Tallon: Structure in Gothic, page 1 Structure in Gothic Andrew Tallon Vassar College The Cambridge History of Religious Architecture, ed. Richard Etlin and Stephen Murray. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, in press. This essay might well have been called Structure is Gothic—or rather Gothic is Structure. For from the very beginnings of its modern reception, Gothic has been an architecture appreciated primarily (and often solely) for its structural audacity. The astonishing conquest of space and clearly-apparent structural brinksmanship of the Gothic masters, whose lissome buildings bent and twisted as they adapted themselves to ever-evolving load distributions, dazzled the architects and aesthetes of the French Enlightenment, who were as impressed with this manifest intrepidity as they were anxious to reject that which seemed to obscure it (a profusion of ornament).1 The heritors of the nascent esteem accorded to the Gothic, in particular the great architect and theorist Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc and his apologists, dissected and categorized the inner workings of the Gothic frame and elevated them into a credo of structural rationalism based on knowledge acquired on hundreds of post-Revolutionary restoration chantiers. Widely diffused through means such as Viollet-le-Duc’s ten-volume Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle or Auguste Choisy’s Histoire de l’architecture, the ideas were elucidated through novel means of representation.2 The most important among these, in terms of structure was the transverse section (Fig. 1). Because of their construction in a series of nearly-identical bays, Gothic buildings were assumed to function as a succession of lateral frames, through which thrust moved from vaults to walls to flying buttresses to buttress-uprights (culées) to the ground. The overwhelmingly complex three-dimensional assembly of stones, mortar and iron could thus be profitably reduced into a single, representative section that allowed the restorers but also—through their publication in the Annales archéologiques, Bulletin monumental, Congrès archéologique and a host of regional journals— generations of amateur archeologists, who could not hope (or did not wish) to participate in the “scaffold culture,” to ponder the means of support and its successful deployment by builders 1 See Robin Middleton, “The Abbé de Cordemoy and the Graeco-Gothic Ideal: a Prelude to Romantic Classicism (Part I),” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 25 (1962): 278-320. 2 Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle, 10 vols. (Paris: B. Bance and A. Morel, 1854-68); Auguste Choisy, Histoire de l’architecture, 2 vols. (Paris: Gauthier- Villars, 1899). See Arnaud Timbert, “Les illustrations du Dictionnaire raisonné: le cas de la cathédrale de Noyon et des églises de l’Oise,” in Viollet-le-Duc à Pierrefonds et dans l’Oise, ed. Dominique Seridji, 98-108 (Paris: Editions du patrimoine, 2008), accessed 15 August 2010, http://www.monuments-nationaux.fr/fichier/editions_livre/664/ livre_pdf_fr_violletleduc.pdf. Tallon: Structure in Gothic, page 2 without access to the things that seem indispensable on a modern worksite, such as reliable means for calculating stresses and equilibrium.3 However, once this intuitively resonant, privileged view was in the hands of a new class of “armchair” scholars, interpretations of Gothic structure proliferated. The structural fortunes of countless Gothic buildings were arbitrated based often on little more than a strong hunch, with a concomitant growth in the number of paradoxical contradictions in the literature. Alain Erlande- Brandenburg, the author of the most recent monograph on Notre-Dame of Paris, for example, said of the high vaults that they thrust but little, while Marcel Aubert, responsible for the penultimate monograph, said quite the opposite.4 Unlike a conventional archeological puzzle, in which a range of dates might be assigned to a portion of a building, for which at least the material elements can be known with some certainty, to attempt to understand Gothic structure is ever to grapple with the invisible—the forces that move through the building. To be sure, the section drawing reveals positive structural connections among vault, wall and buttress. But it cannot indicate what they actually do. The Gothic builder seems to offer some assistance: he supplies us with a representation of the structure in a language of support which suggests the presence and movement of forces along ribs and colonnettes adossed to walls—yet it is but a feint, in a grammar never meant to be taken literally. Piers, ribs and flying buttresses are the dicta that tell us that the building is doing work, but there can be no certainty, in the absence of documents supplied by the medieval builder, that the element in question is primarily designed to do the work or to seem to do the work. The prolonged debate over the structural-constructional-decorative role of the rib, what Henri 3 Andrew Tallon, “The transverse section and the creation of Gothic,” in preparation. 