Gothic architecture

Gothic architecture
Top: West front of Wells Cathedral in England (1225–1240); middle: Sainte-Chapelle in Paris (1238–1248); bottom: tympanum of Rouen Cathedral (15th century)
Additional media
Years active	Late 12th century–16th century
Location	Catholic Europe
Influences	Romanesque architecture, Byzantine architecture, and possibly Armenian architecture
Influenced	Post-Gothic, Gothic Revival architecture, Baroque Gothic

Gothic architecture is an architectural style prevalent in Europe from the late 12th to the 16th century, during the High and Late Middle Ages, surviving into the 17th and 18th centuries in some areas. It evolved from Romanesque architecture and was succeeded by Renaissance architecture. It originated in the Île-de-France and Picardy regions of northern France. The style at the time was sometimes known as opus Francigenum (lit. 'French work'); the term Gothic was first applied contemptuously during the later Renaissance, by those ambitious to revive the architecture of classical antiquity. The defining design element of Gothic architecture is the pointed arch. The use of the pointed arch in turn led to the development of the pointed rib vault and flying buttresses, combined with elaborate tracery and stained glass windows.

At the Abbey of Saint-Denis, near Paris, the choir was reconstructed between 1140 and 1144, drawing together for the first time the developing Gothic architectural features. In doing so, a new architectural style emerged that emphasized verticality and the effect created by the transmission of light through stained glass windows.

Common examples are found in Christian ecclesiastical architecture, and Gothic cathedrals and churches, as well as abbeys, and parish churches. It is also the architecture of many castles, palaces, town halls, guildhalls, universities, and, less prominently today, private dwellings. Many of the finest examples of medieval Gothic architecture are listed by UNESCO as World Heritage Sites.

With the development of Renaissance architecture in Italy during the mid-15th century, the Gothic style was supplanted by the new style, but in some regions, notably England and what is now Belgium, Gothic continued to flourish and develop into the 16th century. A series of Gothic revivals began in mid-18th century England, spread through 19th-century Europe and continued, largely for churches and university buildings, into the 20th century.

Name

Medieval contemporaries characterised the style in Latin as opus Francigenum ("French work" or "Frankish work"), as opus modernum ("modern work"), or as novum opus ("new work"). Italian-speakers could call it maniera tedesca ("German style").

The term "Gothic architecture" originated as a pejorative description. Giorgio Vasari used the term "barbarous German style" in his Lives of the Artists (1550) to describe what is now considered the Gothic style, and in the introduction to the Lives he attributes various architectural features to the Goths, whom he held responsible for destroying the ancient buildings after they conquered Rome, and for erecting new ones in this style. When Vasari wrote, Italy had experienced a century of building in the Vitruvian architectural vocabulary of classical orders revived in the Renaissance and seen as evidence of a new Golden Age of learning and refinement. Thus the Gothic style, being in opposition to classical architecture, from that point of view was associated with the destruction of progress and of sophistication. The assumption that classical architecture was better than Gothic architecture was widespread and proved difficult to counter. Vasari was echoed in the 16th century by François Rabelais, who referred to "Gotz" and "Ostrogotz".

The polymath architect Christopher Wren (1632–1723) disapproved of the label "Gothic" for pointed architecture. He compared it to Islamic architecture, which he called the "Saracen style", pointing out that the pointed arch's sophistication was not owed to the Goths but to Islam, who in turn got it from the Greek. He wrote:

This we now call the Gothic manner of architecture (so the Italians called what was not after the Roman style) though the Goths were rather destroyers than builders; I think it should with more reason be called the Saracen style, for these people wanted neither arts nor learning: and after we in the west lost both, we borrowed again from them, out of their Arabic books, what they with great diligence had translated from the Greeks.

— Christopher Wren, Report on St Paul's

Wren was one of the few to spread the belief that it was not the Europeans, but the "Saracens" who had originated the Gothic style. (The term "Saracen", still in use in the 18th century, typically referred to all Muslims, including Arabs and Berbers.) Wren mentions Europe's architectural debt to the Saracens no fewer than twelve times in his writings. He also decidedly broke with tradition in his assumption that Gothic architecture did not merely represent a violent and bothersome mistake (as Vasari had suggested). Rather, Wren saw that the Gothic style had developed over time along the lines of a changing society, and that it was thus a legitimate architectural style in its own right.

It was no secret that Wren strongly disliked the building practices of the Gothic style. When he was appointed Surveyor of the Fabric at Westminster Abbey in the year 1698, he expressed his distaste for the Gothic style in a letter to the Bishop of Rochester:

Nothing was thought magnificent that was not high beyond Measure, with the Flutter of Arch-buttresses, so we call the sloping Arches that poise the higher Vaultings of the Nave. The Romans always concealed their Butments, whereas the Normans thought them ornamental. These I have observed are the first Things that occasion the Ruin of Cathedrals, being so much exposed to the Air and Weather; the Coping, which cannot defend them, first failing, and if they give Way, the Vault must spread. Pinnacles are no Use, and as little Ornament.

— Christopher Wren, Parentalia

The chaos of the Gothic left much to be desired in Wren's eyes. His aversion to the style was so strong that he refused to put a Gothic roof on the new St Paul's Cathedral, despite pressure to do so. Wren much preferred symmetry and straight lines in architecture, which is why he constantly praised the classic architecture of 'the Ancients' in his writings.

Even though he openly expressed his distaste for the Gothic style, Wren did not blame the Saracens for any apparent lack of ingenuity. Quite the opposite: he praised the Saracens for their "superior" vaulting techniques and their widespread use of the pointed arch. Wren claimed the inventors of the Gothic had seen the Saracen architecture during the Crusades, also called the religious war or "Holy War", originated in the Kingdom of France in the year 1095:

The Holy War gave the Christians, who had been there, an Idea of the Saracen Works, which were afterwards by them imitated in the West; and they refined upon it every day, as they proceeded in building Churches.

— Christopher Wren, Parentalia

Several chronological issues arise from this statement, which is one of the reasons why Wren's theory is rejected by many. The earliest examples of the pointed arch in Europe date from before the First Crusade of 1096–1099; this is widely regarded as proof that the Gothic style could not have possibly been derived from Saracen architecture. Several authors have nevertheless claimed that the Gothic style had most likely filtered into Europe in other ways, for example through Spain or Sicily. Spanish architecture influenced by the Moors could have favoured the emergence of the Gothic style long before the Crusades took place. This could have happened gradually through the influence of the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in the early 8th century, and via merchants, pilgrims, and other travelers.

According to a 19th-century correspondent in the London journal Notes and Queries, "Gothic" was a derisive misnomer; the pointed arcs and architecture of the later Middle Ages differed radically from the rounded arches prevalent in late antiquity and in the period of the Ostrogothic Kingdom (493–553) in Italy:

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. But, without citing many authorities, such as Christopher Wren, and others, who lent their aid in depreciating the old mediaeval style, which they termed Gothic, as synonymous with every thing that was barbarous and rude, it may be sufficient to refer to the celebrated Treatise of Sir Henry Wotton, entitled The Elements of Architecture,... printed in London so early as 1624.... But it was a strange misapplication of the term to use it for the pointed style, in contradistinction to the circular, formerly called Saxon, now Norman, Romanesque, &c. These latter styles, like Lombardic, Italian, and the Byzantine, of course belong more to the Gothic period than the light and elegant structures of the pointed order which succeeded them.

Influences

The Gothic style of architecture was strongly influenced by the Romanesque architecture from which it evolved, the growing population and wealth of European cities, and the desire to express local grandeur. It was also influenced by theological doctrines, which called for more light, and by technical improvements in vaults and buttresses that allowed much greater height and larger windows. Practical influences included the necessity of many churches, such as Chartres Cathedral and Canterbury Cathedral, to accommodate growing numbers of pilgrims. The Gothic adapted features from earlier and foreign styles, particularly Islamic architecture, to which Europeans were exposed in the Middle East, Sicily and Iberia. However, many of the elements of Islamic architecture that have been cited as influences on Gothic architecture also appeared in Late Roman and Byzantine architecture, the most noticeable example being the pointed arch and flying buttress.

Romanesque influence

Romanesque architecture and Norman architecture had a major influence upon Gothic architecture. The plan of the Gothic cathedral was based upon the plan of the ancient Roman basilica, which was adopted by Romanesque architecture. The Latin cross form, with a nave and transept, choir, disambulatory, and radiating chapels, came from the Romanesque model. The grand arcades of columns separating the central vessel of the nave from the collateral aisles, the triforium over the grand arcades, and the windows high on the walls allowing light into the nave were all also adapted from the Romanesque model. The portal with a tympanum filled with sculpture was another characteristic Romanesque feature, as was the use of the buttress to support the walls from the outside. Gothic architects improved them by adding the flying buttress with high arches connecting the buttresses to the upper walls. In the interior, Romanesque architecture used the barrel vault with a round arch to cover the nave, and a groin vault when two barrel vaults met at right angles. These vaults were the immediate ancestors of the Gothic rib vault. One of the first use of the Gothic rib vaults to cover a nave was in the Romanesque Durham Cathedral, (1093–1104).

Norman Architecture, similar to the Romanesque style, also influenced the Gothic style. Early examples are found in Lessay Abbey in Normandy, which also featured early rib vaults in the nave similar to the Gothic vaults. Cefalu Cathedral (1131–1267) in Sicily, built when Sicily was under Norman rule, is another interesting example. It featured pointed arches and large Gothic rib vaults combined with ornamental mosaic decoration.

Romanesque architecture had become a pan-European style and manner of construction, affecting buildings in countries as far apart as Ireland, Sweden and Sicily. The same wide geographic area was then affected by the development of Gothic architecture, but the acceptance of the Gothic style and methods of construction differed from place to place, as did the expressions of Gothic taste. The proximity of some regions meant that modern country borders did not define divisions of style. Many different factors like geographical/geological, economic, social, or political situations caused the regional differences in the great abbey churches and cathedrals of the Romanesque period that would often become even more apparent in the Gothic. For example, studies of the population statistics reveals disparities such as the multitude of churches, abbeys, and cathedrals in northern France while in more urbanised regions construction activity of a similar scale was reserved to a few important cities. Such an example comes from Roberto López, wherein the French city of Amiens was able to fund its architectural projects whereas Cologne could not because of the economic inequality of the two. This wealth, concentrated in rich monasteries and noble families, would eventually spread certain Italian, Catalan, and Hanseatic bankers. This would be amended when the economic hardships of the 13th century were no longer felt, allowing Normandy, Tuscany, Flanders, and the southern Rhineland to enter into competition with France.

Islamic influence

The pointed arch, one of the defining attributes of Gothic, was earlier featured in Islamic architecture, Though it did not have the same functions. Precursor of pointed arch appeared in Byzantine and Sassanian architectures, This was evidenced in early church building in Syria and occasional secular structures, like the Karamagara Bridge; in Sassanian architecture, employed in palace and sacred construction. These pre-Islamic arches were decorative rather than structural in their function. The pointed arch as an architectonic principle was first clearly established in Islamic architecture; as an architectonic principle, the pointed arch was entirely alien to the pre-Islamic world. Use of the pointed arch seems to have taken off dramatically in Islamic architecture. It begins to appear throughout the Islamic world in close succession after its adoption in the late Umayyad or early Abbasid period. Some examples are the Al-Ukhaidir Palace (775 AD), the Abbasid reconstruction of the Al-Aqsa mosque in 780 AD, the Ramlah Cisterns (789 AD), the Great Mosque of Samarra (851 AD), and the Mosque of Ibn Tulun (879 AD) in Cairo. It also appears in one of the early reconstructions of the Great Mosque of Kairouan in Tunisia, and the Mosque–Cathedral of Córdoba in 987 AD. The pointed arch had already been used in Syria, but in the mosque of Ibn Tulun we have one of the earliest examples of its use on an extensive scale, some centuries before it was exploited in the West by the Gothic architects.

A kind of rib vault was also used in Islamic architecture, for example in the ceiling of the Mosque-Cathedral of Cordoba. In Cordoba, the dome was supported by pendentives, which connected the dome to the arches below. The pendentives were decorated with ribs. Unlike the Gothic rib vault, the Islamic ribs were purely decorative; they did not extend outside of the vault, and they were not part of the structure supporting the roof.

The military and cultural contacts with the medieval Islamic world, including the Norman conquest of Islamic Sicily in 1090, the Crusades (beginning 1096), and the Islamic presence in Spain, may have influenced Medieval Europe's adoption of the pointed arch. Another feature of Gothic architecture, a kind of rib vault, had also earlier appeared in Islamic architecture, and spread to Western Europe via Islamic Spain and Sicily. The early rib vaults in Spain were used to support cupolas, and were decorative. The dome of the Mosque-Cathedral of Cordoba was supported by pendentives, rather than the vault. These were frequently used in Romanesque and Byzantine architecture, as in the dome of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, which also was supported by pendentives. The Gothic rib vault, among other features, such as the flying buttress, have their antecedents in Romanesque architecture, such as Durham Cathedral, constructed between 1093 and 1096.

In those parts of the Western Mediterranean subject to Islamic control or influence, rich regional variants arose, fusing Romanesque and later Gothic traditions with Islamic decorative forms. For example, in Monreale and Cefalù Cathedrals, the Alcázar of Seville, and Teruel Cathedral.

