This is a gothic cathedral, now you may be wondering why I am bringing this up when I am trying to give you the answers to what truly is art. The answer is already in front of you, this is in fact art allow me to explain in the text below to cite out the point.

In this image the constructors were looking for a way to build the cathedral during the Middle Ages, and one constant issue they ran into was the vault and arches.

When constructing them the supports weren’t strong enough or weren’t enough for the initial support of the buildings design and some had carved designs onto them to represent the lord of heaven as this was essentially the church at the time.

So, with every design made, came a new way of how it looked from the barrel to the groin, the rib, and finally ending on the fan. Remember the arches I mentioned earlier, well arches didn’t have a support being separate as single arches to hold the buttress, so they improvised and combined two arches to be touching one another where they are able to hold the weight surrounding them without any changes to their design like the vault.