OK, good morning, nice to see you. In this series of.
Talks and, of course, which was amusing on. An introduction to art history.
There have been many exotic journeys to ancient from Syria to Egypt to different parts of Asia, parts of the world,
the party, of course, to enjoy and stopped the content of the visual culture of these different parts of the.
But also to shake up our preconceptions and our definitions or methods of dealing with a discipline about history.
And each of these, as we've been saying problematise,
is some of the assumptions built into an art history that was born in Western Europe and continues to.
Questioning itself, debating its role, but continues to use terms and to offer it with assumptions that were born particularly far.
This is, of course, part of the intention of this course, a very important part of the intention of this whole course as it is to help
ourselves to think a little bit about where we want to take that discipline.
In addition to what we might do with the particular contents of these different Muslim countries and problematise in this case,
something we can also do by looking at Western art.
And today, we're just going to look with the world that architecture in European context impacts specifically in the context of the later Middle Ages.
And in doing so, to think a little bit about these cathedrals we'll be looking at.
But also to think about how we deal with the subject of architecture, actually, and how we conceptualise a field of visual production,
which in modern times has come to be separated from other things that people do, other cultural activities, including other visual activities.
And in fact, the way we understand the history of architecture has been really quite problematise by this.
Confusion as to how buildings have been made of is still surrounding the building,
in particular of great churches in mediaeval in mediaeval Europe in the 19th century
when people started to be interested again in the mediaeval parts of Europe.
There was a very widespread myth and legend that the great buildings of the very has been built by ordinary day.
People are driven by piety or by monks.
Since then, the 20th century historical research has turned up the names of hundreds of professionals, masons, carpenters, glaziers,
who work on building sites, and we've got a rather different image now of the professionalisation of the field of building.
But what's still confusing to so many observers of these buildings now is the modern notion of the architect.
Because the profession of the grand designer will think of examples of modern architects who are shaping our world,
who are changing the skyline of London, who are putting up prestige museums.
This grandiose and prestigious role, Izabel actually when you think architects were professionals, they're professionals.
As recently as the late 19th century and not before the separation, two of the high arts of architecture,
together with sculpture and painting, are also, as you know, indeed, that separation is also a renaissance of later a major phenomenon.
But in particular, architecture has been further distinguished by the professionalisation in modern times.
If Renzo Piano turns up to look at the Shard while it's going up,
it's once in a blue moon and put on a hard hat and we'll go around in this nice Armani suit and
not get too close to the workmen who are connecting the wires or chain and fitting the plumbing.
So call for the visit. There's a disconnect now between the designer and the building site, which is very,
very different from that which operated in the mediaeval past and indeed, in the context of.
Architectural construction in other cultures. Some of the Masons.
And we'll see this actually a little bit later.
Who works on building sites in the Middle Ages did acquire individual reputations of quite high fame and prestige.
But their training and experience was on the building trades, stone cutters and construction engineers, as we would say.
This was common to all of their profession. And the master Mason on a site who would act as the overall designer.
And it was usually called the master of the works. The Maricel and the master of the world would never be wholly detached from the German team.
So this separation of the design from the knowledge of how to build is a face of evil.
But the larger issue you think about here, when we think about creation in not only in architecture, but in other fields,
and indeed the separation in the field of architecture is a peculiarly Western phenomenon, which has been imposed, as I say,
during the last five centuries, and particularly during the last hundred and fifty years outside this particular Western and modern tradition,
the integration of the design and the manufacture which we find on the building sites of the mediaeval cathedrals.
We'll look at some examples now has been equally characteristic of most cultural production in history.
Some very old, actually, about architecture. The way it's been conceptualised and actually the way it's been studied academically.
Architectural historians tend to be a breed apart. They work in the departments that architectural history,
or more particularly most architectural historians in academia, work in architecture departments.
That's why there are positions for architectural historians and that's what they tend to find themselves lecturing to.
More or less interested would be Renzo Piano's of the future.
But Matthew Walker, who was an architectural historian, was here for a few years, just as moved on a post in America just now in this department.
Would he hear you completely agree with this? Is that this this this and perception of what this imaginary of how buildings supposedly were
created by a special breed of person that created has created also within academic art history,
a notion that architecture is something separate from other fields of physical production.
Now, another preconception about great buildings of the Middle Ages is that they were conceived as grand unified designs.
As well as it were, Renzo Piano's shot. And yes, I think it's going to be something interesting to learn from this.
And yet the realisation of a completely integrated building design was extremely rare.
Actually, it's extremely rare today.
There aren't many Renzo pianos, there aren't many shards, there aren't many Bilbao museums for Frank Gehry to conceive as a totality.
