Gothic history through Art and Architecture

Gothic Art is concerned with the painting, sculpture, and architecture

characteristics that flourished in western and central Europe during the
Middle Ages

Gothic art evolved from Romanesque art and lasted from the mid-12th
century to as late as the end of the 16th century in some areas. The term
Gothic was coined by classicizing Italian writers of the Renaissance, who attributed the invention (and what to
them was the non-classical ugliness) of medieval architecture to the barbarian Gothic tribes that had destroyed
the Roman Empire and its classical culture in the 5th century Ad. The term retained its derogatory overtones
until the 19th century, at which time a positive critical revaluation of Gothic architecture took place. Although
modern scholars have long realized that Gothic art has nothing in truth to do with the Goths, the term Gothic
remains a standard one in the study of art history.

Architecture was the most important and original art form during the Gothic period. The principal structural
characteristics of Gothic architecture arose out of medieval masons' efforts to solve the problems associated
with supporting heavy masonry ceiling vaults over wide spans. The problem was that the heavy stonework of
the traditional arched barrel vault and the groin vault exerted a tremendous downward and outward pressure
that tended to push the walls upon which the vault rested outward, thus collapsing them. A building's vertical
supporting walls thus had to be made extremely thick and heavy in order to contain the barrel vault's outward
thrust.

Three successive phases of Gothic architecture can be distinguished: Early, High, and Late Gothic.

Early Gothic.

This first phase lasted from the Gothic style's inception in 1120-50 to about 1200.
The combination of all the aforementioned structural elements into a coherent style
first occurred in the Île-de-France (the region around Paris), where prosperous urban
populations had sufficient wealth to build the great cathedrals that epitomize the Gothic
style. The earliest surviving Gothic building was the abbey of Saint-Denis in Paris,
begun in about 1140. Structures with similarly precise vaulting and chains of windows
along the perimeter were soon begun with Notre-Dame de Paris (begun 1163) and Laon
Cathedral (begun 1165).

High Gothic.

During the period from about 1250 to 1300 European art was dominated for the first time by the art and
architecture of France. By about 1220-30 it must have been clear that engineering expertise had pushed
building sizes to limits beyond which it was unsafe to go. The last of these gigantic buildings, Beauvais
cathedral, had a disastrous history, which included the collapse of its vaults, and it was never completed. In
about 1230 architects became less interested in size and more interested in decoration. The earliest moves in
this direction were at Amiens cathedral, where the choir triforium and clerestory were begun after 1236.

Another typical feature of high gothic is the thinning of vertical supporting members, the enlargement of
windows, and the combination of the triforium gallery and the clerestory until walls are largely undifferentiated
screens of tracery, mullions (vertical bars of tracery dividing windows into sections), and glass. Stained glass--
formerly deeply colored--became lighter in color to increase the visibility of tracery silhouettes and to let more
light into the interior. The most notable examples of the Rayonnant style are the cathedrals of Reims, Amiens,
Bourges, Chartres, and Beauvais.
Sculpture.

Gothic sculpture was closely tied to architecture, since it was used primarily to decorate
the exteriors of cathedrals and other religious buildings. The earliest Gothic sculptures
were stone figures of saints and the Holy Family used to decorate the doorways, or
portals, of cathedrals in France and elsewhere. The sculptures on the Royal Portal of
Chartres Cathedral (c. 1145-55) were little changed from their Roman-esque
predecessors in their stiff, straight, simple, elongated, and hieratic forms. But during the
later 12th and the early 13th centuries sculptures became more relaxed and naturalistic
in treatment, a trend that culminated in the sculptural decorations of the Reims
Cathedral (c. 1240). These figures, while retaining the dignity and monumentality of their
predecessors, have individualized faces and figures, as well as full, flowing draperies
and natural poses and gestures, and they display a classical poise that suggests an awareness of antique
Roman models on the part of their creators. Early Gothic masons also began to observe such natural forms as
plants more closely, as is evident in the realistically carven clusters of leaves that adorn the capitals of
columns.

Painting.

