ARCHITECTURE - Karatunov.net

126 FRANCE BURGUNDY [CH. xxns. Urbam period of the Gothic style. In the church of S. URBAINroyesat TROVES we have a miracle of masonry. Every partof the construction shows complete knowledge of thestrength of the material and exact appreciation of thetask imposed upon The it. supports are reduced toa minimum, and seern scarcely equal to their work. Toan artist's eye the work looks thin and : itwiry seemsas if science were getting ahead of art, and the designsavours more of engineering than of architecture. Wonderfulas it is, fuller satisfaction may I think be got out ofthe massive work of the Burgundian Romanesque wherethere is a more generous allowance of material and moreobvious sufficiency of support, even if it be often superfluous.And in the quaint imaginings of the storiedcapitals, amid which the fancy of the carver ran riot, andto whichin the strange stiff sculptures of the tympanaarchaicism seems to lend a mystery, one finds somethingmore interesting and even more sympathetic than in thebrisk caps a crochet, and the more facile sculptures ofthe later Gothic at the end of the I3th and in the I4thcenturies, by the side of which the earlier sculpturesbetray, it must be admitted, a spice of barbarism.