In practise today, certainly in these mediaeval examples we'll be looking at,
construction was usually a matter of partial intervention within pre-existing structures
and only rarely was a building constructed in a single campaign from its foundations.
And as we'll see, this gives rise to local debates about what's appropriate,
should things be changed to get the same discussions which draw in others beyond well beyond,
in some cases, to the practitioners who are actually going to put the building up and building up
the best chance you might have if you wanted something exciting new was a fire.
Indeed, the Middle Ages gave many five. In the late 12th century, Katzenberg witnessed the murder of Thomas Beckett in front of his own high alter,
the Cathedral of Canterbury in eleven seventy, caused a storm across Christendom.
As you all know, something a little bit something about. And the monks of the Cathedral of Cathedral prior Canterbury were quick to goose.
Mourn his death and then promote the cult of the martyred saints, the victim of royal.
The royal intervention, which which which many felt it had exaggerated, to say the least,
and which did indeed catalyse the beginnings of what became an enormous one of the great pilgrimage cults.
Like many of Europe, four years after the death of Beckett.
I mean, he's still in the early 70s in London before a fire destroyed a very large part of the.
Especially at the East End. And we have from one of the monks, a who we a chronicle during this period,
a vivid account of the process of consultation with various French and English builders, which followed the monk was called Joey's Jabez Monk.
And I've put his text and one or two other quotations, if you want them on the back of the.
On one side, if you have your hand up just in case, it's useful for the future.
What he seems to be doing.
Why does he write all this down, it seems to me actually is covering up a debate and anxiety, perhaps differences of opinion as to what should happen.
He says he says of William of Science,
who was brought from Sunset in northern France to advise on what could be the east end of the the burned cathedral.
And Jobi says he spent many days with the monks in a careful study of the burned walls above and below, inside and out.
But for the time being, avoided saying what would have to be done in order not to shock them too much in their enfeebled state of mind.
But he kept on getting ready for what was needed for the work, either personal or through agents.
He goes on to say arrangements were made for bringing stones from overseas.
And we know because we can see the building now that this stone was brought from camp in Normandy and William assaults.
He goes on designed ingenious machinery for loading and unloading the ships and for the transport of mortar and stones.
He handed templates for shaping the stones to the carvers who he had taken on and over four years, William of sorts.
This Frenchman is described as having made considerable progress in the course of which he essentially designed this choir.
This east end of Canterbury Cathedral that you see today.
Source in the, say, northeast France, not one northern France, well, from which William had come on well,
clearly he'd been working, had just recently completed its own new building project, The New East End.
And in what was still a very modern and bold manor,
had created a brilliantly high and illuminated east end to frame the the high altar of the cathedral.
With these soaring pointed bolts and with the weights now being carried by the new.
In the 20th century design down through narrow appears to the ground, the weight of the building being concentrated in these fears.
The spaces in between appears to be opened up as never before. In mediaeval times or indeed in any time to glass.
So this is what it just happened that Souls William of is clearly an interesting person to somebody who's looking to rebuild it,
to create a new shrine that will be a pilgrimage shrine for the whole of Europe, for a whole Christendom.
And some of the monks in Canterbury get him over. And this is what this is what results.
And you can see that the it's in three stories, one tall story at the Mississippi grand royal level,
at the level of the nave and the ambulatory around the east and saving in Canterbury.
A less tall gallery level with a passage.
Same here. And then at all ish, pretty tall pastry level with more like less in from above.
And in the case of the Canterbury Eastend illuminating the hiles with what
were now to be the gathered well most of the gathered relics of the martyrs,
the martyred archbishop. In addition, at the very, very far east end of Canterbury Cathedral, another.
A distinctive local one on Beckett was back in the course of the attack by the four nights set by the second on the top
of Beckett's head was cut right off and police and the corona top of his head was it was venerated as a separate relic.
In what was called the corona or the crown of the cathedral at the East End.
So there's an additional chapel that to house that. Was even this short passage from the Canterbury Chronicle here, is that for us?
Insignificantly shows us I think it is the.
Complexity that arises in the context of patronage and availability,
where there will certainly have been division on the monks as to what should happen,
because this is an ancient and the sacred building, it's got older relics and Saxon saints venerated for hundreds of years.
And there would have been a constituency urging the re the reparation of the building and exactly.
And so forth, and nothing in, as we would say, architectural terms.
I think this kind of grandeur, height might have been seen in these islands before.
So this is a radical novelty and some would have been resistant.
And what I think one detects something of that resistance in order not to shock them too severely and so on in Japan cherishes account.
The patrons then, with their pockets, varying views, play a key role, play a key role.