Armenian influence

A number of scholars have cited the Armenian Cathedral of Ani, completed 1001 or 1010, as a possible influence on the Gothic, especially due to its use of pointed arches and cluster piers. However, other scholars such as Sirarpie Der Nersessian, who rejected this notion as she argued that the pointed arches did not serve the same function of supporting the vault. Lucy Der Manuelian contends that some Armenians (historically documented as being in Western Europe in the Middle Ages) could have brought the knowledge and technique employed at Ani to the west.

Periods

Architecture "became a leading form of artistic expression during the late Middle Ages". Gothic architecture began in the earlier 12th century in northwest France and England and spread throughout Latin Europe in the 13th century. By 1300, a first "International Style" of Gothic had developed, with common design features and formal language. A second "international style" emerged by 1400, alongside innovations in England and central Europe that produced both the Perpendicular and Flamboyant varieties. Typically, these typologies are identified as:

• c. 1130 – c. 1240 Early to High Gothic and Early English
• c. 1240 – c.1350 Rayonnant and Decorated Style
• c. 1350 – c. 1500 Late Gothic: Flamboyant and Perpendicular
• c. 16th–18th century Gothic Survival and Post-Gothic

History

Early Gothic

Norman architecture on either side of the English Channel developed in parallel towards Early Gothic. Gothic features, such as the rib vault, had appeared in England, Sicily and Normandy in the 11th century. Rib-vaults were employed in some parts of the cathedral at Durham (1093–1133) and in Lessay Abbey in Normandy (1098). However, the first buildings to be considered fully Gothic are the royal funerary abbey of the French kings, the Abbey of Saint-Denis (1135–1144), and the archiepiscopal cathedral at Sens (1135–1164). They were the first buildings to systematically combine rib vaulting, buttresses, and pointed arches. Most of the characteristics of later Early English were already present in the lower chevet of Saint-Denis.

The Duchy of Normandy, part of the Angevin Empire until the 13th century, developed its own version of Gothic. One of these was the Norman chevet, a small apse or chapel attached to the choir at the east end of the church, which typically had a half-dome. The lantern tower was another common feature in Norman Gothic. One example of early Norman Gothic is Bayeux Cathedral (1060–1070) where the Romanesque cathedral nave and choir were rebuilt into the Gothic style. Lisieux Cathedral was begun in 1170. Rouen Cathedral (begun 1185) was rebuilt from Romanesque to Gothic with distinct Norman features, including a lantern tower, deeply moulded decoration, and high pointed arcades. Coutances Cathedral was remade into Gothic beginning about 1220. Its most distinctive feature is the octagonal lantern on the crossing of the transept, decorated with ornamental ribs, and surrounded by sixteen bays and sixteen lancet windows.

Saint-Denis was the work of the Abbot Suger, a close adviser of Kings Louis VI and Louis VII. Suger reconstructed portions of the old Romanesque church with the rib vault in order to remove walls and to make more space for windows. He described the new ambulatory as "a circular ring of chapels, by virtue of which the whole church would shine with the wonderful and uninterrupted light of most luminous windows, pervading the interior beauty." To support the vaults he also introduced columns with capitals of carved vegetal designs, modelled upon the classical columns he had seen in Rome. In addition, he installed a circular rose window over the portal on the façade. These also became a common feature of Gothic cathedrals.

Some elements of Gothic style appeared very early in England. Durham Cathedral was the first cathedral to employ a rib vault, built between 1093 and 1104. The first cathedral built entirely in the new style was Sens Cathedral, begun between 1135 and 1140 and consecrated in 1160. Sens Cathedral features a Gothic choir, and six-part rib vaults over the nave and collateral aisles, alternating pillars and doubled columns to support the vaults, and buttresses to offset the outward thrust from the vaults. One of the builders who is believed to have worked on Sens Cathedral, William of Sens, later travelled to England and became the architect who, between 1175 and 1180, reconstructed the choir of Canterbury Cathedral in the new Gothic style.

Sens Cathedral was influential in its strongly vertical appearance and in its three-part elevation, typical of subsequent Gothic buildings, with a clerestory at the top supported by a triforium, all carried on high arcades of pointed arches. In the following decades flying buttresses began to be used, allowing the construction of lighter, higher walls. French Gothic churches were heavily influenced both by the ambulatory and side-chapels around the choir at Saint-Denis, and by the paired towers and triple doors on the western façade.

Sens was quickly followed by Senlis Cathedral (begun 1160), and Notre-Dame de Paris (begun 1160). Their builders abandoned the traditional plans and introduced the new Gothic elements from Saint-Denis. The builders of Notre-Dame went further by introducing the flying buttress, heavy columns of support outside the walls connected by arches to the upper walls. The buttresses counterbalanced the outward thrust from the rib vaults. This allowed the builders to construct higher, thinner walls and larger windows.

Early English and High Gothic

Following the destruction by fire of the choir of Canterbury Cathedral in 1174, a group of master builders was invited to propose plans for the reconstruction. The master-builder William of Sens, who had worked on Sens Cathedral, won the competition. Work began that same year, but in 1178 William was badly injured by falling from the scaffolding, and returned to France, where he died. His work was continued by William the Englishman who replaced his French namesake in 1178. The resulting structure of the choir of Canterbury Cathedral is considered the first work of Early English Gothic. The cathedral churches of Worcester (1175–), Wells (c.1180–), Lincoln (1192–), and Salisbury (1220–) are all, with Canterbury, major examples. Tiercerons – decorative vaulting ribs – seem first to have been used in vaulting at Lincoln Cathedral, installed c.1200. Instead of a triforium, Early English churches usually retained a gallery.

High Gothic (c. 1194–1250) was a brief but very productive period, which produced some of the great landmarks of Gothic art. The first building in the High Gothic (French: Classique) was Chartres Cathedral, an important pilgrimage church south of Paris. The Romanesque cathedral was destroyed by fire in 1194, but was swiftly rebuilt in the new style, with contributions from King Philip II of France, Pope Celestine III, local gentry, merchants, craftsmen, and Richard the Lionheart, king of England. The builders simplified the elevation used at Notre Dame, eliminated the tribune galleries, and used flying buttresses to support the upper walls. The walls were filled with stained glass, mainly depicting the story of the Virgin Mary but also, in a small corner of each window, illustrating the crafts of the guilds who donated those windows.

The model of Chartres was followed by a series of new cathedrals of unprecedented height and size. These were Reims Cathedral (begun 1211), where coronations of the kings of France took place; Amiens Cathedral (1220–1226); Bourges Cathedral (1195–1230) (which, unlike the others, continued to use six-part rib vaults); and Beauvais Cathedral (1225–).

In central Europe, the High Gothic style appeared in the Holy Roman Empire, first at Toul (1220–), whose Romanesque cathedral was rebuilt in the style of Reims Cathedral; then Trier's Liebfrauenkirche parish church (1228–), and then throughout the Reich, beginning with the Elisabethkirche at Marburg (1235–) and the cathedral at Metz (c.1235–).

In High Gothic, the whole surface of the clerestory was given over to windows. At Chartres Cathedral, plate tracery was used for the rose window, but at Reims the bar-tracery was free-standing. Lancet windows were supplanted by multiple lights separated by geometrical bar-tracery. Tracery of this kind distinguishes Middle Pointed style from the simpler First Pointed. Inside, the nave was divided into by regular bays, each covered by a quadripartite rib vaults.

Other characteristics of the High Gothic were the development of rose windows of greater size, using bar-tracery, higher and longer flying buttresses, which could reach up to the highest windows, and walls of sculpture illustrating biblical stories filling the façade and the fronts of the transept. Reims Cathedral had two thousand three hundred statues on the front and back side of the façade.

The new High Gothic churches competed to be the tallest, with increasingly ambitious structures lifting the vault yet higher. Chartres Cathedral's height of 38 m (125 ft) was exceeded by Beauvais Cathedral's 48 m (157 ft), but on account of the latter's collapse in 1248, no further attempt was made to build higher. Attention turned from achieving greater height to creating more awe-inspiring decoration.

Rayonnant Gothic and Decorated Style

Rayonnant Gothic maximized the coverage of stained glass windows such that the walls are effectively entirely glazed; examples are the nave of Saint-Denis (1231–) and the royal chapel of Louis IX of France on the Île de la Cité in the Seine – the Sainte-Chapelle (c.1241–1248). The high and thin walls of French Rayonnant Gothic allowed by the flying buttresses enabled increasingly ambitious expanses of glass and decorated tracery, reinforced with ironwork. Shortly after Saint-Denis, in the 1250s, Louis IX commissioned the rebuilt transepts and enormous rose windows of Notre-Dame de Paris (1250s for the north transept, 1258 for the beginning of south transept). This first 'international style' was also used in the clerestory of Metz Cathedral (c. 1245–), then in the choir of Cologne's cathedral (c. 1250–), and again in the nave of the cathedral at Strasbourg (c. 1250–). Masons elaborated a series of tracery patterns for windows – from the basic geometrical to the reticulated and the curvilinear – which had superseded the lancet window. Bar-tracery of the curvilinear, flowing, and reticulated types distinguish Second Pointed style.

Decorated Gothic similarly sought to emphasize the windows, but excelled in the ornamentation of their tracery. Churches with features of this style include Westminster Abbey (1245–), the cathedrals at Lichfield (after 1257–) and Exeter (1275–), Bath Abbey (1298–), and the retro choir at Wells Cathedral (c.1320–).

The Rayonnant developed its second 'international style' with increasingly autonomous and sharp-edged tracery mouldings apparent in the cathedral at Clermont-Ferrand (1248–), the papal collegiate church at Troyes, Saint-Urbain (1262–), and the west façade of Strasbourg Cathedral (1276–1439)). By 1300, there were examples influenced by Strasbourg in the cathedrals of Limoges (1273–), Regensburg (c. 1275–), and in the cathedral nave at York (1292–).

Late Gothic: Flamboyant and Perpendicular

Central Europe began to lead the emergence of a new, international Flamboyant style with the construction of a new cathedral at Prague (1344–) under the direction of Peter Parler. This model of rich and variegated tracery and intricate reticulated rib-vaulting was definitive in the Late Gothic of continental Europe, emulated not only by the collegiate churches and cathedrals, but by urban parish churches which rivalled them in size and magnificence. The minster at Ulm and other parish churches like the Heilig-Kreuz-Münster at Schwäbisch Gmünd (c.1320–), St Barbara's Church at Kutná Hora (1389–), and the Heilig-Geist-Kirche (1407–) and St Martin's Church (c.1385–) in Landshut are typical. Use of ogees was especially common.

The flamboyant style was characterised by the multiplication of the ribs of the vaults, with new purely decorative ribs, called tiercons and liernes, and additional diagonal ribs. One common ornament of flamboyant in France is the arc-en-accolade, an arch over a window topped by a pinnacle, which was itself topped with fleuron, and flanked by other pinnacles. Examples of French flamboyant building include the west façade of Rouen Cathedral, and especially the façades of Sainte-Chapelle de Vincennes (1370s) and choir Mont-Saint-Michel's abbey church (1448).

In England, ornamental rib-vaulting and tracery of Decorated Gothic co-existed with, and then gave way to, the Perpendicular style from the 1320s, with straightened, orthogonal tracery topped with fan-vaulting. Perpendicular Gothic was unknown in continental Europe and unlike earlier styles had no equivalent in Scotland or Ireland. It first appeared in the cloisters and chapter-house (c. 1332) of Old St Paul's Cathedral in London by William de Ramsey. The chancel of Gloucester Cathedral (c. 1337–1357) and its latter 14th century cloisters are early examples. Four-centred arches were often used, and lierne vaults seen in early buildings were developed into fan vaults, first at the latter 14th century chapter-house of Hereford Cathedral (demolished 1769) and cloisters at Gloucester, and then at Reginald Ely's King's College Chapel, Cambridge (1446–1461) and the brothers William and Robert Vertue's Henry VII Chapel (c. 1503–1512) at Westminster Abbey.

Perpendicular is sometimes called Third Pointed and was employed over three centuries; the fan-vaulted staircase at Christ Church, Oxford was built around 1640.

Lacey patterns of tracery continued to characterize continental Gothic building, with very elaborate and articulated vaulting, as at Saint Barbara's, Kutná Hora (1512). In certain areas, Gothic architecture continued to be employed until the 17th and 18th centuries, especially in provincial and ecclesiastical contexts, notably at Oxford.

German Gothic

There was an initial distrust in German-speaking countries regarding the new style coming from France. Since the time of Charlemagne, and later under the Ottonians and the Hohenstaufen, master builders of the western regions of the Empire — and particularly in the Rhine basin between Basel and Cologne — had developed an original architectural style of strong Romanesque matrix. The transition was slow, and initially, buildings were constructed that fused Gothic characteristics with elements that were still typically Romanesque. Examples of this phase are the choir of Magdeburg Cathedral (1208) and the collegiate church of St. George in Limburg an der Lahn (1211–35).

The first buildings that can be considered fully Gothic date back to the 1330s. By around 1230, all resistance had fallen: in Trier and Marburg, the new style coming from France was welcomed with enthusiasm, becoming the main centres from which French Gothic spread throughout the lands of the Empire.

One of the first and most significant examples is the Elisabethkirche in Marburg, in Hesse, whose construction began in 1236, and in which the influence of the cathedrals of Noyon and Reims is evident. The latter also served as a point of reference for the builders of the Liebfrauenkirche in Trier (c. 1233–83), an elegant central-plan polygonal church with multiple apses, declared the oldest Gothic church in Germany. Also noteworthy is Freiburg Minster, known for its 116-metre tower, the only Gothic tower in Germany to have been fully completed in the Middle Ages (1330).

