Gothic architecture Totally Explained

Everything about Gothic Architecture totally explained

Gothic architecture is a style of architecture which flourished during the high and late medieval period. It evolved from Romanesque architecture and was succeeded by Renaissance architecture.
   Originating in 12th-century France and lasting into the 16th century, Gothic architecture was known during the period as "the French Style", with the term Gothic first appearing during the latter part of the Renaissance as a stylistic insult. Its characteristic features include the pointed arch, the ribbed vault and the flying buttress.
   Gothic architecture is most familiar as the architecture of many of the great cathedrals, abbeys and parish churches of Europe. It is also the architecture of many castles, palaces, town halls, guild halls, universities, and to a less prominent extent, private dwellings.
   It is in the great churches and cathedrals and in a number of civic buildings that the Gothic style was expressed most powerfully, its characteristics lending themselves to appeal to the emotions. A great number of ecclesiastical buildings remain from this period, of which even the smallest are often structures of architectural distinction while many of the larger churches are considered priceless works of art and are listed with UNESCO as World Heritage Sites. For this reason a study of Gothic architecture is largely a study of cathedrals and churches.
   A series of Gothic revivals began in mid-18th century England, spread through 19th-century Europe and continued, largely for ecclesiastical and university structures, into the 20th century.

The term "Gothic"

   The term "Gothic", when applied to architecture, has nothing to do with the historical Goths. It was a pejorative term that came to be used as early as the 1530s by Giorgio Vasari to describe culture that was considered rude and barbaric. At the time in which Vasari was writing, Italy had experienced a century of building in the Classical architectural vocabulary revived in the Renaissance and seen as the finite evidence of a new Golden Age of learning and refinement.
   The Renaissance had then overtaken Europe, overturning a system of culture that, prior to the advent of printing, was almost entirely focused on the Church and was perceived, in retrospect, as a period of ignorance and superstition. Hence, François Rabelais, also of the 16th century, imagines an inscription over the door of his Utopian Abbey of Thélème, "Here enter no hypocrites, bigots..." slipping in a slighting reference to "Gotz" and "Ostrogotz."
   In English 17th-century usage, "Goth" was an equivalent of "vandal", a savage despoiler with a Germanic heritage and so came to be applied to the architectural styles of northern Europe from before the revival of classical types of architecture.
   According to a 19th-century correspondent in the London Journal Notes and Queries:

There can be no doubt that the term 'Gothic' as applied to pointed styles of ecclesiastical architecture was used at first contemptuously, and in derision, by those who were ambitious to imitate and revive the Grecian orders of architecture, after the revival of classical literature. Authorities such as Christopher Wren lent their aid in deprecating the old mediæval style, which they termed Gothic, as synonymous with every thing that was barbarous and rude.

On 21 July 1710, the Académie d'Architecture met in Paris, and among the subjects they discussed, the assembled company noted the new fashions of bowed and cusped arches on chimneypieces being employed "to finish the top of their openings. The Company disapproved of several of these new manners, which are defective and which belong for the most part to the Gothic."

Influences

Regional

At the end of the 12th century Europe was divided into a multitude of city-states and kingdoms. The area encompassing modern Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Austria, eastern France and much of northern Italy, excluding Venice, was nominally under the authority of the Holy Roman Empire, but local rulers exercised considerable autonomy. France, Spain and Sicily were independent kingdoms, as was England, whose Plantagenet kings ruled large domains in France. Norway came under the influence of England, while the other Scandinavian countries and Poland were influenced by Germany.
Throughout Europe at this time there was a rapid growth in trade and an associated growth in towns.

Religious

The early Medieval periods had seen a rapid growth in monasticism, with several different orders being prevalent and spreading their influence widely. Foremost were the Benedictines whose great abbey churches vastly outnumbered any others in England. Part of their influence was that they tended to build within towns, unlike the Cistercians whose ruined abbeys are seen in the remote countryside. The Cluniac and Cistercian Orders were prevalent in France, the great monastery at Cluny having established a formula for a well planned monastic site which was then to influence all subsequent monastic building for many centuries.
In the 13th century St. Francis of Assisi established the Franciscans, or so-called "Grey Friars", a mendicant order. Its off-shoot, the Dominicans, founded by St. Dominic in Toulouse and Bologna, were particularly influential in the building of Italy's Gothic churches.