But William assaults the master of the works is the guy who sources the material, too.
Who gives the moulds for me? For the arcades. And some savvy to the carvers who oversees the operation.
And he makes this a tangible reality. In the fifth year, in the towards the end of the 70s, William of South had an accident.
He fell from the scaffolding and after a while he had to.
He had to retire. He went back to France culture. And he seems to have left no complete plan to his successor.
This is something which if we look closely at the work in the East End,
we can see there are some disjuncture is and it's not a completely seamless operation.
The man who took over also called William, but he was William. The Englishman completed the design.
As I say, this is this is that is this the same design? More or less of the original pattern.
By eleven eighty one. So the project was not, as it were, the inspired moment of a complete vision on the part of one patron.
It was a profitable piece of profitable because it was a huge success as a major centre, of course, for hundreds of years.
The whole design of the building being conceived as a kind of giant reliquary.
Up until this point. Relics of the Saints were kept underground.
You came into the older churches and you went as a pilgrim down into the ground to see the.
To see the shrine here. For the first time, the relics have been brought up.
This was the plan from the start. And not only are they up, but the raised the high altar is raised with relation to the.
You can see some of the steps going up here from the level of the nave. So those coming in.
This is still the experience. If you get a country coming to the west and you look down the nave and then raised up at the end,
framed and illuminated by these high windows, like in a giant reliquary, as I say,
the hilden from which of course, in the Reformation in the 8th had all the relics carted away 26 cartloads in 1839,
dragged all the riches of Becket Shrine and all the offerings that people had made.
So anyway, the more moral of this is the unpredictability of art and architectural history.
When the hand of code conveniently fails to clear the ground so far.
And, of course, one possibility is that there is a consistent constituency amongst.
The flame. Not at all impossible. But anyway, when the hand of God or anybody else fails to kindle the flames to clear the way for a new building,
and powerful patrons were at times driven to drastic measures.
And I've given his name on your hand out at the beginning of the 13th century to just
a few years later in the context where a number of people are building new churches.
The Bishop of Oaxaca, Gil, dissimulate. In a more high handed fashion, there's not a community of monks either.
He's a bishop. He's got an ambitious and powerful bishop. And according to the local Chronicle, in this case,
it looks that he simply had the old one knocked down in order to get something really splendid put up.
The bishops or his cathedral successor was a very old building and very small suffering from decay in age,
while others in every direction were raising their heads in a wonderfully beautiful style.
Places like sons. So he determined on a new building and that it should be designed by those skilled in the art of masonry,
lest it should be in any way unequals or the other. He had it.
The old one pulls down to the ground so that putting off the decrepitude of antiquity, it might grow young in a more elegant style of normalcy.
But again, nowadays, we're so used to the language of novelty, the newbie, the good, that's it,
that we have to make an effort to think of to to appreciate other cultures in which novelty was not always seen as an undiluted good.
And actually the very word novelty novey tossed in a mediaeval context in the 12th or 13th century.
Context was always a controversial word is not often used with the positive connotations.
And maybe even this Chronicle has a note of irony. The himself is like this.
This is all our bishop. He wanted to be new. He wanted.
He wanted the elegance of Novita as of novelty.
But we certainly have contemporary texts in which nobody's criticised as being a departure from good tradition.
And on the whole, this kind of clean sweep, knock it all down and build a new one was not an option.
At Sundanese, just north of just outside Paris, and Ari are right in the centre of Paris at the beginning of the 12th century,
the abbot Souji again, the spellings are on the sheet up, wanted to see his church rebuilt on a grandiose scale.
And we have Sujiatun writing. Very interesting. Why does he write it at great length, actually, about his project to rebuild the aperture?
Pretty certain images within his monastic community. There were those who thought this was a terrible thing and that he was perhaps so grand ising.
But in any case, he was reckless in dismantling parts of what was a very ancient church that had been founded by Charlemagne,
possibly, according to one legend, even founded by Christ himself.
And here, here, here was about CJK praising the Tea Party, pulled down to his own personal involvement, is inscribed in the building.
There are seven places to this day where you can see,
such as image and read his name here in one of the stained glass windows that survived from his early 20th century work.
You see the kneeling figure of the abbot in his monastic robes.
And so Jarius AB, Albert Szewczyk, the label, just in case you are not sure, not sure which he is and he is.
Or, you know, he was also on the west door as you came in and in other places.
These images and the liveliness of his own tech actually went to books to help protect
the life of his accounts of led modern scholars to come to think of sushi as,
in effect, the designer of Salmoni. And this is quite significant,
given the what we now understand is the impulse of the architectural importance of the building that went up in the 11th, 30s and 40s at Sundanese.
