Eight
Just as the human soul has its hidden recesses, so the cathedral has its secret passages. They extend underground below the church and, taken all together, they form the crypt from the Greek, Kp rao, hidden . In this low, damp, cold place, the observer experiences a strange 26 G. J. Witkowski, L'Art profane ri 1'Eglise. France. Paris, Schemit, 1908, p. 382. feeling and one which imposes silence it is the feeling of power, combined with darkness. We are here in the abode of the dead, as in the...
Two
The cathedral was the hospitable refuge of all unfortunates. The sick, who came to Notre Dame in Paris to pray to God for relief from their sufferings, used to stay on till they were cured. They were allotted a chapel lit by six lamps near the second door and there they spent the night. There the doctors would give their consultations round the holy-water stoup at the very entrance to the basilica. It was there too that the Faculty of Medicine, which left the University in the thirteenth...
Seven
Varro, in his Antiquitates rerum humanorum, recalls the legend of Aeneas saving his father and his household gods from the flames of Troy and, after long wanderings, arriving at the fields of Laurentum,n the goal of his journey. He gives the following explanation Ex quo de Troja est egressus Aeneas, Veneris eum per diem 16 Convallaria polygonata, commonly called Solomon's Seal, owes its name to its stem, the section of which is starred like the magic sign attributed to the King of the...
Three
First of all it is necessary for me to say a word about the term Gothic as applied to French art, which imposed its rules on all the productions of the Middle Ages and whose influence extends from the twelfth to the fifteenth century. Some have claimed-wrongly-that it came from the Goths, the ancient Germanic people. Others alleged that the word, suggesting something barbarous, was bestowed in derision on a form of art, 1 Souffleurs 'puffers', vernacular word for alchemists, from the need to...