CONSTRUCTION XV. THE BUTTRESS 207

detached piers and pinnacles, each sustaining the inclined prop against the central wall, and looking something like a band of giants holding it up with the butts of their lances. This arrangement would imply the loss of an enormous space of ground, but the intervals of the buttresses are usually walled in below, and form minor chapels.

§ 9. The science of this arrangement has made it the subject of much enthusiastic declamation among the Gothic architects,¹ almost as unreasonable, in some respects, as the declamation of the Renaissance architects respecting Greek structure. The fact is, that the whole northern buttress-system

is based on the grand requirement of tall windows and vast masses of light at the end of the apse. In order to gain this quantity of light, the piers between the windows are diminished in thickness until they are far too weak to bear the roof, and then sustained by external buttresses. In the Italian method the light is rather dreaded than desired, and the wall is made wide enough between the windows to bear the roof, and so left. In fact, the simplest expression of the difference in the systems is, that a northern apse is a southern one with its inter-fenestral piers set edgeways. Thus, a, Fig. 42, is the general idea of the southern apse; take it to pieces, and set all its piers edgeways, as at b, and you have the northern one. You gain much light for the interior, but you cut the exterior to pieces, and instead of a bold rounded or polygonal surface, ready for any kind of

¹ [See, for instance, Pugin’s Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture, Lecture i.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]