This building is, by all accounts, a crucially important building in the whole history of architecture and human history of Western architecture.
And it is regarded as it's the first of those buildings which by using pointed rather than round arches, even more significantly,
by carrying the stone weight, the weight of the stone building and its roof knocked down through graphic walls, but through.
Actually, quite slender, Piers.
Has broken through to a new understanding of how you can put up a building and how you can create enormous parts of the walls of that building,
which are not structural, simply empties.
They can. They can be they can be as empty or as as light as you like.
They can be filled with glass because they're not structural.
So this combination of height with the arcades and light with the opening of the of the outer walls is here.
First, there are a couple of prepossessing experiments. It doesn't just come completely out of nowhere, but.
The interesting and in sand, any large parts of it were rebuilt in the 13th century, so only parts.
But this is part of this is this is the section remained from Abbot Suitcase and day, enormous importance attached to this and therefore to sushi.
But what is the role of the patron?
How much importance are we going to give to the person who. Chooses to associate his name in writing and images with the building.
He's Abbott, certainly. But although his interest in the project, the patron is very is very clear,
there's no evidence that he had any technical ability to oversee and still less to actually invent the structure,
which others say is no ordinary structure here with its buttresses to support to hold up this newly.
Colonnaded structure and with its new stained glass windows.
One of the most famous of all art historians is one of the most famous civil wars,
historical studies on this building and on sushi Panofsky in Panofsky,
first half of the 20th century seised upon this as a kind of moral case study for the art historian because he felt.
Ah, here we have the formula. We have an intelligent, educated patient who we can actually hypothesise, read certain texts.
And I come to listen. And translated those texts into a blueprint,
a programme for the artisans who would realise his vision and the books that he identified with the very specific book, actually, his book by Angels.
Not a trivial book at all, a very, very extensive and and serious book about angels, very widely known Middle Ages,
attributed to somebody called Dennis Dionysius and Diniz is his book on angels and the angelic hierarchy and talks in a way very in a very
platonic way Christian writing platonic about how divine power is mediated to Earth through successive levels of prisons or as it yes,
as you might say, Lenz's filtering that divine power, that divine light, so that it manifests itself in the diversity of the world.
And conversely, then, the world is a pattern, which, if you read it in the reverse direction,
is through these lenses or angels or angelic spheres leading back to its divine origins.
This was a way of understanding the diversity and the beauty of the world and susur according to see.
Having read this book, wasn't this your book had invited and wanted to make in his building through his treatment of light as
it passes through these coloured windows in his inclusion of many beautifully decorated ornaments?
I have to queue up for the high altar, which he talks about in just these terms.
Beautiful gems, he says, attract the eye and then lead the line upwards to the source of.
All right. Which is which is God. So quite an exciting hypothesis and one which was offered as a model for understanding.
Actually, it's not too grand to say the history of our intelligent, educated patron can direct the relevant artisans to realise that their design.
That's why it's a significant model.
But there's no getting away from the fact if you look closely at the masonry of a building like this or we can leave from where you're sitting,
it's it's not easy to cut these standards and place them and make them and make this work.
I mentioned there are a couple of presidents from the years before, from just a very few years before, a decade before this, a very nearby church.
Martin. Somewhat under Schantz and Martin, also north of Paris, shows Masons experimenting with just this formula on a small part of the statue.
And you can see that at the time. You see that that the that the they got the weight from the ceilings started to crumble.
And it's still today. And it's locked in a distorted breakage, which which is clear, you can see is original.
These were masons who were experimenting with new ideas.
The patrons certainly wouldn't have been able to understand what they were doing in terms of the practicalities.
So it was following convention that the patron presented himself as the maker.
Sushis portrayed paganism.
But the new church was not the creation of some clever intellectual theory imposed by the patron, but of professional builders.
And also, it was more experimental itself and inconsistent with itself than textbooks tend to send.
There's another point about architectural history, architectural history.
When you read it, you encounter buildings being described in art history books that you presented with a building.
So, yes, certainly it is the first Gothic church. And these four features, it has an.
Some already just the same thing, but actually shot through inconsistencies.
Just as I said, Canterbury Monsignor William Basalts was.
You have to cry, officer training for ill health. No, it's okay, but we can seem to joynes we can see we can see that the slight changes of.
And this, again, might have a lesson for us, not just in terms of believability,
art, art and its production generally and often, as with the bishop of accessor.
We just encountered a patron was spurred on by the sense that other people will put the effects of the buildings.
And they wanted the prestige to compete.
Just to take an example, from the end of the mediaeval period, beginning of the 16th century.