Amiens Cathedral, on the other hand, was the source of inspiration for Gerhard, the architect of Cologne Cathedral. Built starting in 1248 over the ruins of the previous Carolingian cathedral (destroyed by a fire), its project was extremely ambitious: the vaults of the choir exceed 43 metres in height. The choir was consecrated in 1322, but work progressed very slowly. The cathedral, which competes with Milan as one of the largest Gothic cathedrals in the world, was only completed in 1880, in the 19th century, when the original design drawings were found.

The construction of Strasbourg Cathedral (which at the time was a city of the Empire) followed the artistic vicissitudes linked to the penetration of the Gothic style. The initial Ottonian building was reconstructed between the 12th and 13th centuries in the late Romanesque style; the designers, however, changed direction after the arrival at the construction site of an architect of French origins, who adopted rayonnant solutions in the construction of the southern upper level. The Strasbourg workshop soon became an essential centre for the development of the Rayonnant style.

The typical late-Gothic taste for tall and slender forms is also noticeable in Regensburg Cathedral, which was built in the second half of the 13th century and is less tied to French models, presenting a more essential style. In Germany in particular, this new spirituality found expression above all in the creation of hall churches (Hallenkirchen), characterised by spaciousness, openness, and the absence of clerestory windows, such as the Wiesenkirche in Soest, Westphalia, built around 1330. The latter features a square plan in which the nave is indistinguishable from the choir, while the arcades, supported by slender columns, rise harmoniously to the vaults.

Mention must also be made of the choir of Aachen Cathedral (1355), adjacent to the Palatine Chapel, in which the influence of Cologne merges with that of the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. The structure consists of walls covered in extremely high stained-glass windows, surmounted by a ribbed groin vault. The model adopted was that of the hall choir, which subsequently spread in the Austrian region (where St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna, built between 1339 and 1365, also stands out for its characteristic polychrome roof).

Backsteingotik

In the northern regions, in the Hanseatic and Baltic cities (such as Northern Germany and Poland), the lack of quarries for extracting natural stone led to the creation of a particular Gothic style based on brick, called Backsteingotik (Brick Gothic). The builders of the time managed to combine the use of this poorer material with the elevation and lightness characteristic of French Gothic, simplifying its forms without sacrificing sumptuousness.

The main examples of this style include St. Mary's Church in Lübeck (1250–1350), St. Mary's Church in Gdańsk (1379–1502), St. Mary's Basilica in Kraków (1290–1365), and Malbork Castle (13th century). They were not limited only to religious architecture: entire urban plans were laid out according to the Gothic style of the Hanseatic regions, with the construction of civil and public buildings, such as the famous Holstentor gate in Lübeck, and structures in Chorin, Prenzlau, and Stralsund.

Swabia and Bohemia

In Swabia and Bohemia, the spread of the Gothic style is linked to the work of the Parlers, a dynasty of master builders who built a vast network of professional relationships. Originally, the term 'parler' indicated the first assistant to the master builder (magister operis), and only from the 14th century onwards did it become the family's surname. The patriarch was Heinrich I the Elder, whose descendants extended their artistic influence across a large part of Bohemia, in the German-Austrian area, reaching as far as Brabant and Flanders. In their works, recurring elements are recognized in the layout of spaces and the conformation of complex vaults, which justifies the term Parlergotik.

Heinrich Parler and his son Peter both worked at the parish church of the Holy Cross in Schwäbisch-Gmünd (1320), in Swabia, reviving the model of the hall church based on the simplicity of the mendicant orders, but with innovative solutions in the choir (begun in 1350).

Peter Parler, in particular, was one of the great protagonists of the Late Gothic. In 1356, he was summoned to Prague by Emperor Charles IV to complete St. Vitus Cathedral, begun in 1344 by the French architect Mathieu d'Arras. The sovereign had transformed Prague into the capital of the Empire and wanted to expand it with an ambitious monumental plan, which included a Gothic palace, Karlstejn Castle, and buildings for the new University of Prague.

While working on St. Vitus, Peter Parler broke the fluid rhythm of the ambulatory, added the monumental square-plan chapel dedicated to Saint Wenceslas, and crowned the interiors with a pioneering fillet vault (or intersecting ribs in a mesh pattern, which evokes the solutions of English Gothic), where the ribs intertwine in a continuous fashion. Peter Parler we also worked on the construction of the All Saints' Chapel on the Hradčany hill (using the Sainte-Chapelle as a model), the famous Charles Bridge over the Vltava (1357), the choir of Kolín (1360), and the Frauenkirche in Nuremberg.

Family members were active throughout Europe: Wenzel was architect of the cathedral of Vienna (1400–1404), Johann IV worked on the choir of Kutná Hora, and Heinrich III was at the construction site of Milan Cathedral in 1392. Many builders drew inspiration from them, such as Ulrich von Ensingen (who designed the enormous tower of Ulm Minster, begun in 1377, and worked on the facade of Strasbourg). At the end of the 14th century, the Parler style was also adapted to the brick churches of the north, as in Stargard and Brandenburg.

Flanders, Brabant, and the Netherlands

In the Middle Ages, present-day Belgium and the Netherlands were part of the sphere of artistic influence of the Diocese of Cologne and France. However, it is in civil and public architecture that the Gothic style of this region reached its apogee. From the late 13th century onwards, the area of Flanders and Brabant was at the center of a very rich commercial and textile network. The opulence of the bourgeoisie favored the development of civic life, which manifested itself in grandiose buildings decorated in ashlar masonry: the hallen (large markets and merchandise warehouses) and municipal palaces (town halls). To symbolize secular power versus religious power, these civic buildings were endowed with towering belfries ('beffrois'), matching the scale of the great cathedrals.

The municipal palace of Aalst (1225) became the typological reference point, with its corner turrets and a continuous row of windows. The town halls of Bruges and Brussels present similar schemes, but with hyper-decorated facades, a taste for late-Gothic detail also visible in the palaces of Mons (1458), Ghent (1518), the daring palace of Leuven (1448), and the palace of Oudenaarde (1526–1536).

In regional religious architecture, the Brabantine Gothic style stands out. It is characterized by the use of light-colored sandstone or limestone (which allowed for very meticulous carved details), columns with capitals of stylized foliage (such as cabbage leaves), and sometimes ceilings or vaults with wooden structures due to soil conditions. Notable examples include the Church of Our Lady of the Sablon in Brussels (15th century), the Cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula (also in Brussels, begun in the 13th century), and the Church of St. Bavo in Haarlem, Netherlands, famous for its monumental structural wooden Gothic ceiling (c. 1479).

Southern European Gothic

Italy

The Gothic style arrived late in Italy and failed to take deep root due to the strong classical tradition present in the peninsula. Italian Gothic architecture was deeply influenced by the geopolitics of its city-states and the materials available in different regions: marble was available in large quantities in Tuscany, being generously used for surface cladding, while its scarcity in Lombardy induced the systematic and autonomous use of brick. Many transalpine architectural elements were rejected or profoundly subverted, reflecting architectural choices associated with Italian urban traditions and a detachment from the Île-de-France cathedral model.

Thus, instead of dissolving the wall mass into an abstract structural system dominated by glass, Italian architecture preserved the mass and two-dimensionality of the wall, converting it into an abstract plane of chromatic effects and an iconographic support for frescoes. The persistence of architectural solutions distinct from French cathedrals should not be understood as passive resistance or technical delay, but as an expression of Italian political and institutional structures. The monumental architecture of urban communes, the papacy, and the empire developed their own languages that hardly aligned with the model of centralized territorial monarchies of northern Europe.

The Cistercian monastic order played an important role in the initial diffusion of Gothic solutions in Italy, transmitting above all their own interpretation of Burgundian Gothic rather than direct models of French cathedrals, as seen in the Fossanova Abbey (consecrated in 1208) and the Casamari Abbey (1203–1217). Although they followed the basic plan of Gothic Cistercian churches in Burgundy, particularly Cîteaux Abbey, Cister's transmission role was locally requalified. Its aesthetics were absorbed not as a typological replica of French cathedrals, but as a decisive step to organize in a linear and abstract way the static and heavy structures of the Italian basilical tradition.

Among the earliest examples of Gothic religious architecture is the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi (1228–1239). It is an extremely original building, to the point where it is impossible to recognize a specific model that served as a reference for the builders. The church has a simple structure, with a Latin cross plan devoid of side aisles and lacking the typical verticality of large French cathedrals. Furthermore, it features massive walls, following a model inherited from Roman and Romanesque architecture. These heavy walls were decorated with frescoes by Cimabue and Giotto, works that, in turn, strongly influenced later Italian painting. Romanesque elements are also present on the facade of the Church of San Francisco in Bologna, another of the earliest cult buildings constructed in the Gothic style. Its interior, however, shows a greater understanding of the Gothic, with its side aisles and an ambulatory equipped with radiating chapels.

The Basilica of Saint Francis would become a model for Italian Gothic, featuring vast wall surfaces that lent themselves to hosting important fresco cycles. This is a fundamental difference compared to large cathedrals in the rest of Europe, where the wall tended to thin out to be replaced by artistic stained glass. From the second half of the 13th century onwards, the mendicant orders also exercised a decisive influence on Italian architecture. Their churches, frequently located in expanding urban peripheries, adopted spatially vast and relatively simple solutions, prioritizing liturgical functionality and preaching, while assimilating construction characteristics specific to local traditions.

The Italian plan is generally regular and symmetric; cathedrals have few and widely spaced columns, which unify the interior space along the entrance-choir axis. Proportions are generally mathematically balanced, based on the square and the concept of armonia, and except in Venice—where extravagant arches of great decorative exuberance were appreciated—arches are almost always equilateral. Italian Gothic cathedrals frequently retained Romanesque features and conservative static choices. Also Gothic in style is the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, erected by the Dominicans, which features a lighter and airier structure. Founded in 1279, it is the best example of Italian Gothic from the second half of the 13th century, as well as one of the most original, given the scarce impact of French Gothic on its conception. Inside, the side aisles communicate directly with the central nave through wide arcades, generating a unitary space. The circular window rises over flat, bare walls, while the vault is very elevated, a feature that allowed the use of buttresses and flying buttresses to be dispensed with. A similar style is found in Santa Croce in Florence, the Franciscan church designed by Arnolfo da Cambio. In general, a certain reticence toward the Gothic can be observed in other cathedrals that emerged across the peninsula between the 13th and 14th centuries, such as in Siena and Orvieto, where Romanesque elements survived alongside the more typical features of the new style.

The cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, the see of Florence, was designed in 1296 by Arnolfo da Cambio. Italian cathedrals were not as tall as French ones; they rarely used flying buttresses and generally had only two levels—an arcade and a clerestory with small windows—maintaining the tectonic integrity of the wall. Inside Santa Maria del Fiore, the central nave and side aisles merge into a single, immense fluid space. Arnolfo's original design was later partially modified by Francesco Talenti, who took over direction of the works around 1350. A lively debate ensued, involving various masters, including sculptors, painters, and goldsmiths. The initial project also anticipated an imposing dome that no one was able to erect until the 15th century, at which point the complex technical problems were brilliantly solved by Filippo Brunelleschi—already entering the full Renaissance period. The bell tower ('campanile') of the cathedral, begun according to Giotto's design, continued by Andrea Pisano, and completed by Talenti, recovers a tradition typical of Florentine Romanesque yet distant from the Gothic. It presents an elegant square base and is adorned with marble decorations in rectilinear compartments. The transept crossing in Italian cathedrals is generally surmounted by an exposed octagonal dome, reinforcing the dialogue between the longitudinal system and the central head, while the bell tower and baptistery remained typologically independent structures.

The smallest notable Italian Gothic church is Santa Maria della Spina in Pisa (c. 1330), which exemplifies the exuberant explosion of the Late Gothic, resembling a Gothic jewelry box in which the decorative language overflows the modesty of the structures. On the other hand, the Basilica of Bologna (San Petronio, begun in 1388) adopted the hall church style (Hallenkirche) and rivaled the Bourges Cathedral in France in height.

In 14th-century Tuscany, a Gothic style very far from the Radiant style and extremely original spread, developing a rich decoration technique visible in both civil buildings and religious architecture. The masterpiece of this style is the facade of the Orvieto Cathedral, whose reconstruction began after 1290 from an ambitious project that still retained Romanesque traits. The nave of Orvieto Cathedral maintained the spirit of classical and paleochristian antiquity through solemn arcades and an original wooden ceiling, deliberately evoking the Roman basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore under the patronage and political ideology of the papacy. The sculpted polychrome decoration on the facade is due to the Sienese Lorenzo Maitani, who took over the direction of works starting in 1310.

A distinctive feature of Italian Gothic is the use of polychrome decoration, both externally (as marble cladding over brick facades) and internally, where arches and pillars are often made of alternating segments of light and dark stone. Italian church facades, often conceived as wall surfaces independent of the church body (such as Lombard "a vento" facades), feature open porches (protiros) and oculus or circular windows rather than complex rose windows. The eastern end generally features a relatively low and rectilinear projecting apse adapted to the urban scale. Although stained glass is frequently found, the primary narrative medium of the interior was the fresco, ceding the leading role in instructing the faithful to painting. Another innovation of Italian Gothic is the bronze door covered with sculptures (the most famous examples being the doors of the Florence Baptistery by Andrea Pisano (1330–1336)). Lacking the elaborate sculptural tympanums over entrances typical of French cathedrals, Italian architecture featured abundant realistic sculptural decoration integrated into the surface, notably the works of Nicola Pisano in the Baptistery of the Pisa Cathedral (1259–1260) and the Siena Cathedral, and of his son Giovanni Pisano on the western facade of the latter (1284–1285).

