Note 32

Some architectural historians are inclined to identify the climactic phase of the Gothic style with Reims and Amiens (nave), and to consider the radical elimination of the wall in the nave of St.-Denis, the Sainte-Chapelle, St.- Nicaise-de-Reims, or St.-Urbain-de-Troyes as the beginning of a disintegration or decadence (“Gothique rayonnant” as opposed to “Gothique classique”). This is, of course, a matter of definition (cf. P. Frankl, “A French Gothic Cathedral: Amiens,” Art in America, XXXV, 1947, pp. 294. ff). But it would seem that the Gothic style, measured by its own standards of perfection, only fulfills itself where the wall is reduced to the limit of technical possibilities while, at the same time, a maximum of “inferability” is reached. I even suspect that the above- mentioned view has some purely verbal foundation in that the expressions “classic High Gothic” or “Gothique classique” automatically suggest the plastic standards of Greek and Roman, but not Gothic, “classicality.” In fact the masters of Amiens themselves eagerly adopted the glazed triforium of St.-Denis as soon as they had become familiar with it (transept and chevet).