Note 40

See, for instance, the treatise convincingly interpreted by Kubler, loc. cit. (see Note 35), or the French expert Mignot’s violent and justified objections to the outrageous theory of his Milanese confreres according to which “archi spiguti non dant impulzam contrafortibus” (cf. now J. S. Ackerman, “‘Ars Sine Scientia Nihil Est’; Gothic Theory of Architecture at the Cathedral of Milan,” Art Bulletin, XXXI, 1949, pp. 84 ff.). As evidenced by the Milan texts (reprinted in Ackerman, loc. cit., pp. 108 ff.), the terms contrefort and arcboutant (“archi butanti”) were familiar even in Latin and Italian by the end of the fourteenth century, and both were used in a figurative sense as early as in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (Dictionnaire historique de la langue française publié par l’Académie Française, 111, Paris, 1888, pp. 575 ff.; E. Littré, Dictionnaire de la langue française, 1, Paris, 1863, p. 185; La Curne de la Palaye, Dictionnaire historique de l’ancienne langue française, IV, Paris and Niort, 1877, p. 227). The term bouterec (F. Godefroy, Lexique de l’ancien Français, Paris, 1901, p. 62) must have been in use before 1388 when “buttress” occurs in English, and estribo is constantly employed in the treatise interpreted by Kubler, loc. cit. (see Note 35)