In Italy, the only attempt to build a cathedral that fully and coherently followed the canons of French Gothic was carried out at Milan's Duomo. The first project was prepared in 1387, followed by a debate among builders that assumed international proportions. Between 1387 and 1401, the Milanese requested assistance from masters from Campione, Bologna, Paris, and Germany. The works spanned centuries, and the cathedral was only completed in 1858. The entire structure conveys a sense of grandeur and solemnity, starting with the pink marbles that clad both the exterior and interior. The naves are delimited by pillars topped by edicule-shaped capitals housing statues.

Between the 12th and 15th centuries, numerous civil buildings inspired by the Gothic style also sprang up in many Italian cities, although they do not share the aspiration to verticality that characterizes the Gothic in France and other countries. This architectural flourishing was a direct consequence of the peninsula's prosperity, which at the time constituted the main financial center of Europe. This was combined with the strong civic identity asserted in each commune, where violent factional clashes for control of political power frequently broke out. One of the earliest examples was the Piazza del Campo in Siena, built starting in 1298. The square, with its celebrated fan shape, is dominated by the Palazzo Pubblico (1298–1348), seat of the municipal government, whose plan consists of a complex network of rooms and offices, many decorated with frescoes by celebrated artists. Rising above the palace is the Torre del Mangia. Florence's Palazzo Vecchio (1299–1314), seat of the Florentine government, retains the volumetry and characteristics of the defensive fortress it once was. Next to it stands the Loggia della Signoria, built around 1370, which already displays elements of transition to the Renaissance.

Particularly exquisite are the palaces built in southern Italy. Among them stands out the fortified palace commissioned by Frederick II at Castel del Monte (completed after 1250), with an octagonal plan where French Gothic elements merge with aspects of Roman ancestry. In northern Italy, on the other hand, the construction of military buildings continued, exemplified by the castles of Sirmione on the shores of Lake Garda and Fénis in the Aosta Valley. However, the most refined palaces of Italian medieval architecture are found in Venice, which in the 15th century was the most prosperous commercial city in the Mediterranean. The Doge's Palace, whose reconstruction began in the mid-14th century, acquired its current appearance in the 1420s. It features a two-tiered arcade gallery, topped by an upper body clad in white and pink marble slabs.

Spain

Intense architectural activity in Spain remained steady until the end of the Middle Ages. Among the cathedrals planned at the beginning of the 15th century, the most majestic is Seville Cathedral (1401), designed with a five-aisled plan and chapels embedded directly into the exterior buttresses. The vaults rise to the level of the upper clerestory-style windows.

In 1469, the country achieved political unification as a result of the marriage between Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile; in 1492, this was followed by the annexation of the Kingdom of Granada, until then the last Muslim domain, and in 1412 the Kingdom of Navarre was conquered. In the 16th century, Spain would become the hegemonic power of Europe, consolidated by the coronation of Charles V (Charles I of Spain) as Holy Roman Emperor. In the late eighteenth century, a new style called Isabeline thus spread, fusing the characteristics of Flamboyant Gothic with elements of Mudéjar affiliation and early Renaissance influxes.

One of the exponents of this period is the church of San Gil Abad in Burgos, where the Chapel of the Nativity of Mary (1529) uses squinches to convert the square plan into an octagonal one, crowned by a star vault with a central oculus. In the Chapel of the Sorrowful Mother, the curved liernes (tertiary ribs), typical of Iberian Late Gothic, stand out, while the Chapel of the Three Kings (1489) is characterized by its geometric complexity and highly ornamented vault bosses, reflecting the direct influence of the craftsmen of Burgos Cathedral.

Spanish Gothic from this phase resulted from close collaboration between local, German, Flemish, and French architects and artisans. Among the most prominent figures is Juan Guas, author of the monastery of San Juan de los Reyes in Toledo. This is a Franciscan convent endowed with unusual ornamental sumptuosity, filled with sculptural programs. The church, commissioned directly by the Catholic Monarchs, was intended to house the royal pantheon until the conquest of Granada (1492). To Simón de Colonia we owe, in turn, the Capilla del Condestable (1482–1494), inserted inside Burgos Cathedral. Established by the hereditary constable of Castile, Pedro Fernández de Velasco, it features an octagonal plan crowned by complex spires and flamboyant tracery. The same architect later worked on the exuberant facade of the church of Saint Paul in Valladolid (1495–1505). Spain also possesses a vast heritage of medieval urban centers, although it preserves fewer Gothic civil buildings compared to Italy or Flanders. Its castles, dating mostly from the 15th century, are in excellent condition. There is no shortage, however, of exceptional references from the previous century, such as Bellver Castle, on the outskirts of Palma de Mallorca, commissioned for King James II of Aragon. It features a perfectly circular plan and the palatial quarters develop around a central courtyard, where an elegant two-story arcade gallery stands out. The body of the castle connects externally to the keep, also of circular plan.

Kingdom of Castile

In the Iberian Peninsula, French Gothic elements were introduced by the Cistercians in the second half of the 12th century. The earliest examples were the monasteries of Veruela, Poblet, and Santes Creus. Ribbed vaults were very early applied inside buildings of still fully Romanesque matrix, such as the Portico of Glory of the Santiago de Compostela Cathedral or Zamora Cathedral, which would also influence the Collegiate Church of Santa María la Mayor in Toro. The Gothic style in the Iberian Peninsula presents surprisingly different variations from the rest of Europe, the result of a transitional period in which the end of the Romanesque alternated with rare expressions of pure Gothic.

In 1172, the French architect Giral Fruchel designed the territory's first Gothic cathedral, Ávila Cathedral in Castile, which represents precisely this fusion between Romanesque and Gothic. Inspired by the Basilica of Saint-Denis, King Alfonso VIII of Castile demanded for Ávila a plan with radiating chapels and a double ambulatory. Standing out within the cathedral are the unusual flying buttresses in the transept and nave, making it one of the earliest works of Gothic architecture in Spain. Among the first buildings to consistently employ Gothic style elements are the church of San Vicente and Ávila Cathedral itself, a cathedral-castle where battlements, machicolations, and watchtowers combine with its structure.

In the 13th century, however, fundamental historical-political shifts occurred with direct repercussions on Hispanic architecture. Muslims lost control of most of the peninsula: following the conquest of Seville in 1248, only the Kingdom of Granada remained under their domain. The kingdoms of Castile, Aragon, and later Mallorca asserted themselves, alongside the Kingdom of Portugal, as the new Iberian powers. It is precisely in this 13th century that the so-called Full Gothic (or High Gothic) arrived with full force through the pilgrimage routes of the Way of St. James, a time when the purest cathedrals, closely linked to French and German Gothic, were erected. These are fully manifested in the cathedrals of Toledo, Burgos, and León, located in the territories of the Kingdom of Castile.

The distinctive feature of the Iberian Peninsula's Gothic cathedrals is their spatial complexity, with many areas of different shapes interconnecting. They are comparatively wide and frequently feature very high arcades topped by low clerestories, giving them a spatiality similar to German hall churches. This chronological categorization is often preferable to stylistic classification, applying the qualifier "Gothic" with caution and favoring the term "low medieval".

The reconstruction of Toledo Cathedral, begun in 1227 by Archbishop Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, was completed in the late 15th century. It exemplifies the richness of this period, erected over an old mosque and maintaining a plan that partially recalled the original Islamic structure; the fusion of French Gothic with local elements generated a unique style. It recovers some characteristics of Bourges Cathedral, featuring a double ambulatory and double side aisles of decreasing height. It differs, however, from its model due to its marked horizontal expansion, large bronze doors on the central portal, simple vaults, elaborate stonework with colored marbles, profuse decorations, and a transept that interrupts the continuity of the aisles. Some Mudéjar elements—typical of Hispano-Moorish Islamic architecture—are also integrated. An example of this is the ambulatory, where three- or five-lobed arches are found, surmounted by a larger arch; of Islamic root are also the decorations of the archivolts and rose windows located in that same area.

Burgos Cathedral is contemporary to Toledo's: begun around 1221, it underwent multiple subsequent alterations, and was completed and consecrated in 1260. It has a more homogeneous structure than Toledo's, incorporating pier arcades, clerestories, flying buttresses, and a large rose window, with the choir singularly positioned in the center of the nave rather than between the nave and the altar. The influence of French cathedrals is perfectly perceptible: the spaces are wide, abundantly lit, and approach the forms of Reims and Paris. Particularly original is the triforium which, as in Toledo, exhibits typical Hispano-Moorish influenced decorations. Also noteworthy are the German-influenced towers on the west facade (combining intricate ornamentation with broad flat surfaces), begun in 1444 by architect John of Cologne, and subsequently complemented by a central tower completed in 1540 by his grandson.

León Cathedral was supposedly begun around 1255. Its west facade typically resembles French facades, although it presents wider proportions relative to height. Its plan evokes that of Chartres Cathedral, while the ambulatory with five radial chapels and the transept endowed with side aisles were imported from Reims. The traceried triforium clearly approaches the Radiant Gothic, with a total absence of the Hispano-Moorish decorations observed in Toledo and Burgos. León Cathedral presents a very slender volumetry, typical of French Radiant Gothic, with its shafts and clustered colonnettes rising vertically to the vaults.

Many Iberian cathedrals are completely surrounded by chapels which, as in English cathedrals, are frequently stylistically diverse. In Oviedo Cathedral, the Chapter House (built between 1293 and 1314) exemplifies this diversity with its Aquitaine-Spanish group vaulting, using ribbed squinches to cover a square plan with an octagonal vault. The absence of an ambulatory in buildings such as Oviedo Cathedral—which differs from Bayonne and Pamplona in this aspect—was due to liturgical and functional reasons; if relics were kept in an independent building (such as the Holy Chamber), a peripheral ambulatory lost its meaning. Although León Cathedral is frequently proposed as a model for the new San Salvador of Oviedo, the latter's morphology reveals a closer relationship with Bayonne Cathedral, begun around 1310. It is important to note that the Gothic style also includes lower quality constructions of a more popular character, where technical crudeness conceals scholarly international models reinterpreted through popularization processes.

Catalonia, the Balearic Islands, and Valencia

Architectural development in this region is inseparable from its political, social, and territorial reality. The monarchy, consolidated from the time of Ramon Berenguer IV and the union with the Kingdom of Aragon, determined the guidelines of ecclesiastical architecture and allied with the urban bourgeoisie and merchant aristocracy, driving institutional growth and city urbanism.

During the first half of the 13th century, there was a stagnation of Romanesque forms and the maintenance of contacts with Italy and Languedoc (Toulouse), especially in secondary centres of Old Catalonia. However, under the reign of James I (1213–1276), who redefined Catalan politics with the conquest of Mallorca and Valencia, the landscape changed profoundly:

In the final decades of the 13th century, new Gothic forms began to be introduced in major urban centers (Barcelona, Girona, Perpignan) and in newly reconquered cities from Islam (Lleida, Tarragona, Tortosa, Palma de Mallorca, Valencia), being superimposed and adapted to pre-existing spatiality and structures. Thanks to available resources, the Church erected cathedrals and parishes in the reconquered areas, such as Tarragona Cathedral, the old Lleida Cathedral, Sant Llorenç, Sant Martí, and Santa Maria de Agramunt. In Barcelona, a new episcopal see was planned and the chapel of Santa Llúcia was built, while in Perpignan the church of Saint-Jean-le-Vieux was erected. The period was also marked by the construction activity of major Cistercian abbeys (Poblet, Santes Creus, and Vallbona de les Monges), mendicant orders (convents of Santa Caterina and Sant Francesc in Barcelona), and chivalric orders (the Peñíscola Castle of the Templars, and the church of Sant Joan de l'Hospital in Valencia).

The 13th-century building activity also included the projection of Barcelona's city wall to protect new neighbourhoods (such as Santa Maria del Mar and Sant Pere de les Puelles), the first restorations of the Palau Reial Major, and the foundation of the drassanes (naval shipyards) by Peter III the Great (1281). Added to this are the municipal palace of La Paeria in Lleida, the chapels of the Palais des Rois de Majorque in Perpignan, and rural and urban residences of the nobility, such as the castles of Maldà and Verdú.

In Catalonia, the Balearic Islands, and Valencia—territories then controlled by the Crown of Aragon, whose Mediterranean and urban expansion culminated in its apogee under the reigns of James II, Alfonso III, and above all Peter the Ceremonious (1336–1387)— very original characteristics developed between 1262 and 1393, inspired in part by the churches of the mendicant orders, whose strong urban presence dated back to the previous century, which privileged a single nave flanked by side chapels.

Among these, the most important is the church of Santa Maria del Pi in Barcelona (begun in 1322), in which the large unitary interior volume is punctuated by chapels inserted into the flanks. This parochial typology mirrors the great construction increase associated with the development of new urban neighborhoods in the 14th century, also visible in churches like Santa Maria del Mar and Sant Just i Pastor in Barcelona, Sant Feliu in Girona, Santa Maria de l'Aurora in Manresa, and the homonymous churches of Santa Maria in Castelló d'Empúries, Cervera, and Montblanc.

