienns.
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