is a necessary but invisible means to an artistic end and is concealed behind painted or stucco ornaments. In the Gothic, structure is not concealed (Von Simson 4-5).
The Gothic architects freed themselves from the Romanesque stylish dependence on weight and mass. For instance, the clerestory walls of Notre Dame are only two feet thick (Anderson 57-58). The rebuilding of Notre Dame began in 1163 and would set the model for the great gothic church:
In scale, height, and the grandeur of its dispositions, Notre-Dame represented an advance into a new order of magnitude on the part of patrons and architects . . . Notre-Dame is the architectural counterpart of the stadium or university of Paris but, as an all-embracing symbol of the age, it encompasses infinitely more than all the treatises on God, Man, and Nature written within sight of its flying buttresses and towers (Anderson 66).
The transept of Notre Dame was enlarged in the period 1245-1250. the end walls of both the north and sout
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