An identical spatial conception is found in multi-aisled structures, such as Barcelona Cathedral, begun in 1298 to replace the aforementioned episcopal see, but completed only in the 19th century. The chapels are integrated into the load-bearing structure itself, making the dividing walls assume the function of internal buttresses. Furthermore, it features towering arcades, reducing upper windows to mere oculus openings. The central nave is covered by four large square vault bays, which discharge their weight onto the chapels, tribunes, and buttresses. This 14th-century architecture is based on a classical ascension spatiality that favours the homogenization of internal space, modulated by harmoniously proportioned bays, formally resorting to groin vaults and clustered pillars.

Simultaneously, Valencia Cathedral (13th to 15th centuries) developed following this regional tendency of ample spatiality, with the process of introducing Gothic forms beginning in the late 13th century over the structures of the recently reconquered city, later becoming in the 15th century one of the great centres of concentration of artistic and public resources after the extinction of the main line of the house of Barcelona.

Girona Cathedral, begun in 1312, shares similar traits with Toledo Cathedral, differing, however, in the elevation of the choir, which features ample windows and an open triforium over its large arcades. The reconstruction of this 14th-century cathedral replaced the earlier Romanesque structure, with the worksite counting on the collaboration of local masters, such as the Borrassà family, in producing its stained glass windows. In the 15th century, the structure was profoundly altered: architect Guillaume Boffy erected an immense single nave with powerful buttresses to support the vault, abutting it against the three aisles of the initial sanctuary. The transition and closure between the two sections were achieved through a frontal wall pierced by three large rose windows.

Palma Cathedral is particularly ambitious, with a large nave supported by many complex buttresses and flying buttresses. Construction began in the early 14th century over the urban space reconquered in the previous century by James I, and its chevet was completed in 1327, though the cathedral was not finished until the 17th century. The choir lacks an ambulatory and is lower than the nave, which has a two-storey elevation with soaring frestas and tall windows. The high vaults are supported by slender octagonal pillars.

The Gothic model of the region expanded strongly into civil architecture and major public works financed by municipalities (especially Barcelona's) and professional corporations. Outstanding examples include public palaces (the palaces of the Generalitat and the municipal palaces of Barcelona and Valencia), large merchant exchanges (Llotges of Barcelona, Palma, Perpignan, and Valencia), the expansions of Barcelona's drassanes, and hospitals such as Santa Creu. This civil and religious language would exert a direct influence on other Mediterranean areas, serving as a model for Castel Nuovo in Naples and Palazzo Bellomo in Syracuse.

Portugal

Gothic architecture was introduced to Portugal in the late 12th century, progressively asserting itself over the following centuries within the context of the kingdom's consolidation, the expansion of the Catholic Church, and the affirmation of the territorial independence. In contrast to the scale and monumentality of contemporary European cathedrals, Portuguese Gothic is characterized by restrained and refined volumes, conditioned by local materials: granite in the north, soft limestone in the Coimbra region, and lioz limestone in Lisbon. Pedro Dias considers Portuguese Gothic to be distinct from the Romanesque, while other authors emphasize the continuity between both styles.

The first to introduce the style were the Cistercian monks, whose austere style may be seen in the Alcobaça Monastery (1178-1252), the country's first entirely Gothic building. It has a chevet, rib vaults and flying buttresses. Simultaneously, military orders played a decisive role in spreading the new language, as observed in the Church of Santa Maria do Olival and the round church in the Convent of Christ, both in Tomar (Templars). Évora Cathedral and the cloister of the Old Cathedral of Coimbra also belong to this initial phase. The spread of Gothic architecture was enabled by contacts with the western French coastline and dynastic relations with the House of Évreux, introducing models that linked Portugal and the Asturias to southwestern France. However, the transition between Romanesque and Gothic proceeded slowly, throughout the 13th and 14th centuries. Conservative features like plate tracery were used as late as the 14th century, for example at the Monastery of Odivelas (1295–1305). Santarém was the centre of this transitional style, influencing, alongside the Monastery of Almoster (1289), the churches of Santa Cruz and Santa Clara. The same transitional vocabulary was used in the church of the Monastery of Cete in Paredes—still marked by a Romanesque spatiality, although provided with pointed arches and vegetal capitals. As in Spain, Gothic exteriors were frequently blocky and fortress-like, lacking spires or steep roofs.

Cathedrals, such as those of Porto, Coimbra, Lamego, and Lisbon, initiated in the Romanesque period, were completed or remodelled according to Gothic principles, frequently incorporating cloisters of Cistercian influence. Porto also has early flying buttresses. In the Coimbra region, the church of the Convent of Santa Clara-a-Velha, attributed to architect Domingos Domingues, stands out, having a vaulted ceiling that contrasts with the wooden roofs of mendicant architecture. Only the Alcobaça Monastery, Santa Clara-a-Velha, Évora Cathedral, Guarda Cathedral and the Batalha Monastery are fully stone vaulted.

The full consolidation of the Gothic in the 14th century was driven by the establishment of mendicant friars, whose foundations accompanied the growth of urban centres. The mendicant branch of Portuguese Gothic defined itself by formal sobriety: unvaulted three-aisled plans, clerestory lighting over arcades, and projecting transepts with stone-vaulted apse chapels. Exemplifying this typology are Silves Cathedral, the convent of São Francisco of Porto and the Santa Clara-a-Velha Monastery in Coimbra. This constructive burst developed during the reigns of Afonso III (1248–1279), Dinis (1279–1325), and Afonso IV (1325–1357). Female convents adapted spatiality to the demands of enclosure: the nave was frequently divided into two sections, reserving the western sector for the nuns and the eastern one for the congregation, a layout that required the elimination of the western portal in favour of southern doors. More minor churches remained conservative, featuring a single nave with a rib-vaulted polygonal apse and refined façades with pointed-arched portals surmounted by oculi or modest rose windows, as at the Church of Graça in Santarém.

During the course of the 14th century, the pace of construction slowed down, renewing itself under the House of Aviz in the reign of João I (1385–1433), a phase termed Joanine Gothic. The primary monument of this period is Batalha Monastery (begun in 1387), the burial-place of the Aviz dynasty. The structure reflects a formal eclecticism: in the early 15th century, the building incorporated Flamboyant Gothic features and a façade of marked horizontality, aligned with the English Perpendicular style. The Founder's Chapel was added in 1434, followed by an octagonal funerary rotunda (the Unifinished Chapels) under King Duarte. The Batalha worksite was the diffusing centre of 15th- and 16th-century Portuguese architecture, gathering masters and sculptors who fixed Gothic models throughout the kingdom. Its influence propagated through masters trained at Batalha, called to direct works in various regions, such as at the collegiate church of Guimarães and the Carmo Convent in Lisbon. Under the action of João I, the language of Batalha extended to the north via the Convent of São Domingos in Vila Real, while in the centre it manifested itself at Guarda Cathedral.

Manuel I (1495–1521) pushed the completion of the rotunda at Batalha, adding seven radial chapels and a monumental portal sculpted by Mateus Fernandes. His reign marks the affirmation of the Manueline style, a variant of Late Gothic fuelled by economic prosperity and the cultural context of the Age of Discovery. Manueline articulated the decorative exuberance of Late Gothic with a naturalist, heraldic, and maritime iconography. The paradigmatic expression of the style is found in the Chapter House window of the Convent of Christ in Tomar (1510–1514), designed by Diogo de Arruda. Other important examples include the Jerónimos Monastery and the Belém Tower in Lisbon. As well as the Manueline style, late Gothic architecture in Portugal included Mudéjar elements, as at Sintra Royal Palace.

Decline and transition

Beginning in the mid-15th century, the Gothic style gradually lost its dominance in Europe. It had never been popular in Italy, and in the mid-15th century the Italians, drawing upon ancient Roman ruins, returned to classical models. The dome of Florence Cathedral (1420–1436) by Filippo Brunelleschi, inspired by the Pantheon, Rome, was one of the first Renaissance landmarks, but it also employed Gothic technology; the outer skin of the dome was supported by a framework of twenty-four ribs. In the 16th century, as Renaissance architecture from Italy began to appear in France and other countries in Europe. The Gothic style began to be described as outdated, ugly and even barbaric. The term "Gothic" was first used as a pejorative description. Giorgio Vasari used the term "barbarous German style" in his 1550 Lives of the Artists to describe what is now considered the Gothic style. In the introduction to the Lives he attributed various architectural features to the Goths whom he held responsible for destroying the ancient buildings after they conquered Rome, and erecting new ones in this style. In the 17th century, Molière also mocked the Gothic style in the 1669 poem La Gloire: "...the insipid taste of Gothic ornamentation, these odious monstrosities of an ignorant age, produced by the torrents of barbarism..." The dominant styles in Europe became in turn Italian Renaissance architecture, Baroque architecture, and the grand classicism of the style Louis XIV.

The Kings of France had first-hand knowledge of the new Italian style, because of the military campaign of Charles VIII to Naples and Milan (1494), and especially the campaigns of Louis XII and François I (1500–1505) to restore French control over Milan and Genoa. They brought back Italian paintings, sculpture and building plans, and, more importantly, Italian craftsmen and artists. The Cardinal Georges d'Amboise, chief minister of Louis XII, built the Chateau of Gaillon near Rouen (1502–1510) with the assistance of Italian craftsmen. The Château de Blois (1515–1524) introduced the Renaissance loggia and open stairway. François I installed Leonardo da Vinci at his Chateau of Chambord in 1516, and introduced a Renaissance long gallery at the Palace of Fontainebleau in 1528–1540. In 1546 François I began building the first example of French classicism, the square courtyard of the Louvre Palace designed by Pierre Lescot.

Nonetheless, new Gothic buildings, particularly churches, continued to be built. New Gothic churches built in Paris in this period included Saint-Merri (1520–1552) and Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois. The first signs of classicism in Paris churches did not appear until 1540, at Saint-Gervais-Saint-Protais. The largest new church, Saint-Eustache (1532–1560), rivalled Notre-Dame in size, 105 m (344 ft) long, 44 m (144 ft) wide, and 35 m (115 ft) high. As construction of this church continued, elements of Renaissance decoration, including the system of classical orders of columns, were added to the design, making it a Gothic-Renaissance hybrid.

In Germany, some Italian elements were introduced at the Fugger Chapel of St. Anne's Church, Augsburg (1510–1512), combined with Gothic vaults; and others appeared in the Church of St. Michael in Munich, but in Germany Renaissance elements were used primarily for decoration. Some Renaissance elements also appeared in Spain, in the new palace begun by Emperor Charles V in Granada, within the Alhambra (1485–1550), inspired by Bramante and Raphael, but it was never completed. The first major Renaissance work in Spain was El Escorial, the monastery-palace built by Philip II of Spain.

Under Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, England was largely isolated from architectural developments on the continent. The first classical building in England was the Old Somerset House in London (1547–1552) (since demolished), built by Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset, who was regent as Lord Protector for Edward VI until the young king came of age in 1547. Somerset's successor, John Dudley, 1st Duke of Northumberland, sent the architectural scholar John Shute to Italy to study the style. Shute published the first book in English on classical architecture in 1570. The first English houses in the new style were Burghley House (1550s–1580s) and Longleat, built by associates of Somerset. With those buildings, a new age of architecture began in England.

Gothic architecture, usually churches or university buildings, continued to be built. Ireland was an island of Gothic architecture in the 17th and 18th centuries, with the construction of Derry Cathedral (completed 1633), Sligo Cathedral (c. 1730), and Down Cathedral (1790–1818) are other examples. In the 17th and 18th century several important Gothic buildings were constructed at Oxford University and Cambridge University, including Tom Tower (1681–82) at Christ Church, Oxford, by Christopher Wren. It also appeared, in a whimsical fashion, in Horace Walpole's Twickenham villa, Strawberry Hill (1749–1776). The two western towers of Westminster Abbey were constructed between 1722 and 1745 by Nicholas Hawksmoor, opening a new period of Gothic Revival.

Gothic architecture survived the early modern period and flourished again in a revival from the late 18th century and throughout the 19th. Perpendicular was the first Gothic style revived in the 18th century.

Rediscovery and revival

In England, partly in response to a philosophy propounded by the Oxford Movement and others associated with the emerging revival of 'high church' or Anglo-Catholic ideas during the second quarter of the 19th century, neo-Gothic began to become promoted by influential establishment figures as the preferred style for ecclesiastical, civic and institutional architecture. The appeal of this Gothic Revival (which after 1837, in Britain, is sometimes termed Victorian Gothic), gradually widened to encompass "low church" as well as "high church" clients. This period of more universal appeal, spanning 1855–1885, is known in Britain as High Victorian Gothic.

The Palace of Westminster in London by Sir Charles Barry with interiors by a major exponent of the early Gothic Revival, Augustus Welby Pugin, is an example of the Gothic revival style from its earlier period in the second quarter of the 19th century. Examples from the High Victorian Gothic period include George Gilbert Scott's design for the Albert Memorial in London, and William Butterfield's chapel at Keble College, Oxford. From the second half of the 19th century onwards, it became more common in Britain for neo-Gothic to be used in the design of non-ecclesiastical and non-governmental buildings types. Gothic details even began to appear in working-class housing schemes subsidised by philanthropy, though given the expense, less frequently than in the design of upper and middle-class housing.

