The Study of Gothic Architecture

IMPRINT DDD 30013 Publication Design Hannah Saxton Text used: Murray, S. (2019). The Study of Gothic Architecture. Rudolph, C. (Ed.). A companion to medieval art : Romanesque and gothic in northern europe (pp.598-610). Newark : John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. Retrieved from https://ebookcentral.proquest.com Typefaces used: Brokenscript OT Kepler Std Didot Swinburne University of Technology School of Design Published and Printed in Melbourne, Australia for the School of Design 2020 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by means, electronic or mechanical, including photography, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from Swinburne University of Technology.

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T H E STUDY O F G O TH I C A RCH I TEC TU RE B Y S TEPH EN MU RRAY

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6 CONTENTS

C ON T E N TS

- What is Gothic?

- Problems and Resources - Historiography Romanticism in literature Conservation and restoration Rationalism Architecture, morality and religion The establishment of an art historical métier: archaeology and theory American Goths - Gothic Architecture in the “Crisis” of Art History: Prophets of the Millennium - Current Approaches - Conclusion

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WHAT IS GOTHIC?

WHAT IS GOTHIC?

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10 WHAT IS GOTHIC?

WHAT IS GOTHIC?

‘ T h e cha l l e n g e i s to d ea l with the full r an g e of c u l t u r al va ria t io ns tha t acco m p a n i e d c onst ruct io n while a t the s am e t i m e r e c ognizing a nd a cco unt ing f o r th e p ow e r of tha t unm ista ka b le Go th i c “ l oo k . ” ’

~

The challenge is to deal with the full range of cultural variations that accompanied construction while at the same time recognizing and accounting for the power of that unmistakable Gothic “look.”

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The understanding of “Gothic” architecture involves the assessment of product and process. The first approach, systematized over the past two centuries, applies a checklist of required features including the pointed arch, lightweight ribbed vault, highly developed buttressing (perhaps including flyers), and structure based upon a skeleton of cut stone (ashlar) rather than the massive rubble walls of earlier “Romanesque.” This combination produces a light-filled and spacious interior and jagged exterior massing. The story of Gothic, told in traditional terms, recounts the mid-twelfthcentury assembly of these features to create a radically new structural system in and around the Ile-de-France, the perfection of that system c.1200, its “triumph” and “spread” to England, Germany, Spain, and Italy, its transformation over time, and its demise c.1500.

The second approach (process) – manifestly more attractive to modern audi- ences – focuses upon the cultural framework of architectural production, correlating economic transformations, new agrarian methods, industry, commerce and the growth of towns, technology and rationalized production, the newly expanded mission of the Church and new forms of liturgical and devotional practice, the increasing power of the French monarchy, and supra-regional inter- actions that led to intense interest in a common set of forms that might be appropriated and exploited to meet a wide range of regional needs. Process meets product, of course, in our own experiential response to the building itself.

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PROBLEMS + RESPURCES

PROBLEMS + RESOURCES

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PROBLEMS + RESPURCES

The principal resource for the study of Gothic architecture lies in the buildings themselves. More than metonymy where the idea of the Middle Ages can be conveyed by a building or a group of buildings, the edifice provides direct physical access to the spaces, and contact with the material substance of the past. Buildings, moreover, may possess the power to affect us: not just through the miracle of survival and the “message” that might be found “encoded” in their spaces and forms, but also because the artifice of builders who may have endowed the edifice with the power to move us to a sense of the beautiful or sublime. Our first problem is reconciling our experiential responses with the task of dealing with buildings as entities that can go beyond the written document in providing vital access to the past.

The student must form a direct and personal relationship with the raw material of his study, the buildings themselves, visiting as many as possible and developing a systematic way of looking, understanding, documenting, and interpreting what he sees. These abilities cannot be learned entirely in the classroom or from a book; they are acquired through an extended dialectic between the buildings, the written sources, and interactions with the community of scholars: between the active and the contemplative lives. Work must, of course, begin with an evaluation of the extent to which our buildings have been transformed physically, existing now in a context (urban and cultural) that may have little to do with the situation in which they were created.

