Rheims Cathedral is the Mecca of the student of mediaeval sculpture.  The array of statues on the exterior is amazing, and a walk around the great structure reveals unexpected riches in corbels, gargoyles, and other grotesques, hidden at all heights, each a veritable work of art, repaying the closest study, and inviting the enthusiast to undue extravagance at a shop in the vicinity, which advertises naively, that it is an “Artistical Photograph Laboratory.”

On the door of St. Germain l’Auxerrois in Paris, there is a portrait statue of St. Genevieve, holding a lighted candle, while “the devil in little” sits on her shoulder, exerting himself to blow it out!  It is quite a droll conceit of the thirteenth century.

Of the leaf forms in Gothic sculpture, three styles are enough to generalize about.  The early work usually represented springlike leaves, clinging, half-developed, and buds.  Later, a more luxuriant foliage was attempted:  the leaves and stalks were twisted, and the style was more like that actually seen in nature.  Then came an overblown period, when the leaves were positively detached, and the style was lost.  The foliage was no longer integral, but was applied.

There is little of the personal element to be exploited in dealing with the sculptors in the Middle Ages.  Until the days of the Renaissance individual artists were scarcely recognized; master masons employed “Imagers” as casually as we would employ brick-layers or plasterers; and no matter how brilliant the work, it was all included in the general term “building.”

The first piece of signed sculpture in France is a tympanum in the south transept at Paris, representing the Stoning of Stephen.  It is by Jean de Chelles, in 1257.  St. Louis of France was a patron of arts, and took much interest in his sculptors.  There were two Jean de Montereau, who carved sacred subjects in quite an extraordinary way.  Jean de Soignoles, in 1359, was designated as “Macon et Ymageur.”  One of the chief “imageurs,” as they were called, was Jacques Haag, who flourished in the latter half of the fifteenth century, in Amiens.  This artist was imprisoned for sweating coin, but in 1481 the king pardoned him.  He executed large statues for the city gates, of St. Michael and St. Firmin, in 1464 and 1489.  There was a sculptor in Paris in the fourteenth century, one Hennequin de Liege, who made several tombs in black and white marble, among them that of Blanche de France, and the effigy of Queen Philippa at Westminster.

It was customary both in France and England to use colour on Gothic architecture.  It is curious to realize that the facade of Notre Dame in Paris was originally a great colour scheme.  A literary relic, the “Voyage of an Armenian Bishop,” named Martyr, in the year 1490, alludes to the beauty of this cathedral of Paris, as being ablaze with gold and colour.