The middle of the 19th century was a period marked by the restoration, and in some cases modification, of ancient monuments and the construction of neo-Gothic edifices such as the nave of Cologne Cathedral and the Sainte-Clotilde of Paris as speculation of mediaeval architecture turned to technical consideration. London's Palace of Westminster, St Pancras railway station, New York's Trinity Church and St Patrick's Cathedral are also famous examples of Gothic Revival buildings. The style also reached the Far East in the period, for instance the Anglican St John's Cathedral located at the centre of Victoria City in Central, Hong Kong.

Structural elements

Pointed arches

The defining characteristic of the Gothic style is the pointed arch, which was widely used in both structure and decoration. The pointed arch did not originate in Gothic architecture; they had been employed for centuries in the Near East in pre-Islamic as well as Islamic architecture for arches, arcades, and ribbed vaults. In Gothic architecture, particularly in the later Gothic styles, they became the most visible and characteristic element, giving a sensation of verticality and pointing upward, like the spires. Gothic rib vaults covered the nave, and pointed arches were commonly used for the arcades, windows, doorways, in the tracery, and especially in the later Gothic styles decorating the façades. They were also sometimes used for more practical purposes, such as to bring transverse vaults to the same height as diagonal vaults, as in the nave and aisles of Durham Cathedral, built in 1093.

The earliest Gothic pointed arches were lancet lights or lancet windows, which are narrow windows terminating in a lancet arch. A lancet arch has a radius longer than their breadth (width) and resembles the blade of a lancet. In the 12th-century First Pointed phase of Gothic architecture (also called the Lancet style) and before the introduction of tracery in the windows in later styles, lancet windows predominated Gothic building.

The Flamboyant style of Gothic architecture is particularly known for lavish pointed details such as the arc-en-accolade, where a pointed arch over a doorway was topped by a pointed sculptural ornament called a fleuron and by pointed pinnacles on either side. The arches of the doorway were further decorated with small cabbage-shaped sculptures called chou-frisés.

Rib vaults

The Gothic rib vault was one of the essential elements that made the great height and large windows of Gothic architecture possible. Unlike the semi-circular barrel vault of Roman and Romanesque buildings, where the weight pressed directly downward, and required thick walls and small windows, the Gothic rib vault was made of diagonal crossing arched ribs. These ribs directed the thrust outwards to the corners of the vault, and downwards via slender colonnettes and bundled columns, to the pillars and columns below. The space between the ribs was filled with thin panels of small pieces of stone, which were much lighter than earlier groin vaults. The outward thrust against the walls was countered by the weight of buttresses and later flying buttresses. As a result, the massive, thick walls of Romanesque buildings were no longer needed, as since the vaults were supported by columns and piers, the walls could be made thinner and higher, and filled with windows.

The earlier Gothic rib vaults, used at Sens Cathedral (begun between 1135 and 1140) and Notre-Dame de Paris (begun 1163), were divided by the ribs into six compartments. They were very difficult to build and could only cross a limited space. Since each vault covered two bays, they needed support on the ground floor from alternating columns and piers. In later construction, the design was simplified, and the rib vaults were divided into only four compartments. The alternating rows of alternating columns and piers receiving the vaults' weight were replaced by simple pillars, each receiving the same weight. A single vault could cross the nave. This method was used at Chartres Cathedral (1194–1220), Amiens Cathedral (begun 1220), and Reims Cathedral. The four-part vaults made it possible for taller buildings to be constructed. Notre-Dame, which had begun with six-part vaults, reached a height of 35 m (115 ft). Amiens Cathedral, which had begun with the newer four-part ribs, reached a height of 42.3 m (139 ft) at the transept.

Later vaults (13th–15th century)

In France, the four-part rib vault, with two diagonals crossing at the center of the traverse, was the type used almost exclusively until the end of the Gothic period. However, in England, several imaginative new vaults were invented which had more elaborate decorative features. They became a signature of the later English Gothic styles.

The first of these new vaults had an additional rib, called a tierceron, which ran down the median of the vault. It first appeared in the vaults of the choir of Lincoln Cathedral at the end of the 12th century, then at Worcester Cathedral in 1224, and then the south transept of Lichfield Cathedral.

The 14th century brought the invention of several new types of vaults which were more and more decorative. These vaults often copied the forms of the elaborate tracery of the Late Gothic styles. These included the stellar vault, where a group of additional ribs between the principal ribs forms a star design. The oldest vaults of this kind were found in the crypt of Saint Stephen at Westminster Palace, built about 1320. A second type was called a reticulated vault, which had a network of additional decorative ribs, in triangles and other geometric forms, placed between or over the traverse ribs. These were first used in the choir of Bristol Cathedral in about 1311. Another late Gothic form, the fan vault, with ribs spreading upwards and outwards, appeared later in the 14th century. An example is the cloister of Gloucester Cathedral (c. 1370).

Another new form was the skeleton vault, which appeared in the English Decorated style. It has an additional network of ribs, like the ribs of an umbrella, which criss-cross the vault but are only directly attached to it at certain points. It appeared in a chapel of Lincoln Cathedral in 1300. and then several other English churches. This style of vault was adopted in the 14th century in particular by German architects, particularly Peter Parler, and in other parts of central Europe. Another exists in the south porch of the Prague Cathedral

Elaborate vaults also appeared in civic architecture. An example is the ceiling of the Vladislav Hall in Prague Castle in Bohemia designed by Benedikt Ried in 1493. The ribs twist and intertwine in fantasy patterns, which later critics called "Rococo Gothic".

Columns and piers

In early French Gothic architecture, the capitals of the columns were modeled after Roman columns of the Corinthian order, with finely-sculpted leaves. They were used in the ambulatory of the Abbey church of Saint-Denis. According to its builder, the Abbot Suger, they were inspired by the columns he had seen in the ancient baths in Rome. They were used later at Sens, at Notre-Dame de Paris and at Canterbury in England.

In early Gothic churches with six-part rib vaults, the columns in the nave alternated with more massive piers to provide support for the vaults. With the introduction of the four-part rib vault, all of the piers or columns in the nave could have the same design. In the High Gothic period, a new form was introduced, composed of a central core surrounded several attached slender columns, or colonettes, going up to the vaults. These clustered columns were used at Chartres, Amiens, Reims and Bourges, Westminster Abbey and Salisbury Cathedral. Another variation was a quadrilobe column, shaped like a clover, formed of four attached columns. In England, the clustered columns were often ornamented with stone rings, as well as columns with carved leaves.

Later styles added further variations. Sometimes the piers were rectangular and fluted, as at Seville Cathedral, In England, parts of columns sometimes had contrasting colours, using combining white stone with dark Purbeck marble. In place of the Corinthian capital, some columns used a stiff-leaf design. In later Gothic, the piers became much taller, reaching up more than half of the nave. Another variation, particularly popular in eastern France, was a column without a capital, which continued upward without capitals or other interruption, all the way to the vaults, giving a dramatic display of verticality.

Flying buttresses

An important feature of Gothic architecture was the flying buttress, a half-arch outside the building which carried the thrust of weight of the roof or vaults inside over a roof or an aisle to a heavy stone column. The buttresses were placed in rows on either side of the building, and were often topped by heavy stone pinnacles, both to give extra weight and for additional decoration.

Buttresses had existed since Roman times, usually set directly against the building, but the Gothic vaults were more sophisticated. In later structures, the buttresses often had several arches, each reaching in to a different level of the structure. The buttresses permitted the buildings to be both taller, and to have thinner walls, with greater space for windows.

Over time, the buttresses and pinnacles became more elaborate supporting statues and other decoration, as at Beauvais Cathedral and Reims Cathedral. The arches had an additional practical purpose; they contained lead channels which carried rainwater off the roof; it was expelled from the mouths of stone gargoyles placed in rows on the buttresses.

Flying buttresses were used less frequently in England, where the emphasis was more on length than height. One example of English buttresses was Canterbury Cathedral, whose choir and buttresses were rebuilt in Gothic style by William of Sens and William the Englishman. However, they were very popular in Germany: in Cologne Cathedral the buttresses were lavishly decorated with statuary and other ornament, and were a prominent feature of the exterior.

Towers and spires

Towers, spires and flèches were an important feature of Gothic churches. They presented a dramatic spectacle of great height, helped make their churches the tallest and most visible buildings in their city, and symbolised the aspirations of their builders toward heaven. They also had a practical purpose; they often served as bell towers supporting belfries, whose bells told the time by announcing religious services, warned of fire or enemy attack, and celebrated special occasions like military victories and coronations. Sometimes the bell tower is built separate from a church; the best-known example of this is the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

The towers of cathedrals were usually the last part of the structure to be built. Since cathedral construction usually took many years, and was extremely expensive, by the time the tower were to be built public enthusiasm waned, and tastes changed. Many projected towers were never built, or were built in different styles than other parts of the cathedral, or with different styles on each level of the tower. At Chartres Cathedral, the south tower was built in the 12th century, in the simpler Early Gothic, while the north tower is the more highly decorated Flamboyant style. Chartres would have been even more exuberant if the second plan had been followed; it called for seven towers around the transept and sanctuary.

In the Île-de-France, cathedral towers followed the Romanesque tradition of two identical towers, one on either side of the portals. The west front of the Saint-Denis, became the model for the early Gothic cathedrals and High Gothic cathedrals in northern France, including Notre-Dame de Paris, Reims Cathedral, and Amiens Cathedral.

The early and High Gothic Laon Cathedral has a square lantern tower over the crossing of the transept; two towers on the western front; and two towers on the ends of the transepts. Laon's towers, with the exception of the central tower, are built with two stacked vaulted chambers pierced by lancet openings. The two western towers contain life-size stone statues of sixteen oxen in their upper arcades, said to honour the animals who hauled the stone during the cathedral's construction.

In Normandy, cathedrals and major churches often had multiple towers, built over the centuries; the Abbaye aux Hommes (begun 1066), Caen has nine towers and spires, placed on the façade, the transepts, and the centre. A lantern tower was often placed the centre of the nave, at the meeting point with the transept, to give light to the church below.

In later periods of Gothic, pointed needle-like spires were often added to the towers, giving them much greater height. A variation of the spire was the flèche, a slender, spear-like spire, which was usually placed on the transept where it crossed the nave. They were often made of wood covered with lead or other metal. They sometimes had open frames, and were decorated with sculpture. Amiens Cathedral has a flèche. The most famous example was that of Notre-Dame de Paris. The original flèche of Notre-Dame was built on the crossing of the transept in the middle of the 13th century, and housed five bells. It was removed in 1786 during a program to modernize the cathedral, but was put back in a new form designed by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc. The new flèche, of wood covered with lead, was decorated with statues of the Apostles; the figure of St Thomas resembled Viollet-le-Duc. The flèche was destroyed in the 2019 fire, but is now restored in the same design.

In English Gothic, the major tower was often placed at the crossing of the transept and nave, and was much higher than the other. The most famous example is the tower of Salisbury Cathedral, completed in 1320 by William of Farleigh. It was a remarkable feat of construction, since it was built upon the pillars of the much earlier church. A crossing tower was constructed at Canterbury Cathedral in 1493–1501 by John Wastell, who had previously worked on King's College at Cambridge. It was finished by Henry Yevele, who also built the present nave of Canterbury. The new central tower at Wells Cathedral caused a problem; it was too heavy for the original structure. An unusual double arch had to be constructed in the centre of the crossing to give the tower the extra support it needed.

England's Gothic parish churches and collegiate churches generally have a single western tower. A number of the finest churches have masonry spires, with those of St James Church, Louth; St Wulfram's Church, Grantham; St Mary Redcliffe in Bristol; and Coventry Cathedral. These spires all exceed 85 m (280 ft) in height.

Later Gothic towers in Central Europe often followed the French model, but added even denser decorative tracery. Cologne Cathedral had been started in the 13th century, following the plan of Amiens Cathedral, but only the apse and the base of one tower were finished in the Gothic period. The original plans were conserved and rediscovered in 1817, and the building was completed in the 19th century following the origin design. It has two spectacularly ornamented towers, covered with arches, gables, pinnacles and openwork spires pointing upwards. The tower of Ulm Minster has a similar history, begun in 1377, stopped in 1543, and not completed until the 19th century.

Regional variants of Gothic towers appeared in Spain and Italy. Burgos Cathedral was inspired by Northern Europe. It has an exceptional cluster of openwork spires, towers, and pinnacles, drenched with ornament. It was begun in 1444 by a German architect, Juan de Colonia (John of Cologne) and eventually completed by a central tower (1540) built by his grandson.

In Italy the towers were sometimes separate from the cathedral; and the architects usually kept their distance from the Northern European style. the leaning tower of Pisa Cathedral, built between 1173 and 1372, is the best-known example. The Campanile of Florence Cathedral was built by Giotto in the Florentine Gothic style, decorated with encrustations of polychrome marble. It was originally designed to have a spire.

Tracery

Tracery is an architectural solution by which windows (or screens, panels, and vaults) are divided into sections of various proportions by stone bars or ribs of moulding. Pointed arch windows of Gothic buildings were initially (late 12th–late 13th centuries) lancet windows, a solution typical of the Early Gothic or First Pointed style and of the Early English Gothic. Plate tracery was the first type of tracery to be developed, emerging in the later phase of Early Gothic or First Pointed. Second Pointed is distinguished from First by the appearance of bar–tracery, allowing the construction of much larger window openings, and the development of Curvilinear, Flowing, and Reticulated tracery, ultimately contributing to the Flamboyant style. Late Gothic in most of Europe saw tracery patterns resembling lace develop, while in England Perpendicular Gothic or Third Pointed preferred plainer vertical mullions and transoms. Tracery is practical as well as decorative, because the increasingly large windows of Gothic buildings needed maximum support against the wind.

