CHAPTER IV

The Late Gothic Style
c. 1250-r. 1500
TTATE Gothic, though by die predominant use of the pointed arch
I still part of the Gothic style, is essentially different from the High
•J—'Gothic of the great French cathedrals of Paris, Rheims and
Amiens, and the English cathedrals of Salisbury and Lincoln, Its
coining can clearly be traced within Lincoln Cathedral. The retro-
choir, or Angel Choir (pi. xxxn), was begun in 1256. It is of supreme
beauty, but it possesses no longer the freshness of spring or early
summer; this abundance of rich and mellow decoration has the
warmth and sweetness of August and September, of harvest and vin-
tage. But what generous fulfilment in the luxuriant foliage of the
corbels and the gallery shafts and capitals, the full mouldings of the
arcades and tracery of the gallery, and, above all, the two gorgeous
layers of tracery up in the clerestory: one in the windows and one
separating the wall-passage from the interior.
While here there is still breadth and fullness, in other equally ad-
vanced work of the same date a tendency becomes noticeable to-
wards the more sophisticated and at the same time the more
complicated. This tendency runs parallel with the dominant tend-
ency in contemporary philosophy—the abstruse intricacies of Duns
Scotus (born c. 1270) and his pupil Occam (died c. 1347)—and also
with that in French architecture. But whereas the result in France
is on the whole lean and retrospective, England went on inventing
forms with amazing profuseness, forms merely decorative, no longer
strictly architectural. The most perfect expression of this new spirit is in
the kind of tracery which is called flowing as against the geometrical
tracery of 1230 to about 1300. The economy of the Early English
—a feature of all classic phases—is in strong contrast to the infinite
variety of the Decorated. Where there had been exclusively circles
with inscribed trefoils, quatrefoils, etc., there are now pointed
trefoils, and ogee or double curved arches, shapes like daggers and
shapes like the, vesica pistis, and whole systems of reticulations
(%. 35)'.
To study this new English flow in terms of space, one must go to
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