Bishop Oliver Bath and Wells. Both places joined together, he said, anyway, he had a dream.
So this is, of course, another way of justifying it.
And so that's my dream. I would like the Priory Church and the very Asian private church of the bath to be razed to the ground.
And we're gonna put up something really wonderful that I've seen in my life, my dream in its place.
And that was the justification that was that was given.
He hired the Masons who whose names we know and we know something about them who were called Virtue Roberson,
William Virtue, the older brother of the two.
Robert had previously worked with his father on the Kings works on the on the Royal The World Chapel, most prestigious building in the country.
And later, the latest, which was the east end of Westminster Abbey.
The the Henry the sentence. What became the Henry the sentence chapel. And actually, I'm just here the next night.
So on the right hand side of the screen, you see what Adam Virtue and Robert Virtue had produced for the Royal Easter and the
new royal east end of Westminster Abbey in the last years of the of the 15th century.
This, to the like of this has never been seen, not quite quite like this.
There are once again experiments with this kind of patterned what's countrypeople fan vaulting.
So that, again, this doesn't come from nowhere.
But the Masons clearly push the base out of whatever it tried to do for the royal patrons in this instance.
And to those that Klaus in particular are calling, please, of any secular ecclesiastical peers of the realm of bishops,
we should all over Boston must have been there all talking about this.
And so the bishop of Bath in Wales in this instance of 52 gets hold of Robert Virtue's has come down to my place.
I just had a vision of having you. We'll have a new building and on a smaller scale.
And in fact, in a context where different models are used for the rebuilding, the old, low, dark,
thick walled and narrow windowed Romanesque priory Church of Bath was razed to
the ground and it was replaced by the high high Arcadia's high clear street.
No gallery in between.
So the history is enormous with these enormous windows, these features of these lateral features of the building you're looking at,
which is both Abbey to this day are modelled on the parish church in Somerset in this very.
But the ceiling where he got in, which he did, which the virtues,
the brothers virtue were also in what is a simplified version of what had been just put up in Westminster Abbey.
And we can see the mentality behind the patrons choice here in this letter,
which I quoted for you, in which he says to one of the secular ministers of the King, Robertson,
William Virtues have been here with me that can report on the state and forwardness of this church,
a bath and of the vaults devised for the chancellor of the centre church,
where unto as they say now, there shall be none so goodly, neither in England nor in France.
So in cases like this, about Susur and Bishop Oliver,
we can see the ambition and the taste of the patron and a clear bearing on the direction of the building operation.
But the practical business of making the structure lay firmly with.
The crafts people trust people learn how to do these things in the Mason's yard, constantly experimenting, perhaps trying out some new ideas.
But that's where the practical learning is concentrated.
I've mentioned this tendency of artistry to deal with complete objects and complete buildings and that this is misleading.
There's always been a tendency for building projects to remain incomplete,
to say academic art histories tended to privilege the appreciation of whole buildings over fragments.
But the reality is that only a minority of structures consent to it can be said to be in time.
With respect to a single design, even apart, and I'm not talking about this today that I mentioned at the beginning,
the separation of architectural history from other kinds of history will.
One massive result of that is that studies of great churches, for example,
tend to be carried out by architectural historians who look at the architecture.
The functioning of those buildings depended on the furnishings, upon hangings, upon altars and altar pieces,
on civility, surgical equipment, all of which were made by a whole host of diversity,
different crafts people, and were in the practical use as much as the architecture,
catalysts of response, understanding, creation of meaning in the early.
But if we stick only with the architecture, as I say, we need to take it, we need to hoist in the non completion of many, if not most buildings.
But not only that, it's actually interesting. It can be illuminating to look at the reasons why buildings aren't finished.
According to a single Windsor piano, Renzo Piano kind of design,
the many structural problems encountered on mediaeval sites draw attention to the way in which master masons tended to work empirically,
pragmatically, lacking so much they showed.
As I mentioned just now north of Paris, just after eleven hundred feeling their way towards solutions which were not always clear at the start.
And we can see this very dramatically in this instance, the amazing space of BofI Choir.
So this is this is one to see, another one with a great 13th century northern French cathedral buildings where the Masons just went on.
And it's a very French thing, this competitive. You noticed it with the bishop of Auxerre. Well, people are going up.
I want to go up to this Beauvais. This this pretty much touch the sky at forty six point eight metres from the main floor.
But if you look at the furniture in the foreground, think these chairs, it gives you a bit of an idea of the distance to the ceiling.
But here again, this is there's an element of the hazardous about the deliberately hazardous, consciously hazardous and experimental,
and actually they got as far as the crossing, working from EastEnders has often is the case working from the East End as far as the crossing.