4 Alain Erlande-Brandenburg and A.-B. Merel-Brandenburg, Histoire de l’architecture française du Moyen Age à la Renaissance (Paris: Mengès, 1995), 274; Marcel Aubert, “Les plus anciennes croisées d’ogives: leur rôle dans la construction,” Bulletin Monumental 93 (1934): 1-67, 137-237, esp. 86. See also Alain Erlande-Brandenburg, Notre- Dame de Paris (Paris: Nathan/CNMHS, 1991), 74 and 90. Tallon: Structure in Gothic, page 3 Focillon called “the most delicate, the most bitterly contested point in the history of architecture,” is testament to this.5 The flying buttress is similarly multilingual. Architect and historian Anne Coste has ventured, based on the results of a computer model, that the traceried flyers in the choir of the cathedral of Auxerre are not structurally essential (Fig. 2).6 Similar observations were made of the flyers at the cathedral of Sens and the abbey church of Saint-Remi in Reims by engineers Robert Mark and Leonard Van Gulick.7 These experimental results suggest that flying buttresses may have been assessed as much for their ability to provide structural support as for their look, as instruments by which the decorative and spatial treatment hitherto proper to the interior might equally be extended to the exterior—transforming what was before an unrelieved envelope into an ever-changing and indistinct zone of shadow and light. Confirmation of this mode of reception is found in a number of early thirteenth-century manuscript illuminations and windows in which the flying buttress has been transformed into a symbol of structure (f. 50 v of the Bible moralisée Codex Vindobonensis 2554 or window 8 of the cathedral of Auxerre, for example).8 Perhaps the flying buttress was intended to prop not only according to structural rules, but to comfort the intuitions of the canons and bishop standing below. A Gothic builder like William of Sens, who began his tenure at Canterbury Cathedral as a “handler” of monks frightened by the destruction by fire of their choir in 1174, had to convince his clients—and perhaps himself—that what he was attempting was safe. Clearly-visible arches such as William 5 Henri Focillon, The art of the West in the Middle Ages, ed. Jean Bony, trans. Donald King, 2 vols. (London, 1963), I, 54. The key statements in the discussion, in chronological order, are as follows: Roger Gilman, “The Theory of Gothic Architecture and the Effect of Shellfire at Rheims and Soissons,” American Journal of Archaeology 24, no. 1 (1920): 37-72; Victor Sabouret, “Les voûtes d’arêtes nervurées: rôle simplement décoratif des nervures,” Le génie civil 92, no. 3 (1928): 205-09; Pol Abraham, “Nouvelle explication de l’architecture religieuse gothique,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 6th series, no. 9 (1934): 257-71; Pol Abraham, “Viollet-le-Duc et le rationalisme médiéval,” Bulletin Monumental 93 (1934), 69-88; Aubert, “Les plus anciennes croisées d’ogives,” 1-67, 137-237; Henri Masson, “Le rationalisme dans l’architecture du Moyen Age,” Bulletin Monumental 94 (1935): 29-50; Henri Focillon, “Le problème de l’ogive,” Recherche 1 (1939): 5-28; George Kubler, “A Late Gothic Computation of Rib Vault Thrusts,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 6th series 26 (1944): 135-48; Paul Frankl, The Gothic: Literary Sources and Interpretations Through Eight Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), 563-578; John Fitchen, The Construction of Gothic Cathedrals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 68-173; Jacques Heyman, “On the rubber vaults of the Middle Ages and other matters,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 6th series 71 (1968): 177-188, esp. 183-184; and Robert Mark, K. D. Alexander, and J. F. Abel, “The Structural Behavior of Medieval Ribbed Vaulting,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 36 (1977): 241-51. For a recent discussion see Santiago Huerta, “The Debate about the Structural Behaviour of Gothic Vaults: From Viollet-le-Duc to Heyman,” in Proceedings of the Third International Congress on Construction History, 20th-24th May 2009, ed. Werner Lorenz, 837-844, Cottbus, Germany, 2009. 6 Anne Coste, L’architecture gothique: lectures et interprétations d’un modèle (Saint-Etienne: Publications de l’université de Saint-Etienne, 1997), 115 and 188-197. 7 These unpublished studies were made in 1987; I am grateful to the authors for having allowed me to make use of the analyses. 8 See Claudine Lautier, “Les édifices réligieux et leur construction dans