Origins and Spread of Romanesque & Gothic Style in France, Germany & Northern Europe. 3

Gothic Sculpture.

“With the institution of the lodge in the twelfth century, a change already noticed by Viollet-le-Duc took place in this respect. The lodge offered the sculptor a more convenient and better equipped place of work than the scaffolding had been. Now he generally does the whole of his work in a workshop near the church, the finished sculptures being subsequently built into the structure. The change was probably not so sudden as Viollet-le-Duc supposes, 223 but, in any case, here was a development which was to lead ultimately to the independence of the sculptor’s work and a growing separation of sculpture from architecture.” Arnold Hauser.¹

Lots of Gothic churches have sculpture inside or around them: outside on doorways, buttresses; inside, attached to shafts. This kind of sculpture is known as decoration; it evolved from the Romanesque into a more programmatic type of art with its iconography geared towards a more didactic function.² Unfortunately most of this sculpture from the first phase of the Gothic, what Martindale calls a “age of transition” lasting a century from 1140 to 1240, has not survived; these include St Denis and St Bénigne (Dijon).³ But luckily most of the sculpture at Chartres Cathedral has survived, particularly the figures on the tympanum and west portal and porches which were begun after 1194. These figures with long parallel folds and boxlike pleats were admired and imitated; they are found at Le Mans and Laon. The Kings and Queens at Chartres are impressive, but lack gracefulness; this is remedied by such 13^th century figures as St Modeste (above) on the North Porch whose restorers earned Ruskin’s condemnation. It is believed that some of the Chartres sculptors travelled to Rheims, but the sculpture there – from the same century- lean more towards the antique; as in the figures from the Judgement in the north transept. It is thought that this antique orientation might betray the influence of the metalworker Nicolas of Verdun (1130-1205) who developed this drapery style; the group of the Visitation at Rheims are one of the most well-known examples. Gradually more emotion enters into the sculptural groups, particularly in Germany like the Death of the Virgin at Strasbourg Cathedral (1230). The Rheims style of sculpture reaches Germany, Bamberg (Madonna), Strasbourg (Death of the Virgin), Magdeburg (Wise and Foolish Virgins). Between 1240 and 1350 when Paris had achieved eminence in art and architecture, the style of sculpture became more sumptuous and decorative as with the many statues like the Virgin and Child of Jeanne d’Evreux, Queen of France.

1The Social History of Art, Vol 1, From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages, with an introduction by Jonathan Harris, (Routledge, 1999, first pub in two volumes 1951), 120.

2Frankl, Gothic Architecture, 290.

3Ibid, 17f.