And they are a couple of days into the night and then the cracks started opening up.
And. They stopped them from the outside.
What you see today is an old photograph. This is what you see today. You see this.
So there it is. That's the that's the chance of the crossing and the beginning of the nave.
And at that point, they realise that this was far, far, far too dangerous, great chunks, and makes me started falling off.
And they called a halt. And you can see the seats of the height of the nave.
After all, it was a little bit lower than that. They pulled back.
I mean, the reasons, as I say, the reasons for Puscifer interruption are interesting.
The reasons why the movie, if we if we look at it, we understand, is that we we need to a slightly different questions about the motives.
But for embarking on this kind of project, because there is something undoubtedly heroic and hazardous about embarking project.
The details of which are not understood. Clearly, they were understood from the beginning.
Many designs evolved in the course of execution. Again,
underlining the role of the unpredictable places when big themes this morning is coming
across and the importance of an element of pragmatism on the part of the builders.
Sometimes the appearance of alarming cracks generated extraordinary and brilliant, um, uh, solutions.
So the 13th century Navon Crossing and Wells Cathedral in Somerset and in particular the enormous height and weight of
the tower in the 14th century and the early 14th century began to create cracks in the lower parts around the crossing,
the nave and then the crossing.
So there was there was fear that the whole thing just splay out and then the control tower collapse and these reverse arches,
scissor arches were invented, were invented, turned into a pragmatic invention in around 13,
30 of brilliant architects turning near disaster to crater a new a new invention which has worked so far.
On the other hand, at Ely Cathedral in the thirteen thirties, the central tower collapsed.
It simply felt it collapsed on itself and. So that was of a catastrophe which had to be resolved in some way.
And here we have again a Chronicle, the 14th century monastic chronicle of Ealey,
which attributes the this is what we're looking at is the replacement,
the amazing octagon of the cathedral, the the 14th century solution to that particular local disaster.
And the chronicler attributes it to the sacristy.
The monk who was responsible for the ornaments and maintenance of the church of the building, who was called Ellen Wolf thing.
And once again, readers of this attended. No one will see him, a brilliant patron or somebody who has an idea.
Maybe he's the clever person who thought, let's go for an eight sided towelettes.
Let's include other novel features. But again, much more likely is it that the sacristy was seen at the time as taking responsibility for the Ripper,
but that the required practical skill lay in other hands. And then it's it's it's a work of genius.
This is the exterior anyway, to admire. And then from the inside, standing underneath this crossing tower and looking up.
This is what you see. And it's.
It's as though the designer is saying, well, we did have a massive square tower and it was very brand venerable and wonderful.
But actually now we've got to haven't devolves to look up with these soaring clusters of.
Of ribs surrounding an octagon, which itself, because it rises higher,
is illuminated or a creates this said the sense of a heavenly heavenly spare above.
So there's a theatre, a drama, a theological message to about that, which is brilliant,
original and also breathtaking because I all in the other one just fall down.
And doesn't this look like an even more complex and risky building? It looks like an achievement in stone.
That would be completely impossible. And indeed, so it would have been completely impossible.
It looks as if it's not in stone. It is entirely made of wood.
So, again, ingenuity and brilliance and creativity can come out of that Mason's yard with the stimulus of certain challenges and particular patrons.
And we need to think about the interaction of all these elements and not just formulaically about one
rich or ambitious or well read patron coming up with an idea and having the artisans simply executing.
There's another I think this is the final example of this kind of experimentation that I wanted to show you at CNN Cathedral,
Sienna's built on a series of hills and on the top of one of which legend had it not been a temple of Diana.
And this was the site of the early Christian church in Seattle.
Met the mother church and where in the late 13th century, which is the period of greatest expansion of the Communist Party,
the Republican government of the city on the basis of banking in particular on trade, was newly rich and powerful.
And it was reconstructing its image, if you like, of the image of the city through great public works.
And this was a great civic projects, not an. Narrative, ecclesiastical, perfect.
It was one that was funded by and overseen by the senior year.
That said, the civil rulers of the CND Republic. And they wanted and they replaced again an old dark and low Romanesque church of the 20th century.
At the end of the 13th and into the 14th centuries. With what?
The structure. You see him. Now, again, what happened just demonstrates, I suppose, what I've been saying more than once,
which is that patrons can have the most visionary dreams and the most ambitious ideas and the most competitive propagandistic motives.
But it's Masons who have to deal with the practicalities of getting buildings up.
