If the student desire a clear notion of the nature and the appearance of Gothic rib-vaulting he may study Plate XXVI, in which the structure can be seen better than in the high vaults of a cathedral. Each rib is a part of an independent arch of stone, perhaps a foot wide and twenty inches or two feet deep. The arch-solids (voussoirs) are very carefully cut, and the arch built with all its company of corresponding arches to meet at top, midway, in a boss of cut stone. This done, the triangular spaces are easy enough to build with smaller and rougher stones, and the haunches are loaded outside and above with still ruder masonry.
The style was developed in that tract of country which lies between the Loire on the south, the Somme on the north, the Meuse on the east, and, on the west, a line drawn north and south through the cities of Caen and Angers--a district about one hundred and thirty by two hundred and fifty miles, equal to England and Wales south of the Trent and the Mersey, or, say, the State of Pennsylvania. The style was never quite at its best except in what is now France, though the boundaries of the district above named were soon overpassed by the perfected Gothic. The most nearly French, and therefore most normal and faultless, examples out of France are those of the Rhine and of northern Spain where French master-masons seem to have worked. The Gothic, beginning as early as 1290 in England, is of extreme beauty in a simple, quasi-domestic, less grand and less perfectly developed way than the French. The Gothic of Germany and the Austrian dominions differed from the normal type in being somewhat fantastical and irregular, but still more in a lack of a thoroughly intelligent proportion of the parts. The so-called Gothic of Italy is never admirable as a style except in a few Cistercian monastic churches: and the magnificent cathedrals such as Orvieto, Siena, Monreale, and Florence are rightly beloved indeed for their magnificent combination of the decorative arts of form and color--their mosaics, their delicate sculptures in marble, their wrought and highly developed porches, their superb wall-tombs--but are of minor architectural importance from the very fact of their complete lack of constructional significance.