Central Europe, the late Gothic

Introduction

The enormous production of church buildings in Central Europe during the late Middle Ages was fuelled chiefly by the competitive civic pride of the region's burgeoning towns, and as a result the main focus of creative effort was the urban parish church rather than the cathedral or monastic church.

It seems legitimate to associate the matter-of-fact di

rectness of the normative type, the hall church, with the practical tenor of town life, although increasingly often during the 14th century the hall format was adopted by majoi ecclesiastical corporations whose counterparts elsewliere in Northern Europe would automatically have built great churches.

Austerely detailed basilicas in the Freiburg-im-Breisgau mould continued to find favour, especially with the friars, and, like hall churches, they could be executed on the largest scale The hall choirs of a few exceptionally ambitious parish chinches incorporated some of the trappings of great church Gofhic.

Impoitanc examples are the radiating chapels at Schwabisch Gmund in Swabia (begun 1351), based on the chapels added from с. 1300 to the chevet of Nofre-Dame in Paris, and the external elevations of the choir of St Sebald at Nuremberg (begun 1361), which incoiporate traceried gables and image-lined buttresses worthy of any Rayonmant cathedral.

Central Europe, the late Gothic

The one l4th-century church in Central Europe which adopted the French great church system more or less complete is Prague Cathedral. This stylistic allegiance can be ascribed without hesitation to the patrons, the Luxemburg dynasty of Bohemian kings, allies of the French royal house in family, politics and culture.

Under King John (1310-46) and his son, the Emреrоr Charles IV (1346-78). Prague was transformed into a Central European Paris, complete with a university, the first in the Empire north of the Alps.

Its centrepiece was the cathedral which, like Henry Ill's Westminster Abbey, stood beside the main royal palace and combined the functions of Reims (coronation church), St-Dems (royal mausoleum) and the Sainte-Chapelle (relic cult glorifying the monarchy).

Prague was less directly the personal creation of the ruler than Westminster only in the sense that the administration of the works remained in clerical hands, tor Сharles IV spared no effort to ensure that the new cathedral would be an effective symbol of the enhanced power and prestige of Bohemia.

In 1341, when Charles was already co-regent, a tenth of the very large royal revenues from the Bohemian silver mines was granted to the chapter specifically to meet the costs of building; in 1344 Charles personally negofiated with the pope the caiving out of an archdiocese of Prague from that of Mainz; in 1355 he acquired relies of the cathedral's patron, St Vitus; and by 1358 he had remade the shrine for the relics of St Wenceslas - like Edward the Сonfessor, a canonized representative of the previous indigenous dynasty

The clearest indication of Charles's interest in the building itself is that while engaged in discussions with the pope at Avignon, he recruited the architect Matthew of Arras.

Matthew died in 1352 when the ambulatory and radiating chapels were complete and the stiaight bays had been begun. His work is in an elegant Rayonnant manner strongly influenced by the late 13th-century parts of Narbonne. The pivofal position of Prague in the history of German Late Gofhic is due not to Matthew but to Peter Parler, who took over in 1356 at the extraordinarily young age of twenty-three.

Parlei completed tile sacristy on the north side of the choir in 1362, the south transept porch in 1368, the arcade level of the choir by 1370 and the upper levels by 1385. Work on the great tower west of the south transept continued until c. 1420, when the Hussite revolution halted church building throughout Bohemia.

The nave, whose foundation stone was laid in 1392, remained unbuilt until the early 20th century.

The acceptability of the youthful Parler in Prague had no doubt much to do with his being a member of a well-established family of architects active in the Rhineland and Swabia. His father Heinrich was probably architect of the choir of Schwabisch Gmund. His first work at Prague, the sacristy, shows him to have been abreast of the most advanced developments in German architecture.

Its two square bays are covered by vaults from which are suspended, with the aid of concaled ironwork, open conoids of ribs not unlike, the spokes of an umbrella. There can be little doubt that the main inspiration for these pendant vaults was the larger octagonal vaults which, until their failure and replacement in the mid-16th century, covered the two-bay chapel of St Catherine on the south side of Strashourg Cathedral (begun c. 1338). It is almost certain that the Strasbourg pendants anticipated Prague's omission of webs, but the possibility exists that they resembled the considerable numbers of early 13th-century.

The earliest German rib vaults without webs are those in the west tower at Freiburg Minster and the 'Tonsur' chapel in the cloister at Magdeburg Cathedral, both of c. 1310-30.

Similar but smaller vaults had been used slightly earlier in England, in the vestibule to the sacristy of St Angustine's, Bristol (begun 1298) and in the Easter Sepulechre at Lincoln Cathedral (c. 1290-1300).

If this were the only correspondence between German and English vault design of the late 13th and early 14th centuries it could be dismissed as coincidence, but in fact there are many German vaults besides those оf the Prague sacristy which can readily be understood as variaitions on earlier English designs.

The plan of the ribs in the centre of the vault over the eastern sacristy bay at Prague is a tour-point star. This design and the eight-point stars of the Strasbourg vaults were among the more spectacular manifestations of a longstanding and widespread.

Continental interest in the stellar vaults used in English circular and polygonal chapter houses from the late 12th century onwards.

One of the earliest signs of this interest is a plan of c. 1230 in the 'sketchbook' of Villard de Honnecourt showing a square chapter house covered by a simplified version of the vaulting scheme exemplified by the mid-13th-century chapter house at Westminster.

Some of the material in the Villard sketchbook suggests close connections with the Cistercians, whose international and centralized organization provided ideal channels for transmitting information about English chapter houses to the Continent. It is likely that this is what actually happened, for the revival of interest in the centrally planned chapter house at the end of the 12th century took place under the auspices of the Cistercians of south-west England and Wales, and some of the earliest Central European star vaults are found in Cistercian chapter houses or strongly Сistercian-influenced buildings.

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