Glossary · T
Tracery
The ornamental stone ribwork in the upper part of a Gothic window, or applied as panelling to walls.
See also: Plate tracery, Bar tracery, Mullion
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).
The fan vault: identical cones of tracery. Make each springer the foot of an inverted half-cone (a conoid) whose ribs all have the same curve and are cut across by horizontal rings; where the conoids stop, fill the centre with flat panels.
Where it appears in the book
In the chapters Vaults, Romanesque and Gothic, Enlightenment and Revival.
A feature of Gothic architecture.
Nearby in the glossary
Torii · Torus · Torus moulding · Trace italienne · Transept · Transom · Transverse arch · Treillage