Architectural

Gothic architecture grew out of the previous architectural genre, Romanesque. For the most part, there wasn't a clean break, as there was later to be in Renaissance Florence with the sudden revival of the Classical style by Brunelleschi in the early 15th century.

Romanesque tradition

   Romanesque architecture, or Norman architecture as it's generally termed in England because of its association with the Norman invasion, had already established the basic architectural forms and units that were to remain in slow evolution throughout the Medieval period. The basic structure of the cathedral church, the parish church, the monastery, the castle, the palace, the great hall and the gatehouse were all established. Ribbed vaults, buttresses, clustered columns, ambulatories, wheel windows, spires and richly carved door tympanums were already features of ecclesiastical architecture.
   The widespread introduction of a single feature was to bring about the stylistic change that separates Gothic from Romanesque, and broke the tradition of massive masonry and solid walls penetrated by small openings, replacing it with a style where light appears to triumph over substance. The feature that brought the change is the pointed arch. With its use came the development of many other architectural devices, previously put to the test in scattered buildings and then called into service to meet the structural, aesthetic and ideological needs of the new style. These include the flying buttresses, pinnacles and traceried windows which typify Gothic ecclesiastical architecture.
   Concurrent with its introduction and early use as a stylistic feature in French churches, it's believed that the pointed arch evolved naturally in Western Europe as a structural solution to a purely technical problem. (See below: Pointed arch, Origins)

Abbot Suger

Abbot Suger, friend and confidante of the French Kings, Louis VI and Louis VII, decided in about 1137, to rebuild the great Church of Saint-Denis, attached to an abbey which was also a royal residence.
   Suger began with the West front, reconstructing the original Carolingian facade with its single door. He designed the façade of Saint-Denis to be an echo of the Roman Arch of Constantine with its three-part division and three large portals to ease the problem of congestion. The rose window is the earliest-known example above the West portal in France.
   At the completion of the west front in 1140, Abbot Suger moved on to the reconstruction of the eastern end, leaving the Carolingian nave in use. He designed a choir (chancel) that would be suffused with light. To achieve his aims his architects drew on the several new features which evolved or been introduced to Romanesque architecture, the pointed arch, the ribbed vault, the ambulatory with radiating chapels, the clustered columns supporting ribs springing in different directions and the flying buttresses which enabled the insertion of large clerestory windows.
   The new structure was finished and dedicated on June 11, 1144, in the presence of the King. The Abbey of Saint-Denis thus became the prototype for further building in the royal domain of northern France. It is often cited as the first building in the Gothic style. A hundred years later, the old nave of Saint-Denis was rebuilt in the Gothic style, gaining, in its transepts, two spectacular rose windows.
   Through the rule of the Angevin dynasty, the style was introduced to England and spread throughout France, the Low Countries, Germany, Spain and northern of Italy and Sicily. slightly exceeding that of Lincoln Cathedral, the tallest which was actually completed during the medieval period, at 527 feet (160 m).