“Interpretation” brings the assessment of the relationship between the monument and similar contemporaneous edifices (“style”) as well as the search for an understanding of that building in relation to the physical and cultural circumstances that attended its construction and use (“context”). Unable to visit countless edifices, the student quickly becomes dependent upon various kinds of representation. First, are images of buildings made using mechanical means. Slides and photographs have long been accepted – sometimes thoughtlessly – as surrogates for the building. And then there are graphic images made manually – plans, sections, axonometric renderings, and, from an earlier age, lithographs, engravings, paintings and sketches.

“Representation,” of course, brings not only images, but also the secondary sources written by post-medieval (art) historians. As far as the story of Gothic is concerned, the pages of the book impose a linear structure upon the phenomenon with two-dimensional linkages between buildings that are three dimensional, creating deceptive order out of ambiguity and complexity. An impressive array of recently published works combine ever-more spectacular photographic repro- ductions with texts that provide a predictable set of permutations around themes of “development” and “context.”

Then, the student must become a historian of medieval life, addressing problems of function, the role of the patron, the artisan, sources of revenue, mechanics of construction, the dynamic political, economic and religious contexts, and what the building might have meant to medieval builder and user. This leads to primary written sources from the time of construction, scattered in countless libraries and archives – including great centralized collections ( for example, the Public Records Office or the British Library in London, or in Paris the Bibliothèque nationale or Archives nationales) – and also local collections: for example, the French Archives départementales. First consult published anthologies such as Mortet and Deschamps, Frisch,

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Panofsky, and Frankl.6 The student may then proceed to the inventories of the archive(s) that pertain(s) to the object of his study.

Primary written sources are narrative or non-narrative.

The narrative source provides a contemporary account of construction: for example, Gervase of Canterbury’s story of the reconstruction of the cathedral choir, or Abbot Suger’s writings on St Denis. The non-narrative source results from the process of construction: building accounts, contracts, chapter deliberations, and legal documents. Works that depend heavily upon such sources include Colvin, Ackerman, Panofsky, Murray, and Erskine. Of particular importance are building (or fabric) accounts, fiscal documents left by the day-to-day record-keeping for Gothic construction. The earliest such accounts belong to the midthirteenth century: the prolific material of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries provides enormous amounts of information about sources of revenue, as well as expenses for artisans and materials.

From the written sources we learn that medieval people might be perfectly aware of the visual differences between “Romanesque” and “Gothic” “styles.” Descriptive epithets for the phenomenon will, of necessity, refer to time (newness) and place. Thus, Gervase of Canterbury provided a systematic comparison between the old cathedral choir and new edifice built after the 1174 fire. By the later thirteenth century we find an epithet that embodies the idea of place and cultural identity: the German chronicler, Burkhard von Hall (d.1300) described the new construction at Wimpfenin-Tal as “French Work.”

Graphic sources begin in the first part of the thirteenth century with the famous album or “portfolio” of drawings left by Villard de Honnecourt and his followers. By the end of the thirteenth century such plans and drawings become more common; German Late Gothic generated huge amounts of material.

While we have differentiated three avenues – work on the building, relating that building to others, and locating it within a range of contexts, meanings, and functions – the student will probably undertake all tasks simultaneously. In finding various kinds of working method and synthesizing framework, the student will place himself within the history of interpretation or historiography.

‘ Bu i ld i n g s , m o r e o ver, m a y po ssess th e po w e r to a ff ect us: no t just th r o ug h the mi r a cle o f surviva l a nd th e “me s s a g e ” tha t m ight b e fo und “en co d e d ” i n the i r spa ces a nd fo rm s, b u t a l s o b e c a u s e the a rt ifice o f b u ild e r s w ho ma y ha ve end o wed the e di f i c e w i th the po w er to m o ve us to a s en s e o f th e b e a ut iful o r sub lim e.’

