Identifier: brooklynmuseumqu46broouoft (find matches)
Title: Brooklyn Museum Quarterly
Year: 1916 (1910s)
Authors: Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences. Brooklyn museum quarterly
Subjects:
Publisher: Brooklyn
Contributing Library: Gerstein - University of Toronto
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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their clients, desire to make their workmore interesting and so far as they desire to be free fromthe set formulas which are sometimes wrongly supposed tobe the distinguishing feature of historic styles, it is evidentthat the knowledge of what was consciously done in medievalwork to avoid the appearance of monotonous formalism maybe of great service to them. Without even striving to copyany medieval form of refinement they may still work forresults in the same direction. It follows that the first practical value to modern archi-tects of the new point of view must be the opportunity tostudy the matter for themselves and to develop from thatstudy such independent initiative as their own temperamentmay prompt, inspired by the confidence that they are notviolating tradition in departing from mathematical andgeometrical symmetry, but that they are really faithful totradition. For if any one thing strikes the observer in thissubject more than another it is the infinite variety of modi- 227
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Fig. 5. Chichester Cathedral. South side of the nave. Showing the opticaleffects of an S-shaped curve in plan. Brooklyn Museum photograph, July, 1914.See notes on the illustrations at the close of the article. fication which ajDpears in the individual application of anygiven category of medieval refinement. We may next enquire what these categories are. In theItalian Romanesque, predetermined variations in the spacingof exterior arcading are quite frequent, especially wherePisan influence is found. Such variations are also commonin the Venetian palaces Mhich show Byzantine influence, as^Mr. Ruskin long since demonstrated. The cold and tediousformalism of modern Romanesque exterior arcading is veryobvious and may be instanced by St. Bartholomews in NewYork or the Yale College Chapel in New Haven. In interior constructive arcading the same predeter-mined variations are much more frequently found, ))oth inelevation and in plan. They are occasionally^ connected withschemes of arrangement

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