Castle and Cathedral
The purest expression of Race in mankind is the house. It predates all forms of expression and communication languages and arrives unique on every landscape from the hills of France to the deserts of Persia. It is a natural impulse, like a bee building a hive, that when unsatisfied with roaming, man will build a shell to inhabit.
Predating language, it predates any art history as well. Houses, particularly peasant homes, are derived from a feeling of growth; they are passed down from parent to child and wish to exist outside the trends and directions of history, so to systematize the house as a stage in an art development would be a mistake. Painting, sculpture, and architecture, as differentiated arts, can and will be plastered over the house inspiring such a mistake, but the items of the home, the axe in a lumber yard, the bow or gun of a hunter, the animals of a farmer, these characterize a certain way of living. Overtop these land-born necessities that characterize the race of the inhabitant comes the language of the artist to coat everything in a taste, but strip the aesthetics all away and you’ll find the same house now as then a thousand years ago so long as the race is there to pass the torch generation to generation; the home belongs to the totem side, and the ornamentation to the taboo side.
As has been said before as we studied cities, peasant homes, like the small villages, disconnected from the history and culture of the towns and cities, move towards the eternal and cyclical. The round huts of ancient Italy still existed in the countryside during the height of the Augustan period, the fundamentals of the Saxon home found itself contemporary to the Renaissance, the Baroque and late into the 1800s, and across Western Europe, the quaintness of the cottage home invokes something as ancient as the forests of Germania. The same can really be said of furniture, perhaps not today where furniture, like our homes and everything else, is mass manufactured according to instruction sheets, but furniture would be no different from the axe head in the lifelong purpose it provides, and perhaps a visit to your grandparents, where their homes have remained furnished the same as long as you can remember, expresses this fact.
Whilst the home represents the race side in its most simple and eternal form, the arrival of higher culture brings about two new structural forms that are much grander in nature, towering over the peasant villages where they are found and embody time and space, fact and truth, blood, and intellect respectively: this is the castle and the cathedral. Every higher culture has a certain dynamic between these two forms, on the one side political and on the other religious. If we examine the castle, we understand that the point of a fortress is to maximise its defensive capacity over the land. It is a honed development of all the tactics that will succeed and refined to a necessity in the name of survival. The motte and bailey is itself a microcosm of its relation to ornamentation: the motte is the most well-defended area of a fortress, for when you are under attack, whilst the bailey is where one comes out when it is safe to do so; aesthetics and sentimentalities are painted over the thick walls as a second thought but the heart remains the same. The Cathedral, or for other cultures the temple, however, is all art. It is delicate and displays the highest symbolism of the culture. God is but the symbol for truth and truths are communicated via symbols, thus light flows through the skeletal framed windows of Sainte-Chapelle and illuminates all forms of Faustian expression, and Athena sits sternly in the dark of the Parthenon as her priestesses deliver rituals.
In the Cathedral, the stone itself has form, but in the Castle, it is the men who operate there that bring about the form; on one part is the whole floating web of interconnected symbols, perfect without man’s interference as art and philosophy and science, the other is the customs, manners, and honour of men living towards a goal. It is the Priest preaching the 2000 years perfect word of God, and the Kshatriya and Knight fighting for the Lord of the land.
Even within the early cities, where the small peasant homes have gained new facades, there are still “cult-buildings” which push the art history forward. And the castles become forts and palaces and the knights become regiment leaders of refined armies, they maintain the same stance and conduct, but the style they carry in the cloaks on their backs and the uniforms they take to battle, it’s the ornamental side. It is not theirs but only theirs to carry, to wear like an English peasant home’s Tudor façade. Cathedrals will shift from Gothic to Renaissance, embroiling themselves in every crevasse with gold and ceiling fresco and sculpture, thus rendering their art excessive, and detached from the focus of the church. Style then becomes an arbitrary taste, before ending as a craft art, where I will cite my previous post on Late-Stage Art Forms. The whole history of art style and ornamentation will come to pass, and the peasant home will remain the same, returning to the landscape with its simple lumber axe and cattle providing man with everything he needs.