And it's they who realised what eventually to see. But but the interaction is always fascinating in this instance,
the rebuilding of the Romanesque church in ways which means that we've been looking
at in the northern French Gothic ideas of height and wide windows and so on,
led to the extension of the church beyond its 20th century limit.
Further east. That's what you're looking at today. To the left here. And as I think you can probably see, we're on one of the hills.
The ground falls very steeply away here at the left hand end of the slide.
And so the eastern end of the church was being jetted out over steeply falling hillside.
And they hadn't got very far into the early. They started in the 80s.
They hadn't got very far and very early 13 hundreds when the new Eastend simply started to fall down,
pulled down the hill to get crack opened up and it started to lurch downhill slowly.
Peoples crawling was being being yanked apart by gravity.
Now you can imagine what what some of the Masons locally might have wanted to say about this.
But the senior. And this does illustrate the continuing power of patronage.
They called in masons from other cities to advice and from half a dozen other cities, particularly opiated cathedral had recently been completed.
And they got these masons and we'll be able to have a look and give them and deliver their advice.
And we have their advice on these six Masons say, guys, this is crazy.
You are completely insane. You've got to stop. This is not safe.
And only disaster will ensue.
So the senior scenario took this and read the advice and then they said, right, OK, so we'll get to know that much bigger still.
So, so far from taking this advice so far. So as I say, masons have to be listened to up to a point,
but where the idea of the patron reaches beyond what you find on occasion, Masons in turn then given new tasks.
And so what they decided to do was to curtail the plan to carry on building further east out here into the into the void, as it were.
You can still see the cracks here and to reorientate the entire building so that what
was the nave and the East End would become of me transacts of a newly configured vase.
Biggest in Christendom. Cathedral with a nave on at right angles to this.
So here on the right hand side, you see the planners of the church as it is now in and heart outline the stumpy stand frustratingly short.
But reorientated according to the new plan, that would just have been the transept.
And here in the lower part of the slide, you see the partially completed nave of what they say would have been a vaster and higher,
wider and higher than any other interest in them, including churches in Rome at the day, at the day.
And if you've been to see, you go to see if you can actually now walk up onto the parts of this new projected cathedral that were completed.
It's a dizzying height up at the top here. And you see many, many miles out into the countryside.
It's a very. And this photograph on the left was taken from under. So looking down.
You seem to be exhausted. Amazing project.
Maybe it's as well in this context. In the middle of Black Death, plague arrives thirty, forty eight.
But that's not a subpopulation. Refunds meant that the whole project to be had to be given up.
So I'm not saying patrons don't have any trouble. They certainly do. And it's in this tension and dialogue between patrons ambitions and.
Mason's responses that we can see many of the most interesting, in some cases influential experiments of the period.
So it's nice in the beginning, and we're not yet in the world of Renzo Piano or Richard Rodgers and that are Armani suits and social prestige,
that separation from the general run of.
But nonetheless, we can detect hints in just a few cases that individuals who wear the Maggie Street upper arm,
the masters of the words, acquired a loftier respect than his manual labour that would otherwise come out.
The master Mason is going to be living on the site at any at any time, but he has a long road, which is different from the closest thing.
The other woman and he carries a staff, which means that he has the right to come on, not just the Masons who might be.
A team within which he'd been trained originally, but also everybody else,
you've got to you've got to collaborate with the Masons, the the carpenters, the places and so on.
And we get hints of this respect for a limited number of masters of the works in images
of designers in the floors of one or two of the cathedrals we've been talking about.
Emil Rin's. Well, we have been talking about men particularly, but again, in northern France and here I'm sorry, one of those cases.
Sorry. You can see the ropes and also perhaps you can just about make out the tools of the trade.
The set square,
the dividers that mark the Matthews's is used to measuring out dimensions and arcades and the profiles of stone mouldings and so forth.
The earliest that unless the 13th century, also in the 13th century and significantly from Reames,
again, northeast of Paris, is the earliest to monument.
We have to a master Mason, and he too is the inscription around the edge, tells us his name and negotiate.
He died in 36 and he's shown holding a building that's a model of Reims Cathedral.
He's wearing that long note. And there are other emblems of his his profession, if you like.
So there's certainly the certainly status here.
These are always rather than obsolete. Obviously, if we've lost things.
But these these are rabut. We do know there are some later mediaeval ones as well.
Here's a German example at suit from the early 15th century where the designer of this church appears in his portrait
in a three dimensional portrait with an inscription commemorating his his roles as the master master builder.
The fact that the earliest one is at Reims is surely no accident because reads really got very high.
Highly visible, high prestige building. The Coronation Church of the Capuchin Kings.
Responsible, therefore, for creating in that cathedral the kind of image of Christian monarchy.