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16 PROBLEMS + RESPURCES

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18 HISTORIOGRAPHY

HISTORIO -GRAPHY

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HISTORIOGRAPHY

How did “Gothic” get its name? The earliest applications of the epithet to Northern architecture were associated with disapproval fostered in the decades around 1500 by Italian humanists for whom “Germanic” or “Gothic” was synonymous with rustic, or barbaric. Raphael, in a letter of 1519, derided a form of architecture said to have resulted from the tying together of the branches of forest trees to create forms akin to pointed arches, yet conceded that such architecture could not be altogether bad, as derived from Nature, the only legitimate inspiration for all art.

Students might be troubled by the apparent absurdity of naming an architectural phenomenon of the twelfth and later centuries after fifth-century Germanic invaders of the Roman Empire – the Goths who fostered no tradition in stone architecture. Yet despite attempts to find an alternative (“Saracenic,” “Ogival,” “Pointed”), “Gothic” has stuck. Indeed, with its power to collapse time and to link form with alleged ethnic roots and function, this is a most powerful and appropriate epithet. The elements of the

classical orders embodied in the first mid-twelfth-century “Gothic” buildings pointed emphatically to the past – the Late Roman Empire and Gothic migrations that had seen the first establishment of the Northern Church through the agency of the saints. And there is a distinct possibility that ideas concerning natural origins (the forest) were deliberately nurtured by the patrons and builders of Late Gothic churches in Germany and possibly elsewhere.

One is led to expect an “end” to Gothic in the early sixteenth century, followed by a period of negative reaction, then revival in the late eighteenth to nineteenth centuries. Yet the Northern skyline was still dominated by the churches and cathedrals of the earlier age. And by the seventeenth century local antiquarians began to unravel the history of the monuments that formed local identity – the writing of the history of Gothic architecture had begun. A series of interlocking concerns led people to look at Gothic architecture with new vision.

~ ‘...a f o r m o f a r c h itect ure sa id to ha ve r es u l te d fr o m the t ying to gether o f th e b r a n c he s of fo rest t rees to crea te f o r m s a k i n to p o inted a rches, ’

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HISTORIOGRAPHY

Conservation and restoration Expressions of appreciation of Gothic were rendered eloquent by ( for example) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) and Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803).17 Gothic was viewed as a personal affective experience as well as the expression of cultural or national identity (German, English, French, etc.).

The French Revolution lent additional poignancy to the romantic yearn- ing for the past. François René Chateaubriand (1768–1848) expressed it most beautifully: “One could not enter a Gothic church without a kind of shudder and a vague consciousness of God. One would find oneself suddenly carried back to the times when cloistered monks, after they had meditated in the forests of their monaster- ies, cast themselves down before the altar and praised the Lord in the calm and silence of the night.”

These sought to identify the internal logic (system) of a building and to locate it within a class or “type,” matching parallel methods in the natural sciences. Classification was only possible when large numbers of edifices had been “collected” as specimens – visited, studied and published.

John Britton (1771– 1857) pioneered the mass production of cheaply produced engravings. The similar enterprise for French monuments came a little later with the Voyages pittoresques. Thomas Rickman (1776–1841) provided the equipment necessary to classify the hundreds of monuments that were now becoming available in published form based upon the establishment of “styles” with common characteristics that could be fixed chronologically.

By the early nineteenth century it was realized that Gothic should be assessed as an organic system responding to functional, aesthetic, and structural requirements. The breakthrough to the critical monograph may be associated with names like Johannes Wetter (1806–97) and Robert Willis (1800–78). Wetter aligned the forms of Mainz Cathedral with datable monuments elsewhere, analyzing its structure as a skeleton of stone efficiently conceived from the top downwards in relation to vertical load and outward thrust. Willis’s monograph on Canterbury Cathedral still provides a model combination of the critical written sources (the Chronicle of Gervase of Canterbury) and careful study of the forms of the building itself.

The institutionalization of the study of medieval architecture was furthered by the establishment in 1823 of the Société des antiquaires de Normandie, an organization that provided the model for the much more famous Société française d’archéologie, with its Bulletin monumental and Congrès archéologique, which from 1834 met annually in different cities, providing a vital framework for research and publication.

