DECEMBER 2009 » book review

The Ethereal Geometry of Gothic Vaults

Heavenly Vaults From Romanesque to Gothic in European Architecture
by David Stephenson
Princeton Architectural Press, New York, NY; 2009
192 pp; hardcover; 125 color and 15 b&w images; $65
ISBN 978-1-56898-840-5

Reviewed by Clem Labine

Heavenly Vaults is a photographic tour de force conjured up by Dr. David Stephenson, associate professor at the School of Art, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia. In this new volume he focuses his camera – and our attention – on a single aspect of Europe’s great Romanesque and Gothic Cathedrals: the vaulting systems used to cover the soaring ceremonial spaces erected by master builders of the medieval through Renaissance periods.

With the eye of both an artist and an architectural historian, Stephenson dramatizes the architecturally sublime by providing straight-on views of the awe-inspiring vaulted ceilings of more than 80 great churches, cathedrals and basilicas. The author has created beautifully lit and highly detailed photographs that reveal Gothic vaulting with all its complex geometry, decorative detailing and ornamental painting in ways never seen before. He starts his visual taxonomy with two of the ancient Roman precedents that medieval builders could study: Hadrian’s coffered dome of the Pantheon, and the groin vaults of the Baths of Diocletian.

Roman builders, however, were able to use high-strength Pozzolana hydraulic mortars to create poured-concrete vaults as monolithic units (as in the Pantheon). But the secrets of Roman concrete had been lost to medieval masons, who had to use lower-strength, slow-setting lime mortars. So vaulting systems from the medieval period onward had to depend on stone ribs (arches) for basic structural support. Spaces between the ribs were filled with thin lighter-weight unit-masonry webbing, which made construction of these Gothic vaults an altogether tricky affair. But the master builders were artists as well as engineers, and over the years they devised countless ways to use the exposed ribs to create striking, abstract geometrical forms. The netlike quality of the ribbing also gave a visual lightness to the ceilings – making the viewer forget the hundreds of tons of masonry suspended directly overhead, and how many times vaults like these had collapsed while the Gothic builders were perfecting their art.

Numerous texts explore the building technology of the great European religious buildings, and Stephenson does not attempt to duplicate that material. Rather, he concentrates on the aesthetic effects produced by these architecturally complex vaulting systems, which his full-color photographs so brilliantly illuminate. The images give you the viewpoint you’d have if you were lying flat on the floor of say, Chartres, and looking straight up at the ceiling. The images are all large (9½ x 9½ in.), very sharp and rich with detail. The photos obviously required meticulous lighting set-ups to illuminate the usually poorly lit ceilings. As a result, readers of this book see the vaulted ceilings with greater clarity than any tourist would when standing in the same spaces.

Stephenson’s text provides a basic explanation of the evolution of Gothic vaults, from simple arched stone tunnels (barrel vaults), to quadripartite and sexpartite rib vaults, to intricate tierceron and lierne vaults with their decorative ribs, to complicated net, fan and ribless diamond vaults of the late Gothic period. Besides technical developments, no small part of the evolving complexity and beauty of the vault forms was the desire of the ancient builders – and their patrons – to engage in a “Can you top this?” competition with other cathedral builders. Although the competition was ostensibly motivated by a desire to glorify God in ever-more-magnificent ways, one has to suspect there was more than a bit of architectural ego involved also.

Besides the two Roman precedents already mentioned, the photographs start chronologically with the Basilica di San Miniato al Monte (1013-62) in Florence, and progress through Segovia Cathedral (1563-91), Segovia, Spain. The geographic scope includes churches from France, England, Germany, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Poland, Czech Republic and Belgium. Individual buildings documented include old favorites like Salisbury Cathedral, Chartres, Wells Cathedral, York Minster, Reims Cathedral, Amiens Cathedral, and Sainte-Chappelle – plus 73 other famous and less-famous religious buildings.

There are two limitations to this volume; one could have been easily remedied, the other perhaps not so easily. The biggest problem: Although there are five pages devoted to endnotes and a bibliography, the book has no index. So if you are trying to find an image of a particular cathedral, you must rifle through a lot of pages.

The other limitation is that the text describing each ceiling appears many pages away from the image. This back-and-forth format may have been unavoidable, given that each image takes up a full page. The editors mitigate this drawback by printing, on each of the text pages, postage-stamp images of the vaults being discussed, along with the corresponding page number where the full-size image can be found.

Not many architects today are called upon to design a Gothic cathedral. But there are many other reasons why a designer might wish to have this volume in his/her library. First, on a purely practical plane, the vast array of vault types delineated provide a primer on geometric forms and inspiration for patterns in both two and three dimensions. It also demonstrates how stonework can be made to appear light and airy through skillful design.

Beyond their practical value as design sources, however, the photographs inspire by showing the spiritual power that master builders were able to wring from simple stone and plaster. The seeming infinite variety, complexity and refinement of forms created within a single building type are a great testimonial to the inventiveness of the human mind. The medieval master builders embodied the ideal that practitioners of the new traditionalism keep alive today. The great cathedral designers never resorted to blind copying; rather they took the best ideas from previous generations and kept on improving and refining those precedents. And in so doing, they created works that we still marvel at today. TB

Clem Labine is the founder of Old House Journal, Traditional Building and Period Homes magazines. He has received numerous awards, including awards from The Preservation League of New York State, The Arthur Ross Award from the Institute of Classical Architecture & Classical America (ICA&CA) and The Harley J. McKee Award from the Association for Preservation Technology (APT). Labine was a founding board member of the ICA&CA. He served on the board until 2005 when he moved to Board Emeritus status. His blog can be found at www.traditional-building.com.

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