Heart of Europe by Ralph Adams Cram

Long before the days of the Pisani in Italy, who were erroneously held to have been the restorers of the lost art of sculpture, France had initiated and developed three great schools, one of which at least reached greater heights even than the later schools of Italy, even than Donatello and Michael Angelo if you test this art by the established principles of the greatest sculpture the world has ever known -- that of Greece. These three were: The school of the south with Toulouse as a centre, the school of Burgundy, or Vezelay, and the school of the Île de France.

The first is of the late eleventh century, the second of the twelfth, the third of the latter part of this century and the first half of the thirteenth. The earlier work south of the Loire is part Roman, part Byzantine, and it occasionally reaches, as at Moissac, a level of extraordinary decorative value, with, in its bas reliefs, a feeling for rhythmical line and space composition that are quite astounding. In Burgundy, combined with great rudeness and an almost savage directness, there is far greater humanism, with much action and an unusual amount of character differentiation; much of the best work of this school is to be found at Autun and Vezelay. With the middle years of the twelfth century the sculpture of the Île de France seems suddenly to burst forth at St. Denis and Chartres like some miraculous happening. It was not this, but the result of many years of cumulative and progressive effort; but all that went before has perished, while fortunately some examples at St. Denis and a supreme collection at Chartres remain to give the impression of an unwonted and unheralded event. This sculpture of Chartres is more superbly architectural, more intimately a part of the whole artistic scheme than any other on record; all is formal, conventionalised; the figures are erect, rigid, immensely elongated; the multiplied fine lines and delicate zigzags of the drapery, the simple figure-modelling, the immobile, dispassionate faces, all show a most curious self-abnegation on the part of the sculptor and a profound conviction that both he and his art are only part of a greater whole, for they are purely architectural and indeed nothing but the architectural spirit expressing itself through an allied artistic mode. They are startlingly akin to archaic Greek work and, as Professor Moore has said of the sculpture from Delos: "One of these ancient Greek statues might, if wrought in French limestone and slightly modified in outline, stand in the west portal of Chartres without apparent lack of keeping."