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The French Revolution had nationalized assets necessary to sustain the fabric of the Church. The convergence (1830s) of the pressing physical needs of neglected or mutilated edifices with the increasing sensitivity to the cultural value of such monuments led to the development of a métier – that of the restorer. Jean-Baptiste Lassus (1807–57) and Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–79) are prime examples of the nineteenth-century restorer in France.

Rationalism In 1840 the young Viollet-le-Duc assumed direction of the restoration of La Madeleine at Vézelay. The theoretical understanding that he developed and published in his Dictionnaire must be understood in relation to his practice at Vézelay, Notre-Dame of Paris and scores of other projects.

He concluded that the ribs of a quadripartite vault served as a scaffold to steady the four vault fields during construction.

Each of the vault fields was then built up using lightweight mobile wooden centering. Arches and ribs actually carried the vault. Romanesque architecture is capricious, Gothic is rational – pinnacles provided stability for the buttress uprights and all elements were designed around similar rational principles.

Critics argued that flying buttresses do not work by opposing the thrust of the vault by means of a counterload: they merely transmit the load to the exterior pylons.

Engaged shafts only appear to carry; they express “aesthetic logic” but perform no structural role. Gables, pinnacles, tabernacles all come under the same understanding.

Accusing Viollet-le-Duc of a romanticized notion of mechanics, Pol Abraham and others open the way for the understanding of Gothic as an architecture of illusionism.

Architecture, morality and religion In Augustus Welby Pugin’s (1812–52) Contrasts the moral and religious force of Gothic is everywhere manifest: Gothic is the Christian style. The linkage between appropriateness of form and Christian dogma led to an outpouring of creativity in England with the establishment of the Camden and Ecclesiological Societies to adjudicate on the creation of “good” buildings. John Ruskin (1819– 1900) set out to define guiding principles such as “truth to materials.” The needs of growing urban populations in mid-nineteenthcentury England and the perceived dangers of socialism/ Marxism produced a vast need for new churches, which was met by architects such as George Edmund Street (1824–81), William Butterfield (1884–1900), and George Gilbert Scott (1811–78). Gothic was also a force in the establishment of national identity, particularly in England and Germany.

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‘One could not enter a Gothic church without a kind of shudder and a vague consciousness of God’ 25

HISTORIOGRAPHY

Conservation and restoration Expressions of appreciation of Gothic were rendered eloquent by ( for example) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) and Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803).17 Gothic was viewed as a personal affective experience as well as the expression of cultural or national identity (German, English, French, etc.).

The French Revolution lent additional poignancy to the romantic yearn- ing for the past. François René Chateaubriand (1768–1848) expressed it most beautifully: One could not enter a Gothic church without a kind of shudder and a vague consciousness of God. One would find oneself suddenly carried back to the times when cloistered monks, after they had meditated in the forests of their monaster- ies, cast themselves down before the altar and praised the Lord in the calm and silence of the night.

These sought to identify the internal logic (system) of a building and to locate it within a class or “type,” matching parallel methods in the natural sciences. Classification was only possible when large numbers of edifices had been “collected” as specimens – visited, studied and published. John Britton (1771– 1857) pioneered the mass production of cheaply produced engravings.19 The similar enterprise for French monuments came a little later with the Voyages pittoresques.20 Thomas Rickman (1776–1841) provided the equipment necessary to classify the hundreds of monuments that were now becoming available in pub- lished form based upon the establishment of “styles” with common characteristics that could be fixed chronologically.21 By the early nineteenth century it was realized that Gothic should be assessed as an organic system responding to functional, aesthetic, and structural require- ments. The breakthrough to the critical monograph may be associated with names like Johannes Wetter (1806–97) and Robert Willis (1800–78). Wetter aligned the forms of Mainz Cathedral with datable monuments elsewhere, analyzing its structure as a skeleton of stone efficiently conceived from the top downwards in relation to vertical load and outward thrust.22 Willis’s monograph on Canterbury Cathedral still provides a model combination of the critical written sources (the Chronicle of Gervase of Canterbury) and careful study of the forms of the building itself.23 The institutionalization of the study of medieval architecture was furthered by the establishment in 1823 of the Société des antiquaires de Normandie, an organization that provided the model for the much more famous Société française d’archéologie, with its Bulletin monumental and Congrès archéologique, which from 1834 met annually in different cities, providing a vital framework for research and publication.

