translation studies. retrospective and prospective views

created visual ‘routes’ to the upper parts of the structure where they
suddenly diffused into protruding ornamental bands carrying up each of
the eight ridges of the small angle turrets, reaching up into the pinnacles
and cresting the junctures of the eight sloping planes of the stupendous
octagonal spire.
The flying buttress, another fourteenth-century addition designed to
support the walls from the outside, to take away the thrust of the vault and
to counteract the extra weight of the newly built Tower and Spire, was to
confer enhanced organic verticality to the cathedral. These segments of
arches rising delicately from exterior abutments not only transferred the
pressure of the vault and tower through buttresses to ground level, they
also helped harmonize the steeply pitched cathedral roofs with the squat
appearance of the side structures. Moreover, they functioned as external
ribs caging in the soaring heart of the cathedral as if to protect it from
desecration, foul or sacrilegious adulteration and malefic exposure.
Finally, the flying buttresses shoring up the vault of the nave ensured
compactness and organicity to the ensemble by conducting the flux of
sacred energy circulating from the top of the spire, through the interstices
of the central tower (longitudinal ball-flower mouldings, lozenge-shaped
bands, small colonnettes) and through the network of vault ribs to the
inferior parts of the structure: the outer walls of the aisles and the
supporting pier buttresses. Not only the lateral force of the vault and tower
travelled down through the arched section of the buttress but so did the
divine energy of the world which diffused through the entire body of the
building like blood circulating through vessels nurturing the body of the
cathedral and, at the same time, filling it with sacredness.
Just like Wells, Salisbury Cathedral with its network of slender
colonnettes, pointed arches, tall lancet windows, screen-like façade and
flying buttresses was consistent with the new view of the Heavenly
Jerusalem and of the celestial heaven; it was geometrically regular, orderly,
hierarchical, coherent, enduring, and filled with light. It was the true
threshold through which humanity could translate secular space and enter
eternity; or this is at least what medieval men truly hoped for.
References
Clifton-Taylor, A. (1967). The Cathedrals of England, Book Club Associates London,
London: Thames and Hudson.
Hearn, M. F. (1981). Romanesque Sculpture; The Revival of Monumental Stone Sculpture
in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University
Press.
Kieckhefer, R. (2004). Theology in Stone: Church Architecture from Byzantium to
Berkeley, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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