Gothic painting followed the same stylistic evolution as did sculpture; from stiff, simple, hieratic forms toward
more relaxed and natural ones. Its scale grew large only in the early 14th century, when it began to be used in
decorating the retable (ornamental panel behind an altar). Such paintings usually featured scenes and figures
from the New Testament, particularly of the Passion of Christ and the Virgin Mary. These paintings display an
emphasis on flowing, curving lines, minute detail, and refined decoration, and gold was often applied to the
panel as background color. Compositions became more complex as time went on, and painters began to seek
means of depicting spatial depth in their pictures, a search that eventually led to the
mastery of perspective in the early years of the Italian Renaissance. In late Gothic
painting of the 14th and 15th centuries secular subjects such as hunting scenes,
chivalric themes, and depictions of historical events also appeared. Both religious and
secular subjects were depicted in manuscript illuminations--i.e., the pictorial
embellishment of handwritten books. This was a major form of artistic production
during the Gothic period and reached its peak in France during the 14th century. The
calendar illustrations in the Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry (c. 1416) by the
Limburg brothers, who worked at the court of Jean de France, duc de Berry, are
perhaps the most eloquent statements of the International Gothic style as well as the
best known of all manuscript illuminations

Manuscript illumination was superseded by printed illustrations in the second half of

the 15th century. Panel and wall painting evolved gradually into the Renaissance style
in Italy during the 14th and early 15th centuries but retained many more of its Gothic
characteristics until the late 15th and early 16th centuries in Germany, Flanders, and
elsewhere in Northern Europe.

Late Gothic

During the 15th century much of the most elaborate architectural experiment took place in southern Germany
and Austria. German masons specialized in vault designs; and, in order to get the largest possible expanse of
ceiling space, they built mainly hall churches (a type that had been popular throughout the 14th century).
Important hall churches exist at Landshut ( St. Martin 's and the Spitalkirche, c. 1400), and Munich ( Church of
Our Lady , 1468-88). The vault patterns are created out of predominantly straight lines. Toward the end of the
15th century, however, this kind of design gave way to curvilinear patterns set in two distinct layers. The new
style developed particularly in the eastern areas of Europe : at Annaberg (St. Anne's, begun 1499) and
Kuttenberg (St. Barbara's, 1512).Such virtuosity had no rival elsewhere in Europe . Nevertheless, other areas
developed distinctive characteristics. The Perpendicular style is a phase of late Gothic unique to England . Its
characteristic feature is the fan vault, which seems to have begun as an interesting extension of the Rayonnant
idea in the cloisters of Gloucester cathedral (begun 1337), where tracery panels were inserted into the vault ().
Another major monument is the nave of Canterbury cathedral, which was begun in the late 1370s, but the style
continued to evolve, the application of tracery panels tending to become denser. St. George's Chapel, Windsor
(c. 1475-1500), is an interesting prelude to the ornateness of Henry VII's Chapel, Westminster Abbey. Some of
the best late Gothic achievements are bell towers, such as the crossing tower of Canterbury cathedral (c.
1500).In France the local style of late Gothic is usually called Flamboyant, from the flame-like shapes often
assumed by the tracery. The style did not significantly increase the range of architectural opportunities. Late
Gothic vaults, for instance, are not normally very elaborate (one of the exceptions is Saint-Pierre in Caen
[1518-45], which has pendant bosses).

The End of Gothic

The change from late Gothic to Renaissance was superficially far less
cataclysmic than the change from Roman-esque to Gothic. In the
figurative arts, it was not the great shift from symbolism to realistic
representation but a change from one sort of realism to another.

Architecturally, as well, the initial changes involved decorative material.

For this reason, the early stages of Renaissance art outside Italy are hard
to disentangle from late Gothic. In fact, throughout Europe the "Italian
Renaissance" meant, for artists between about 1500 and 1530, the
embellishment of an already rich decorative repertoire with shapes,
motifs, and figures adapted from another standard of taste. The history of
the northern artistic Renaissance is in part the story of the process by
which artists gradually realized that classicism represented another
canon of taste and treated it accordingly.

Neroccio de Landi, Italian, Portrait of a Lady , Tempera on Wood Panel,

1490 C.E.

But it is possible to suggest a more profound character to the change.

Late Gothic has a peculiar aura of finality about it. From about 1470 to 1520, one gets the impression that the
combination of decorative richness and realistic detail was being worked virtually to death.

The use of Renaissance forms was certainly encouraged, however, by the general admiration for classical
antiquity. They had a claim to "rightness" that led ultimately to the abandonment of all Gothic forms as being
barbarous. This development belongs to the history of the Italian Renaissance. Through all the changes of
Roman-esque and Gothic, no body of critical literature appeared in which people tried to evaluate the art and
distinguish old from new, good from bad. The development of such a literature was part of the Renaissance
alone and, as such, was intimately related to the defense of Renaissance classical art. This meant that Gothic
art was left in an intellectually defenseless state. All the praise went to ancient classical art, most of the blame
to the art of the more recent past.