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The French Revolution had nationalized assets necessary to sustain the fabric of the Church. The convergence (1830s) of the pressing physical needs of neglected or mutilated edifices with the increasing sensitivity to the cultural value of such monuments led to the development of a métier – that of the restorer. Jean-Baptiste Lassus (1807–57) and Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–79) are prime examples of the nineteenth-century restorer in France.

Rationalism In 1840 the young Viollet-le-Duc assumed direction of the restoration of La Madeleine at Vézelay.25 The theoretical understanding that he developed and published in his Dictionnaire must be understood in relation to his practice at Vézelay, Notre-Dame of Paris and scores of other projects.26 He concluded that the ribs of a quadripartite vault served as a scaffold to steady the four vault fields during construction. Each of the vault fields was then built up using lightweight mobile wooden centering. Arches and ribs actually carried the vault. Roman- esque architecture is capricious, Gothic is rational – pinnacles provided stability for the buttress uprights and all elements were designed around similar rational principles.

Critics argued that flying buttresses do not work by opposing the thrust of the vault by means of a counter-load: they merely transmit the load to the exterior pylons.27 Engaged shafts only appear to carry; they express “aesthetic logic” but perform no structural role. Gables, pinnacles, tabernacles all come under the same understanding.

Accusing Viollet-le-Duc of a romanticized notion of mechanics, Pol Abraham and others open the way for the understanding of Gothic as an architecture of illusionism.

Architecture, morality and religion In Augustus Welby Pugin’s (1812–52) Contrasts the moral and religious force of Gothic is everywhere manifest: Gothic is the Christian style.29 The linkage between appropriateness of form and Christian dogma led to an outpouring of creativity in England with the establishment of the Camden and Ecclesiological Societies to adjudicate on the creation of “good” buildings. John Ruskin (1819– 1900) set out to define guiding principles such as “truth to materials.”30 The needs of growing urban populations in mid-nineteenth-century England and the perceived dangers of socialism/Marxism produced a vast need for new churches, which was met by architects such as George Edmund Street (1824–81), William Butterfield (1884–1900), and George Gilbert Scott (1811–78).31 Gothic was also a force in the establishment of national identity, particularly in England and Germany.

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HISTORIOGRAPHY

The establishment of an art historical métier: archaeology and theory The twentieth century was dominated by two streams of thought: “archaeological,” associated especially with the French tradition, and the “theoretical” approaches of German writers. By 1900, in a field dominated by the Ecole des Chartres (1821), with its chair of archaeology (1846), the requirements of the French archaeological study had been clearly established. E. Lefèvre-Pontalis (1862–1923) addressed the question “How should one write a monograph on a church?” The elements of the study should include: (1) determination of the campaigns of construction; (2) analytical analysis (dismemberment) of the edifice; and (3) connection of the edifice with a particular school.

Methods that included an exacting study of molding profiles, capitals, and tracery as evidence of chronology were similar to those applied in the natural sciences (zoology, botany, and mineralogy) to the understanding of groups of fossils or living organisms, and similar language developed to deal with relationships over time: “change,” “development,” or “evolution.” Such methods produced a procession of studies that remain valuable to our own day, including works by Marcel Aubert (1884–1962), Robert de Lasteyrie (1849–1921), and Camille Enlart (1862–1927). Henri Focillon (1881–1951) brought to such work his astonishing powers of observation and analysis, systematizing the overarching theory of form derived from the organic metaphor of evolution or development.