Plate tracery, in which lights were pierced in a thin wall of ashlar, allowed a window arch to have more than one light – typically two side by side and separated by flat stone spandrels. The spandrels were then sculpted into figures like a roundel or a quatrefoil. Plate tracery reached the height of its sophistication with the 12th century windows of Chartres Cathedral and in the "Dean's Eye" rose window at Lincoln Cathedral.

At the beginning of the 13th century, plate tracery was superseded by bar-tracery. Bar-tracery divides the large lights from one another with moulded mullions. Stone bar-tracery, an important decorative element of Gothic styles, first was used at Reims Cathedral shortly after 1211, in the chevet built by Jean D'Orbais. It was employed in England around 1240. After 1220, master builders in England had begun to treat the window openings as a series of openings divided by thin stone bars, while before 1230 the apse chapels of Reims Cathedral were decorated with bar-tracery with cusped circles (with bars radiating from the centre). Bar-tracery became common after c. 1240, with increasing complexity and decreasing weight. The lines of the mullions continued beyond the tops of the window lights and subdivided the open spandrels above the lights into a variety of decorative shapes. Rayonnant style (c. 1230 – c. 1350) was enabled by the development of bar-tracery in Continental Europe and is named for the radiation of lights around a central point in circular rose windows. Rayonnant also deployed mouldings of two different types in tracery, where earlier styles had used moulding of a single size, with different sizes of mullions. The rose windows of Notre-Dame de Paris (c.1270) are typical.

The early phase of Middle Pointed style (late 13th century) is characterized by Geometrical tracery – simple bar-tracery forming patterns of foiled arches and circles interspersed with triangular lights. The mullions of Geometrical style typically had capitals with curved bars emerging from them. Intersecting bar-tracery (c.1300) deployed mullions without capitals which branched off equidistant to the window-head. The window-heads themselves were formed of equal curves forming a pointed arch and the tracery-bars were curved by drawing curves with differing radii from the same centres as the window-heads. The mullions were in consequence branched into Y-shaped designs further ornamented with cusps. The intersecting branches produced an array of lozenge-shaped lights in between numerous lancet arched lights. Y-tracery was often employed in two-light windows c.1300.

Second Pointed (14th century) saw Intersecting tracery elaborated with ogees, creating a complex reticular (net-like) design known as Reticulated tracery. Second Pointed architecture deployed tracery in highly decorated fashion known as Curvilinear and Flowing (Undulating). These types of bar-tracery were developed further throughout Europe in the 15th century into the Flamboyant style, named for the characteristic flame-shaped spaces between the tracery-bars. These shapes are known as daggers, fish-bladders, or mouchettes.

Third Pointed or Perpendicular Gothic developed in England from the later 14th century and is typified by Rectilinear tracery (panel-tracery). The mullions are often joined by transoms and continue up their straight vertical lines to the top of the window's main arch, some branching off into lesser arches, and creating a series of panel-like lights. Perpendicular strove for verticality and dispensed with the Curvilinear style's sinuous lines in favour of unbroken straight mullions from top to bottom, transected by horizontal transoms and bars. Four-centred arches were used in the 15th and 16th centuries to create windows of increasing size with flatter window-heads, often filling the entire wall of the bay between each buttress. The windows were themselves divided into panels of lights topped by pointed arches struck from four centres. The transoms were often topped by miniature crenellations. The windows at Cambridge of King's College Chapel (1446–1515) represent the heights of Perpendicular tracery.

Tracery was used on both the interior and exterior of buildings. It frequently covered the façades, and the interior walls of the nave and choir were covered with blind arcades. It also often picked up and repeated the designs in the stained glass windows. Strasbourg Cathedral has a west front lavishly ornamented with bar tracery matching the windows.

Elements of Romanesque and Gothic architecture compared

#	Structural element	Romanesque	Gothic	Developments
1	Arches	Round	Pointed	The pointed Gothic arch varied from a very sharp form, to a wide, flattened form.
2	Vaults	Barrel or groin	Ribbed	Ribbed vaults appeared in the Romanesque era and were elaborated in the Gothic era.
3	Walls	Thick, with small openings	Thinner, with large openings	Wall structure diminished during the Gothic era to a framework of mullions supporting windows.
4	Buttresses	Wall buttresses of low projection.	Wall buttresses of high projection, and flying buttresses	Complex Gothic buttresses supported the high vaults and the walls pierced with windows
5	Windows	Round arches, sometimes paired	Pointed arches, often with tracery	Gothic windows varied from simple lancet form to ornate flamboyant patterns
6	Piers and columns	Cylindrical columns, rectangular piers	Cylindrical and clustered columns, complex piers	Columns and piers developed increasing complexity during the Gothic era
7	Gallery arcades	Two openings under an arch, paired.	Two pointed openings under a pointed arch	The Gothic gallery became increasingly complex and unified with the clerestory

Plans

The plan of Gothic cathedrals and churches was usually based on the Latin cross (or "cruciform") plan, taken from the ancient Roman Basilica, and from the later Romanesque churches. They have a long nave making the body of the church, where the parishioners worshipped; a transverse arm called the transept and, beyond it to the east, the choir, also known as a chancel or presbytery, that was usually reserved for the clergy. The eastern end of the church was rounded in French churches, and was occupied by several radiating chapels, which allowed multiple ceremonies to go on simultaneously. In English churches the eastern end also had chapels, but was usually rectangular. A passage called the ambulatory circled the choir. This allowed parishioners, and especially pilgrims, to walk past the chapels to see the relics displayed there without disturbing other services going on.

Each vault of the nave formed a separate cell, with its own supporting piers or columns. The early cathedrals, like Notre-Dame, had six-part rib vaults, with alternating columns and piers, while later cathedrals had the simpler and stronger four-part vaults, with identical columns.

Following the model of Romanesque architecture and the Basilica of Saint Denis, cathedrals usually had two towers flanking the west façade. Towers over the crossing were common in England (Salisbury Cathedral, York Minister) but rarer in France.

Transepts were usually short in early French Gothic architecture, but became longer and were given large rose windows in the Rayonnant period. The choirs became more important. The choir was often flanked by a double disambulatory, which was crowned by a ring of small chapels. In England, transepts were more important, and the floor plans were usually much more complex than in French cathedrals, with the addition of attached Lady Chapels, an octagonal Chapter House, and other structures (See plans of Salisbury Cathedral and York Minster below). This reflected a tendency in France to carry out multiple functions in the same space, while English cathedrals compartmentalized them. This contrast is visible in the difference between Amiens Cathedral, with its minimal transepts and semicircular apse, filled with chapels, on the east end, compared with the double transepts, projecting north porch, and rectangular east end of Salisbury and York.

Elevations and the search for height

Gothic architecture was a continual search for greater height, thinner walls, and more light. This was clearly illustrated in the evolving elevations of the cathedrals.

In Early Gothic architecture, following the model of the Romanesque churches, the buildings had thick, solid walls with a minimum of windows in order to give enough support for the vaulted roofs. An elevation typically had four levels. On the ground floor was an arcade with massive piers alternating with thinner columns, which supported the six-part rib vaults. Above that was a gallery, called the tribune, which provided stability to the walls, and was sometimes used to provide seating for the nuns. Above that was a narrower gallery, called the triforium, which also helped provide additional thickness and support. At the top, just beneath the vaults, was the clerestory, where the high windows were placed. The upper level was supported from the outside by the flying buttresses. This system was used at Noyon Cathedral, Sens Cathedral, and other early structures.

In the High Gothic period, thanks to the introduction of the four part rib vault, a simplified elevation appeared at Chartres Cathedral and others. The alternating piers and columns on the ground floor were replaced by rows of identical circular piers wrapped in four engaged columns. The tribune disappeared, which meant that the arcades could be higher. This created more space at the top for the upper windows, which were expanded to include a smaller circular window above a group of lancet windows. The new walls gave a stronger sense of verticality and brought in more light. A similar arrangement was adapted in England, at Salisbury Cathedral, Lincoln Cathedral, and Ely Cathedral.

An important characteristic of Gothic church architecture is its height, both absolute and in proportion to its width, the verticality suggesting an aspiration to Heaven. The increasing height of cathedrals over the Gothic period was accompanied by an increasing proportion of the wall devoted to windows, until, by the late Gothic, the interiors became like cages of glass. This was made possible by the development of the flying buttress, which transferred the thrust of the weight of the roof to the supports outside the walls. As a result, the walls gradually became thinner and higher, and masonry was replaced with glass. The four-part elevation of the naves of early Cathedrals such as Notre-Dame (arcade, tribune, triforium, clerestory) was transformed in the choir of Beauvais Cathedral to very tall arcades, a thin triforium, and soaring windows up to the roof.

Beauvais Cathedral reached the limit of what was possible with Gothic technology. A portion of the choir collapsed in 1284, causing alarm in all of the cities with very tall cathedrals. Panels of experts were created in Sienna and Chartres to study the stability of those structures. Only the transept and choir of Beauvais were completed, and in the 21st century, the transept walls were reinforced with cross-beams. No cathedral built since exceeded the height of the choir of Beauvais.

West front

Churches traditionally face east, with the altar at the east, and the west front, or façade, was considered the most important entrance. Gothic façades were adapted from the model of the Romanesque façades. The façades usually had three portals, or doorways, leading into the nave. Over each doorway was a tympanum, a work of sculpture crowded with figures. The sculpture of the central tympanum was devoted to the Last Judgement, that to the left to the Virgin Mary, and that to the right to the Saints honoured at that particular cathedral. In the early Gothic, the columns of the doorways took the form of statues of saints, making them literally "pillars of the church".

In the early Gothic, the façades were characterized by height, elegance, harmony, unity, and a balance of proportions. They followed the doctrine expressed by Saint Thomas Aquinas that beauty was a "harmony of contrasts". Following the model of Saint-Denis and later Notre-Dame de Paris, the façade was flanked by two towers proportional to the rest of the façade, which balanced the horizontal and vertical elements. Early Gothic façades often had a small rose window placed above the central portal. In England the rose window was often replaced by several lancet windows.

In the High Gothic period, the façades grew higher, and had more dramatic architecture and sculpture. At Amiens Cathedral (c. 1220), the porches were deeper, the niches and pinnacles were more prominent. The portals were crowned with high arched gables, composed of concentric arches filled with sculpture. The rose windows became enormous, filling an entirely wall above the central portal, and they were themselves covered with a large pointed arch. The rose windows were pushed upwards by the growing profusion of decoration below. The towers were adorned with their own arches, often crowned with pinnacles. The towers themselves were crowned with spires, often of open-work sculpture. One of the finest examples of a Flamboyant façade is Notre-Dame de l'Épine (1405–1527).

While French cathedrals emphasized the height of the façade, English cathedrals, particularly in earlier Gothic, often emphasized the width. The west front of Wells Cathedral is 146 feet across, compared with 116 feet wide at the nearly contemporary Amiens Cathedral, though Amiens is twice as high. The west front of Wells was almost entirely covered with statuary, like Amiens, and was given even further emphasis by its colors; traces of blue, scarlet, and gold are found on the sculpture, as well as painted stars against the dark background on other sections.

Italian Gothic façades have the three traditional portals and rose windows, or sometimes simply a large circular window without tracery plus an abundance of flamboyant elements, including sculpture, pinnacles and spires. However, they added distinctive Italian elements. as seen in the façades of Siena Cathedral ) and of Orvieto Cathedral, The Orvieto façade was largely the work of a master mason, Lorenzo Maitani, who worked on the façade from 1308 until his death in 1330. He broke away from the French emphasis on height, and eliminated the column statutes and statuary in the arched entries, and covered the façade with colourful mosaics of biblical scenes (The current mosaics are of a later date). He also added sculpture in relief on the supporting contreforts.

Another important feature of the Italian Gothic portal was the sculpted bronze door. The sculptor Andrea Pisano made the celebrated bronze doors for Florence Baptistry (1330–1336). They were not the first; Abbot Suger had commissioned bronze doors for Saint-Denis in 1140, but they were replaced with wooden doors when the Abbey was enlarged. Pisano's work, with its realism and emotion, pointed toward the coming Renaissance.

East end

Cathedrals and churches were traditionally constructed with the altar at the east end, so that the priest and congregation faced the rising sun during the morning liturgy. The sun was considered the symbol of Christ and the Second Coming, a major theme in Cathedral sculpture. The portion of the church east of altar is the choir, reserved for members of the clergy. There is usually a single or double ambulatory, or aisle, around the choir and east end, so parishioners and pilgrims could walk freely easily around east end.

In Romanesque churches, the east end was very dark, due to the thick walls and small windows. In the ambulatory of the Basilica of Saint Denis, Abbot Suger first used the novel combination rib vaults and buttresses to replace the thick walls and replace them with stained glass, opening up that portion of the church to what he considered "divine light".

In French Gothic churches, the east end, or chevet, often had an apse, a semi-circular projection with a vaulted or domed roof. The chevet of large cathedrals frequently had a ring of radiating chapels, placed between the buttresses to get maximum light. There are three such chapels at Chartres Cathedral, seven at Notre Dame de Paris, Amiens Cathedral, Prague Cathedral and Cologne Cathedral, and nine at Basilica of Saint Anthony of Padua in Italy. In England, the east end is more often rectangular, and gives access to a separate and large Lady Chapel, dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Lady Chapels were also common in Italy.