Not just in the last few minutes. I wanted to.
Just showed how, once again, patrons emulation of one another could drive new architectural developments.
Because here still in Paris in the twelve 40s.
So I said still in Paris, still in that Capucine zone of Paris, Reames, Sundanese in Paris itself, in the Tofel 30s and 40s.
The king of France, then king of France, the then Capucine King Louis,
the ninth who had acquired the most amazing collection of relics in all of Christendom.
Polluting the crown of thorns from Christ's crucifixion and arrange these on the wild.
He had built by his masons that glaziers this enormous, again, reliquary.
So it's a it's smaller than Canterbury Cathedral,
but it's conceived in the same way as it can large reliquary to house these extraordinary this extraordinary collection.
And it was then a kind of an extension of his own image as a Christian, as a Christian community.
But he was looking after these that Paris with under his aegis, a kind of new Jerusalem.
And as you can see, how again brilliantly these new ideas of height and right are used in this instance,
the sand Chapell, what was, as it still is, a sensation.
And one of the people who are completely not sideways by it was the king of England who in twelve forty once Henry the third went on a visit to Paris.
And when he came back, he could not stop talking about comparisons because this actually became the butt of jokes.
We've even got vernacular songs from the time Ionising The King's obsession wanted to bring that Sam Chapelle back in a cart to London.
This kind of thing he told his courtiers, they got they've got houses four stories high.
And we were we've really got to be more like Paris and Gerry, the the the prestige the king of France have got in amongst them.
He was determined to have something that could begin to compete.
And lo and behold, he he hired Henry of Reeds, significantly named Master Masons, master of the works for a new rebuilding of Westminster Abbey.
And on the. Left.
I'm showing you the north transept of Reims Cathedral.
And on the right, I'm showing you.
It's been slightly modified since I'm showing you the north transept of Westminster Abbey, where you see the recently completed Cathedral of Reims.
As I say, the Coronation Church of the Capuchins becomes through the English Kings patronage of a master of works from Reeds,
half a model, not a reprint in every detail,
but an inspiration for the new building of Westminster Abbey with its rose window
and its triple portico for the King to process in two services and so on.
Next to the Royal Palace of Westminster, it becomes. And the was a very recently being worked out reams around twelve thirty by glaziers,
and Mason's working now with increasingly risky, thin numbers in stone to create quite delicate.
Beginning to create quite delicate filigree effects in the windows, something which initially back in sushis dense underneath you don't yet see.
But here you're beginning to see new experiments. And then this is emulated and taken further.
Westminster Abbey here in the chapter, a house that was finished in twelve fifty three.
And in turn, the chapter house of 53, which is is that this is conceived as a it's a polygon hexagon around a central,
wonderfully thin, treelike pier at the centre of this cluster of little piers, in fact, that sprang out and support the roof.
And then the wind, the enormously wide windows, as you see.
And then this is emulated in the 12th 60s at Salisbury, where you can see various details cropping up,
where the visual so every member of the king's court is taking taking this idea, this idea wrong.
Not everybody thought that what Henry was doing was the right thing.
It was a politics about copying France, which Barens and others in even contested.
In fact, some of the secular barons gathered in Oxford precisely to complain that he was going to French,
that this was too much in hock to French culture, French influence, and not all bishops went the way of the bishop of Solsbury in that instance.
But anyway, what we see in these cases is a dynamic which is, I think, interesting interaction between ideas and inspirations on the part of patrons,
practical techniques, willingness to experiment, sometimes brilliant, pragmatic solutions on the part of craftspeople.
And so finally, I'm sorry I've ever run slightly, but district, just finally, there are three points against comes three points.
Let's stand out from this review of mediaeval building practise first,
the respect for architecture as a liberal art is a distinctively Western and recent phenomenon,
professionalisation, which sets the modern architect apart from mechanical builders and technicians dating from the 19th century.
Second, the role of a patron in this period and also in this, as in other media.
Needs to be carefully weighed. On the one hand, not only patients money, but also the patrons personal,
political or religious or put their agenda presented as a dream or Christian kingship or whatever.
But these ideas, clearly these affect significantly the choice of materials, the forms, the workmen employed.
But we shouldn't confuse the ambitions of a patron for the ability to design a building.
And the third and final point is the significance in architecture and in architectural history of the experimental, pragmatic, the incomplete design.
Does it say architectural history is always privileged? The apparently complete building.
But on this point, the mediaeval evidence isn't alone in suggesting that reality tended to be more unpredictable.
Some say the general point here, and this is my end,
is that the subject matter of art history that we might wish it otherwise is always, in some sense, incomplete.