Glossary · B
Bar tracery
Tracery formed of slender moulded bars that continue the mullions into circles, foils and sub-arches, so that the window is mostly glass; introduced at Reims around 1211.
See also: Geometric tracery, Plate tracery
Rules that use the word
Bar tracery: windows drawn with compasses. Instead of cutting separate openings through a plate of wall, fill the whole window arch with glass and divide it by slender stone bars (mullions below, and circles, foils and sub-arches above) set out with compasses from the centres of the window’s own arches.
Plate, geometric, curvilinear, perpendicular. Date a Gothic window by its tracery: openings pierced through a plate (twelfth century); geometric bar tracery of circles and foils (thirteenth); flowing curvilinear tracery of ogees and daggers (fourteenth); and, in England, perpendicular panel tracery with mullions running straight up into the arch (late fourteenth to sixteenth).
Where it appears in the book
In the chapters Romanesque and Gothic.
A feature of Gothic architecture.
Nearby in the glossary
Axis · Baluster · Balustrade · Baptistery · Barchessa · Bargeboard · Barrel vault · Base