Paul Frankl (1878–1962) sought to derive Gothic from one basic principle, creating a “system” for classification of style and locating that transcendent “essence” that determines architectural form much as the laws of the natural sciences determine the form of living organisms. The essential quality of a thing is revealed by contrasting it with what it is not. Frankl’s creation of three juxta- posed opposites for Romanesque and Gothic – addition/division, structure/ texture, and frontality/diagonality provided a powerful expository method for the teacher equipped with two slide projectors.

For Frankl it was the aesthetic implications of the rib that provided the mechanism for change. An internal dialectic imposed reconciliation and integration: each new edifice embodied corrections of the previous one until a synthesis was reached in the nave of Amiens and the choir of Cologne.

The extrinsic mechanism lay in cultural history understood as a wheel where the hub is understood as the “spirit of the times.” That central theme was identified in the life and

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teaching of Jesus Christ. Man is a fragment of creation; the multiple forms of the cathedral expressed this coordination of many elements in one. “Gothic” takes on a metonymic relationship with society as a whole.

Focusing upon St Denis, Sens, and Chartres, Otto von Simson (1912–93) dealt with the image of the cathedral as the revelation of the kingdom of God on earth. The vehicle for this revelation was provided by light and the linear forms of diaphanous architecture conceived around clear geometric principles, allowing the cathedral to reflect the Platonic image of the Cosmos.

Erwin Panofsky’s (1892–1968) translation of Abbot Suger’s writings remains an essential text to this day and represented a massive achievement at the time. Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism is a provocative attempt to parallel two of the most important cultural manifestations of the day: the use of unrelenting logic to make “truth” manifest, and the new architectural forms of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries which he saw as bound together in a cause-and-effect relationship.

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28 HISTORIOGRAPHY

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HISTORIOGRAPHY

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‘Gothic is today alive and well on many an American university campus ’

American Goths In the United States a powerful alliance developed between the moral/mystical response to Gothic associated with the work of Henry Adams and the actual construction of Gothic Revival edifices by builders like Ralph Adams Cram. Gothic is today alive and well on many an American university campus.

In the Academy it was the French archaeological approach that dominated. Sumner Mcknight Crosby (1909–82) studied at Yale with Aubert and Focillon, who directed his doctoral thesis (1937) on St Denis. Crosby conducted extensive excavations in the 1930s, completing the first accurate plans and sections of this most important Gothic edifice and reconstructing the history of the monument from the fifth to the twelfth century.

Robert Branner (1927–73) studied with Sumner Crosby at Yale, completing his dissertation on Bourges Cathedral.

Branner brought the archaeological investigation of the single building to a high level of sophistication, looking beyond the traditional parameters of the discipline to find a context for “style” in the form of the patronage of the royal court. Closely aligned with the French archaeological tradition, he sharply criticized certain German theorizing approaches. Through his acute powers of observation, his dynamic writing, and his powers as a teacher at Columbia, Branner energized the field through the 1960s until his untimely death.

Jean Bony’s years at Berkeley also left an important legacy.

A critical milestone in the study of Gothic architecture was marked by the 1983 appearance of Jean Bony’s magnum opus. Written and re-written over decades, French Gothic Architecture still provides the student with the best demonstration of the use of rhetoric to convey the “look” of an individual building as well as the connective tissue binding together multiple buildings. To demonstrate what Gothic is, Bony turned to Soissons Cathedral, providing a masterly account of the elements that add up to form the system. He tracked the development of each element, concentrating upon spaciousness and linear organization – horizontal and mural as well as vertical. Aware of the dangers of determinism, Bony developed his “accidental” theory – that the new architecture resulted from the attempt to impose a heavy vaulted superstructure in the Anglo-Norman tradition upon a slender infrastructure of the kind favored in and around Paris. Gothic was invented in this atmosphere of danger and went on being invented as a kind of modernism.

