Ely Cathedral and the beauty of progress.
And a note about paid subscriptions.
Before we get started on Ely Cathedral, a note about reaching one year of paid subscriptions.
This month marks one year of paid subscriptions on The Common Reader. I never imagined there would be hundreds of you!
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Mostly what I aim to do is provoke you. Not with brash, attention-seeking provocation, but in the Emerson manner, who said,
Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or reject.
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In the last year, paid subscribers have read nineteenth century literature and learned “How to Read Literature” more closely and critically. This year we’re reading Shakespeare, continuing with “How to Read Literature”, and I’ll be doing more non-fiction reviews, like this one about David Brooks’ new book. I also plan to write more about modern fiction. And I’ll continue with pieces about talent, like ‘How Mozart became Mozart’. (In fact, I’m currently a little obsessed with Mozart.)
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Progress and architecture
Over Christmas, I visited Ely Cathedral. The nave is Romanesque, built in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. It has thick pillars, and short, rounded arches. Unable to support great weights, these arches have to be repeated on three stories to hold up the nave. It is bulky style of architecture that, while impressive and capable of producing a fine cathedral, lacks grandeur and beauty. I was wondering why Ely was held in such high regard as I wandered along.
Then, at the end of the nave, the architecture jumps forwards two hundred years, thanks to a rebuild necessitated by the collapse of the old tower. Suddenly, thirteenth and fourteenth century Gothic arches appear, tall and pointed. Romanesque arches bear their weight down directly onto the walls, necessitating thick supporting pillars. The pointed Gothic arches, though, enable thin stone ribs of the arches to criss-cross over the roof and disperse the weight outwards first, allowing for taller, thinner pillars. Hence the forest like aspect of many of the great Gothic cathedrals. Add in flying buttresses outside and amazing new things become possible.
In the middle of Ely Cathedral, you can see all of this intersecting. The transepts have Romanesque walls juxtaposed to Decorated Gothic ceilings, and the tower between them rises high on pointed arches. In the Lady Chapel, you see the beauty of pure Gothic, capable of so much more delicacy. The Lady Chapel is full of elaborate decoration and wonderful nodding ogees, slightly marred by the discordant, unattractive modern altar and Virgin. Pointed arches and rib vaults make larger windows possible too, as you no longer needed so much heavy wall space to support the roof. It is, like the Chapter House at Westminster, one of those rooms that feels set apart from the rest, a truly quiet place.
Walking through Ely Cathedral is like walking through time. You can see, very literally, the way that huge artistic progress is enabled by engineering improvements. With the more effective supporting of pointed arches, Gothic architecture flourished as one of the high points of Western architecture.
Great way to learn about the transition in architecture. For me, the pictures were essential to my understanding.
I'm lucky enough to live in Ely, we're so lucky. Looking forward to talking about Shakespeare on Sunday, I'm finding it amusing using Google Bard to understand the great man's works.