Window tracery
A Gothic window four ways: plate tracery, geometric bar tracery, flowing curvilinear tracery and English Perpendicular panel tracery.
The rules it illustrates
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 styles Gothic.
In the chapters Romanesque and Gothic.
The terms it shows
Curvilinear tracery · Geometric tracery · Perpendicular tracery · Plate tracery · Tracery