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32 GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE IN THE “CRISIS” OF ART HISTORY – Prophets of the Millennium

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GOTHIC ARCHI – TECTURE IN THE “CRISIS ” OF ART HISTORY

34 GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE IN THE “CRISIS” OF ART HISTORY – Prophets of the Millennium

The 1980s brought a sea change in the conservative world of art historians as “theoretical” approaches developed in contiguous disciplines (literature, philology, philosophy, anthropology, sociology) were enthusiastically (if sometimes naively) applied to visual culture. The imminent millennium provoked a series of forcefully written statements that provide useful stimuli for the student, who should, however, be wary of the sometimes monolithic panaceas recommended.

diametrically opposed to Sauerländer’s. Whereas the latter found revivalism or historicism as the principal catalyst, the former stressed “medieval modernism” returning to the anti-classical essence of “Gothic” as associated with the destroyers of Rome. For Trachtenberg the essential modernity of Gothic was more germane to the “essence of the matter” than later “scientific” scholarship preoccupied with rib vaulting, skeletal structure, scholasticism, diaphaneity, geometry, diagonality, and so forth.

Willibald Sauerländer’s review of Bony’s French Gothic Architecture pro- vides the most audible initial trumpet blast. While he praised Bony’s “brilliant book” as the culmination of the French archaeological approach, Sauerländer focused upon its limitations: excessive concentration upon major monuments in France; the suggestion that the “rise” of the great Gothic cathedrals came from some kind of inner yearning for increased spaciousness. He questioned Bony’s reliance upon figurative language to convey the essential qualities of the building described: of the ambulatory of Chartres Bony had written that it is “as though the interior space, in an effort to expand outwards, had managed to break through the restraining cage of buttresses at three points.” Such words revealed much about modern sensitivities – yet spaces in the Middle Ages were divided by screens and encumbered by liturgical furniture tombs.

Michael Davis based his very useful and positive survey of recent trends upon conflicting “prophetic” declarations, juxtaposing Michael Camille’s con- demnation of the alleged narrowness and positivism of architectural historians with Alain Guerreau’s call for renewed rigor (“positivism?”) in dealing with the material properties, masonry, mortar, and design principles of the buildings under study.

In the clash between theorists and formalists, Davis advocated abandoning the story of Gothic told in linear fashion and giving due attention to the regions and to internal connections within those regional entities. Most attractive is Davis’s advice that the student should not be alarmed by “radical” attempts to realign the study of medieval architecture with current monolithic agendas.

Instead, the student should disregard the restrictive “border police,” recognizing the astonishing breadth of the discipline, and should continue to experiment with new approaches.

Von Simson was also the object of Sauerländer criticism – for having spiritualized the history of architecture, ignoring the technical, material, and historical circumstances. In 1995 Sauerländer berated a discipline that had remained too committed to the “positivistic” approaches advocated by scholars such as Lefèvre-Pontalis. He challenged the assumption that Gothic resulted from a twelfth-century avant-garde or that it expressed a kind of anti-classicism, stressing rather the multiple references to antique architecture in early Gothic buildings, especially the cylindrical column.

Marvin Trachtenberg also aimed to provide the intellectual mechanism neces- sary for the “redefinition of the Gothic and, consequently, also of the Romanesque.” Interestingly, Trachtenberg emphatically advocated an approach that was

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IMAGE SUMMARY

I M AGE S UM M ARY

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IMAGE SUMMARY

I M AGE S UM M ARY

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CONCLUSION

CO NCLUSI O N

Half a century ago Paul Frankl wrote: “The essence of Gothic is, in a few words, that cultural and intellectual background insofar as it entered into the building and was absorbed by it: it is the interpenetration, the saturation, of the form of the building by the meaning of the culture.”

Everything has changed, yet little has changed. Today we would assign more importance to the culture and presuppositions of the viewer/interpreter, and we would challenge Frankl’s underlying idea of “style” as Platonic “essence.” As we pursue the question as to how the ideas

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got into the building, we will learn to deal more fully with the underlying structures and mechanics of human relations. But allow me to end as I began: it is the buildings themselves, with their amazing pull upon the curiosity and the awe of the spectator, that remain the most important raw material of our study. They continue to beckon us to return, even after a lifetime of work, to ask new questions and apply new approaches.

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