Ralph Adams Cram
Published: 2017-12-11
Total Pages: 228
Get eBook
Excerpt from Farm Houses, Manor Houses, Minor Chateaux and Small Churches From the Eleventh to the Sixteenth Centuries in Normandy, Brittany and Other Parts of France From the first beginnings of the Middle Ages in the last quarter of the X century; the grand style in architecture develops side by side with the minor style, as, under the new social conditions, must have been the case. Great abbeys, cathedrals, castles, reveal themselves, growing ever more complex and gigantic, but art is no longer the possession of a favoured few, it is now the heritage of all, and for one great monument there are scores of little churches, minor priories, small castles, with somewhat later, town houses, chapels, farms, manors and Chateaux in ever-increasing numbers and infallible charm. To build up a philosophy of Medieval art and a science of Gothic architecture on the foundations of only such strue tures as the abbeys of Caen, the cathedrals of Chartres, Notre Dame, Rheims, Amiens, Beauvais, to the total ignoring of the work and the people as a whole, is absurd, for the art of Medievalism was essen tially a communal art and to a degree never approached before. It was not the product of a few highly trained specialists expressing their own idiosyncracies, but the spontaneous and instinctive art of a whole people, or rather of groups of people acting under a common impulse, in accordance with varying conditions, to a common end. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.