Vertical emphasis

The pointed arch lends itself to a suggestion of height. This appearance is characteristically further enhanced by both the architectural features and the decoration of the building.
The Equilateral Arch lends itself to filling with tracery of simple equilateral, circular and semi-circular forms. The type of tracery that evolved to fill these spaces is known in England as Geometric Decorated Gothic and can be seen to splendid effect at many English and French Cathedrals, notably Lincoln and Notre Dame in Paris. Windows of complex design and of three or more lights or vertical sections, are often designed by overlapping two or more equilateral arches. and sacred history from the Old and New Testaments and Lives of the Saints, as well as reference to the eternal in the Last Judgment and Coronation of the Virgin. The decorative schemes usually incorporated Biblical stories, emphasizing visual typological allegories between Old Testament prophecy and the New Testament. The west front generally follows the French formula, but the towers are very much taller, and if complete, are surmounted by enormous openwork spires that are a regional feature. Because of the size of the towers, the section of the facade that's between them may appear narrow and compressed. The eastern end follows the French form. The distinctive character of the interior of German Gothic cathedrals is their breadth and openness. This is the case even when, as at Cologne, they've been modelled upon a French cathedral. German cathedrals, like the French, tend not to have strongly projecting transepts. There are also many hallenkirke without clerestorey windows. Other cities with a concentration of secular Gothic include Bruges and Sienna. Most surviving small secular buildings are relatively plain and straightforward; most windows are flat-topped with mullions, with pointed arches and vaulted ceilings often only found at a few focal points. The country-houses of the nobility were slow to abandon the appearance of being a castle, even in parts of Europe, like England, where defence had ceased to be a real concern. The living and working parts of many monastic buildings survive, for example at Mont Saint-Michel.
There are many excellent examples of secular Gothic buildings in brick, notably Malbork, a castle of the Teutonic Knights in Poland. Brick Gothic buildings were associated with the Hanseatic League and the Teutonic Knights. There are over one hundred brick Gothic castles in northern Poland, Baltic states, and western Russia, and many smaller buildings.

Gothic survival and revival

In 1663 at the Archbishop of Canterbury's residence, Lambeth Palace, a Gothic hammerbeam roof was built to replace that destroyed when the building was sacked during the English Civil War. Also in the late 17th century, some discrete Gothic details appeared on new construction at Oxford and Cambridge, notably on Tom Tower at Christ Church, Oxford, by Christopher Wren. It isn't easy to decide whether these instances were Gothic survival or early appearances of Gothic revival.
In England in the mid-18th century, the Gothic style was more widely revived, first as a decorative, whimsical alternative to Rococo that's still conventionally termed 'Gothick', of which Horace Walpole's Twickenham villa "Strawberry Hill" is the familiar example.

19th and 20th century Gothic Revival

   Partly in response to a philosophy propounded by the Oxford Movement and others in England, from about 1830 Gothic became the preferred style for ecclesiastical, civic and institutional architecture, resulting in a Gothic revival, sometimes termed Victorian Gothic or Neo-Gothic. The Houses of Parliament in London are an example of this Gothic revival style, designed by Sir Charles Barry with interiors by a major exponent of the early Gothic Revival, Augustus Welby Pugin. Neo-Gothic was often applied to university buildings such as the main building of the University of Glasgow designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott. Gothic was also widely used in upper and middle-class housing, and Gothic details often appear even in working-class housing, especially if subsidised by philanthropy.
    In France, simultaneously, the towering figure of the Gothic Revival was Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, who outdid historical Gothic constructions to create a Gothic as it ought to have been, notably at the fortified city of Carcassonne in the south of France and in some richly fortified keeps for industrial magnates. Viollet-le-Duc compiled and coordinated an Encyclopédie médiévale that was a rich repertory his contemporaries mined for architectural details. He effected vigorous restoration of crumbling detail of French cathedrals, including the Abbey of Saint-Denis and famously at Notre Dame, where many of whose most "Gothic" gargoyles are Viollet-le-Duc's. He taught a generation of reform-Gothic designers and showed how to apply Gothic style to modern structural materials, especially cast iron.
   In Germany, the great cathedrals of Cologne and Ulm, left unfinished for 600 years, were brought to completion, while in Italy, Florence Cathedral finally received its polychrome Gothic facade. New churches in the Gothic style were created all over the world, including Japan, Thailand, India, Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii and South Africa.
   As in Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand utilised Neo-Gothic for the building of universities, a fine example being Sydney University by Edmund Blacket. In Canada, the Canadian Parliament Buildings in Ottawa designed by Thomas Fuller and Chilion Jones with its huge centrally-placed tower draws influence from Flemish Gothic buildings.
   Although falling out of favour for domestic and civic use, Gothic for churches and universities continued into the 20th century with buildings such as Liverpool Cathedral and the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, New York. The Gothic style was also applied to iron-framed city skyscapers such as Cass Gilbert's Woolworth Building and Raymond Hood's Tribune Tower. Post-Modernism in the late 20th and early 21st centuries has seen some revival of Gothic forms in individual buildings, such as the Gare do Oriente in Lisbon, Portugal.

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