Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 7.djvu/319

AND AFTER-GOTHIC STYLES IN GERMANY. 221 however, differs from frame-work in this, that it inchides no conception of support, and that its elements (the staves, mulKons, or tracery bars, as Mr. WiHis calls them) are exhibited as undergoing flexures which have no relation to mechanical structure. M. Kallenbach remarks, justly, as appears to me, that the trefoils, quatrefoils, &c. which occur in the Gothic style are not forms arising from the development of that style, but independent elements primarily existing in the Romanesque style. Now% these elements materially influenced the forms which tracery assumes. They determined, almost entirely, the forms of " geometrical tracery ; " and added, as it would seem, the "■ feathering," or " foliation," to the other kinds of tracery. The gradual formation of tracery by grouping together several windows in one large panel, and perforating with circles, trefoils, quatrefoils, &c., the blank space, may be shown as an historical process by examples both in England and in Germany. Mr. K. gives examples, taken from Seligenstadt (xxix.), St. Gereon at Cologne (xxx.), Maul- bron (xxxi.), Ratisbon (xxxii.), where we see the process beginning ; while in the choir at Ratisbon, and in the church at Naumburg (xxxiii.), we see it carried further. Finally, as at Magdeburg (xxxvh.), the mullions, with their ramifications, occupy the whole window^ leaving no blank surfaces. The feathering of the heads of lights, as well as the trefoils and quatrefoils, are separated from the head, and glazed in the intervening opening.^ Though the invention of tracery thus would seem to have been gradual both in Germany and in England, and also in France, its general adoption appears to have gone on much more rapidly abroad than in our country. Cologne, Amiens, and Salisbury, may be considered as nearly contemporary. •* Professor Willis (Remarks on Archit. when the window space is either so of Middle Ages, 1835, p. 49) has, with constructed or so seen that the blank more distinctness, shown that foliation s[)accs (trefoils, quatrefoils, <!v:c.) strike arises from placing arches of different tlie eye, the intermediate bars being forms (as trefoil, quatrefoil, &c.) under blotted into unorganic spaces of variable the same compound archway; and that breadth (as the cusjis project and retire) trurery is the result of placing multiple produces the efl'ect of genuine tracery no arches behind single ones, it may be, in longer. This holds whether the quatre- repeated succession. foils, &c., bo seen from within, .as lights It may be remarked that tracery in a darlc space, or from without, as dark necessarily imphes that the attention is figures on a light sjiace. .Mucli of the fixed upon the tracery bars .as the posi- filling of Italian windows appears to be live elements of the structure; and that tiiis spurious kind of tracerv.