A Treatise on the Rise and Progress of Decorated Window Tracery in England Volume 2; Illustrated with Ninety-Seven Woodcuts and Six Engravings on Steel (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1849 Excerpt: ...woodcuts, which represent the plans of the Mullions and Tracery-bars of the Early Geometrical Window of Lincoln (No. 11), the Late Geometrical Window of Guisborough (No. 17), In the last mentioned it will be seen that the section of the Mouldings above and below the capitals is the same. It does not follow that Windows, the design of whose Tracery is elaborate, exhibit a corresponding richness in their Mouldings: it frequently happens, on the contrary, that the Window-heads of the most intricate pattern exhibit a Window-arch of the most simple profile. Rich as are the Mouldings in some of the earlier Curvilinear Windows, it cannot be denied that a certain heaviness and inelegance is observable in the details of the latter part of this Period, which contrast unfavourably with the effective combinations in the Mouldings of the preceding Period. There is little doubt, in fact, that the art of moulding stonework, which had been constantly advancing for three centuries, reached its perfection at the commencement of the fourteenth century; then as gradually declined through that and the two following centuries, and became finally extinct, so far as originality of design was concerned, in the seventeenth. PART II. CHRONOLOGICAL ACCOUNT OF THE PRINCIPAL TRACERIED WINDOWS IN ENGLAND. CHAPTER I. THE GEOMETRICAL PERIOD. SECTION I. EARLY QKOMETRICAL. From the preceding remarks it will be perceived that it is proposed to apply the term Geometrical to a large number of Windows which have hitherto been described and considered as Early English; but which contain Tracery, in the sense in which that term is explained in the fourth chapter of Part I. The advantage resulting from this division of our earliest Pointed Windows, and the application of the term Tracery, as now so...