Sculpture

Portals and tympanum

Sculpture was an important element of Gothic architecture. Its intent was present the stories of the Bible in vivid and understandable fashion to the great majority of the faithful who could not read. The iconography of the sculptural decoration on the façade was not left to the sculptors. An edict of the Second Council of Nicaea in 787 had declared: "The composition of religious images is not to be left to the inspiration of artists; it is derived from the principles put in place by the Catholic Church and religious tradition. Only the art belongs to the artist; the composition belongs to the Fathers."

In Early Gothic churches, following the Romanesque tradition, sculpture appeared on the façade or west front in the triangular tympanum over the central portal. Gradually, as the style evolved, the sculpture became more and more prominent, taking over the columns of the portal, and gradually climbing above the portals, until statues in niches covered the entire façade, as in Wells Cathedral, to the transepts, and, as at Amiens Cathedral, even on the interior of the façade.

Some of the earliest examples are found at Chartres Cathedral, where the three portals of the west front illustrate the three epiphanies in the Life of Christ. At Amiens, the tympanum over the central portal depicted the Last Judgement, the right portal showed the Coronation of the Virgin, and the left portal showed the lives of saints who were important in the diocese. This set a pattern of complex iconography which was followed at other churches.

The columns below the tympanum are in the form of statues of saints, literally representing them as "the pillars of the church". Each saint had his own symbol at his feet so viewers could recognize them; a winged lion meant Saint Mark, an eagle with four wings meant Saint John the Apostle, and a winged bull symbolized Saint Luke. Floral and vegetal decoration was also very common, representing the Garden of Eden; grapes represented the wines of Eucharist.

The tympanum over the central portal on the west façade of Notre-Dame de Paris vividly illustrates the Last Judgement, with figures of sinners being led off to hell, and good Christians taken to heaven. The sculpture of the right portal shows the coronation of the Virgin Mary, and the left portal shows the lives of saints who were important to Parisians, particularly Saint Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary.

To make the message even more prominent, the sculpture of the tympanum was painted in bright colors. following a system of colours codified in the 12th century; yellow, called gold, symbolized intelligence, grandeur and virtue; white, called argent, symbolized purity, wisdom, and correctness; black, or sable, meant sadness, but also will; green, or sinople, represented hope, liberty and joy; red or gueules (see gules) meant charity or victory; blue or azure symbolised the sky, faithfulness and perseverance; and violet, or pourpre, was the colour of royalty and sovereignty.

In the later Gothic, the sculpture became more naturalistic; the figures were separated from the walls, and had much more expressive faces, showing emotion and personality. The drapery was very skilfully carved. The torments of hell were even more vividly depicted. The late Gothic sculpture at Siena Cathedral, by Nino Pisano, pointing toward the Renaissance, is particularly notable. Much of it is now kept in a museum to protect it from deterioration.

Grotesques and gargoyles

Besides saints and apostles, the exteriors of Gothic churches were also decorated with sculptures of grotesques or monsters. These included the chimera, a mythical hybrid creature which usually had the body of a lion and the head of a goat, and the strix or stryge, a creature resembling an owl or bat, which was said to eat human flesh. The strix appeared in classical Roman literature; it was described by the Roman poet Ovid, who was widely read in the Middle Ages, as a large-headed bird with transfixed eyes, rapacious beak, and greyish white wings. They were part of the visual message for the illiterate worshippers, symbols of the evil and danger that threatened those who did not follow the teachings of the church.

Gargoyles had a more practical purpose. They were the rain spouts of the church, designed to throw rainwater away from the building, to prevent erosion. To produce many thin streams rather than a torrent of water, a large number of gargoyles were used, so they were also designed to be a decorative element of the architecture. The rainwater ran from the roof into lead gutters, then down channels on the flying buttresses, then along a channel cut in the back of the gargoyle and out of the mouth away from the church.

Labyrinths

Another common feature of Gothic cathedrals in France was a labyrinth or maze on the floor of the nave near the choir, which symbolised the difficult and often complicated journey of a Christian life before attaining paradise. Most labyrinths were removed by the 18th century, but a few, like the one at Amiens Cathedral, have been reconstructed, and the labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral still exists essentially in its original form. Reims Cathedral had a labyrinth depicting the master masons of the cathedral, but this was destroyed in the 18th century.

Windows and stained glass

Increasing the amount of light in the interior was a primary objective of the founders of the Gothic movement. Abbot Suger described the new kind of architecture he had created in the east end of the Saint-Denis: "a circular ring of chapels, by virtue of which the whole church would shine with the wonderful and uninterrupted light of most luminous windows, pervading the interior beauty."

Religious teachings in the Middle Ages, particularly the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, a 6th-century mystic whose book, De Coelesti Hierarchia, was popular among monks in France, taught that all light was divine. When the Abbot Suger ordered the reconstruction of choir of the abbey church at Saint-Denis, he had the builders create seventy windows, admitting as much light as possible, as the means by which the faithful could be elevated from the material world to the immaterial world.

The placement of the windows was also determined by religious doctrine. The windows on the north side, frequently in the shade, had windows depicting the Old Testament. The windows of the east, corresponding to the direction of the sunrise, had images of Christ and scenes from the New Testament.

In the Early Gothic period, the glass was particularly thick and was deeply coloured with metal oxides; cobalt for blue, copper for a ruby red, iron for green, and antimony for yellow. The process of making the windows was described in detail by the 12th-century monk known as Theophilus Presbyter. The glass of each colour was melted with the oxide, blown, shaped into small sheets, cracked with a hot iron into small pieces, and assembled on a large table. The details were painted onto the glass in vitreous enamel, then baked in a kiln to fuse the enamel on the glass. The pieces were fit into a framework of thin lead strips, and then put into a more solid frame or iron armatures between the panels. The finished window was set into the stone opening. Thin vertical and horizontal bars of iron, called vergettes or barlotierres, were placed inside the window to reinforce the glass against the wind.

The use of iron rods between the panels of glass and a framework of stone mullions, or ribs, made it possible to create much larger windows. The three rose windows at Chartres (1203–1240) each were more than 12 m (40 ft) in diameter. Larger windows also appeared at York Minster (1140–1160) and Canterbury Cathedral (1178–1200)

The stained glass windows were extremely complex and expensive to create. King Louis IX paid for the rose windows in the transept of Notre-Dame de Paris, but other windows were financed by the contributions of the professions or guilds of the city. These windows usually had a panel which illustrated the work of the guild which funded it, such as the drapers, stonemasons, or coopers.

The 13th century saw the introduction of a new kind of window, with grisaille, or white glass, with a geometric pattern, usually joined with medallions of stained glass. These windows allowed much more light into the cathedral, but diminished the vividness of the stained glass, since there was less contrast between the dark interior and bright exterior. The most remarkable and influential work of stained glass in the 13th century was the royal chapel, Sainte-Chapelle (1243–1248), where the windows of the upper chapel, 15 m (49 ft) high, occupied all of the walls on the three sides, with 1,134 individual scenes. Sainte-Chapelle became the model for other chapels across Europe.

The 14th century brought a variety of new colours, and the use of more realistic shading and half-toning. This was done by the development of flashed glass. Clear glass was dipped into coloured glass, then portions of the coloured glass were ground away to give exactly the right shade. In the 15th century, artists began painting directly onto the glass with enamel colours. Gradually the art of glass came closer and closer to traditional painting.

One of the most celebrated Flamboyant buildings was the Sainte-Chapelle de Vincennes (1370s), with walls of glass from floor to ceiling. The original glass was destroyed, and is replaced by grisaille glass. King's College Chapel (15th century), also followed the model of walls entirely filled with glass.

The stained glass windows were extremely complex and expensive to create. King Louis IX paid for the rose windows in the transept of Notre-Dame de Paris, while other windows were often financed by the contributions of the professions or guilds of the city. These windows usually incorporated a panel which illustrates the work of the guild which funded it, such as the drapers, stonemasons, or barrel-makers.

In England, the stained glass windows also grew in size and importance; major examples were the Becket Windows at Canterbury Cathedral (1200–1230) and the windows of Lincoln Cathedral (1200–1220). Enormous windows were also an important element of York Minster and Gloucester Cathedral.

Much of the stained glass in Gothic churches today dates from later restorations, but a few, notably Chartres Cathedral and Bourges Cathedral, still have many of their original windows

Rose windows

Rose windows were a prominent feature of many Gothic churches and cathedrals. The rose was a symbol of the Virgin Mary, and they were particularly used in churches dedicated to her. The French Gothic cathedrals of Chartres, Notre Dame de Paris, Reims, and Laon have them in the west façade, and in the transepts as well. Amiens Cathedral, Strasbourg Cathedral and Westminster Abbey also have them in transepts. The designs of their tracery became increasingly complex, and gave their names to two periods; the Rayonnant and the Flamboyant. Two of the most famous Rayonnant rose windows were constructed in the transepts of Notre-Dame in the 13th century.

Architectural elements

High Gothic architectural elements, 1180–1230

• Flying buttresses developed
• Higher vaults were possible because of the flying buttresses
• Larger clerestory windows because of the flying buttresses.
• Clerestory windows had geometric tracery
• Rose windows became larger, with geometric tracery
• The west front of Notre-Dame set a formula adopted by other cathedrals.
• Transept ends had ornate portals like the west front

Rayonnant Gothic architectural elements, 1230–1350

• Cathedrals increasingly tall in relation to width, facilitated by the development of complex systems of buttressing
• Quadripartite vaults over a single bay
• Vaults in France maintained simple forms but elsewhere the patterns of ribs became more elaborate.
• Emphasis on the appearance of high internally.
• Abandonment of fourth stage, either the deep triforium gallery or the shallow tribune gallery, in the internal elevation.
• Columns of classical proportion disappear in favour of increasingly tall columns surrounded by clusters of shafts.
• Complex shafted piers
• Large windows divided by mullions into several lights (vertical panels) with geometric tracery in the arch
• Large rose windows in geometric or radiating designs

Flamboyant Gothic architectural elements, 1350–1550

• The design of tracery no longer dependent on circular shapes, developed S curves and flame-like shapes.
• Complex vaults with Flamboyant shapes in the ribs, particularly in Spain and Central Europe, but rare in France
• Many rose windows built with Flamboyant tracery, many in France.
• Large windows of several lights with Flamboyant tracery in the arch
• The Flamboyant arch, drafted from four centres, used for smaller openings, e.g. doorways and niches.
• Mouldings of Flamboyant shape often used as non structural decoration over openings, topped by a floral finial (poupée)

Palaces

The Gothic style was used in royal and papal residences as well as in churches. Prominent examples include the Palais de la Cité the Medieval Louvre, the Chateau de Vincennes in Paris, residences of the French kings, the Doge's Palace in Venice, and the Palace of the Kings of Navarre in Olite (1269–1512). Another is the Palais des Papes (Palace of the Popes), the former Papal residence in Avignon. It was constructed between 1252 and 1364, during the Avignon Papacy. Given the complicated political situation, it combined the functions of a church, a seat of government and a fortress.

The Palais de la Cité in Paris, close to Notre-Dame de Paris, begun in 1119, which was the principal residence of the French kings until 1417. Most of the Palais de la Cité is gone, but two of the original towers along the Seine, of the towers, the vaulted ceilings of the Hall of the Men-at-Arms (1302), (now in the Conciergerie); and the original chapel, Sainte-Chapelle, can still be seen.

The Louvre Palace was originally built by Philippe II of France beginning in 1190 to house the King's archives and treasures, and given machicoulis and features of a Gothic fortress. However, it was soon made obsolete by the development of artillery, and in the 15th century it was remodelled into a comfortable residential palace. While the outer walls retained their original military appearance, the castle itself, with a profusion of spires, towers, pinnacles, arches and gables, became a visible symbol of royalty and aristocracy. The style was copied in chateaux and other aristocratic residences across France and other parts of Europe.

Civic architecture

In the 15th century, following the late Gothic period or flamboyant style, elements of Gothic decoration began to appear in the town halls of northern France, Flanders and the Netherlands. The Rouen Courthouse in Normandy is representative of Flamboyant Gothic in France. The Hôtel de Ville of Compiègne has an imposing Gothic bell tower, featuring a spire surrounded by smaller towers, and its windows are decorated with ornate accolades or ornamental arches. Similarly flamboyant town halls were found in Arras, Douai, and Saint-Quentin, Aisne, and in modern Belgium, in Brussels, Ghent, Bruges, Audenarde, Mons and Leuven.

Gothic civil architecture in Spain includes the Silk Exchange in Valencia, Spain (1482–1548), a major marketplace, which has a main hall with twisting columns beneath its vaulted ceiling.

Educational architecture

In England, university students initially lived in converted houses or hostels, but from the 13th century they began to be organised in colleges, with dedicated Gothic buildings derived from the rectangular cloisters and courtyards of monasteries and manor houses. The oldest existing example in England is probably Mob Quad of Merton College at Oxford University, constructed between 1288 and 1378. Some colleges, like Balliol College, Oxford, used crenellations to evoke military architecture.

The standard English arrangement was developed by William of Wykeham, Chancellor of England and founder of Winchester College and New College, Oxford, in 1379. His architect, William Wynford, designed the New College quadrangle in the 1380s, which combined a hall, chapel, library, and residences for Fellows and undergraduates. A similar kind of academic cloister was created at Queens' College, Cambridge in the 1440s, possibly designed by Reginald Ely. The grandest English college would have been King's College, Cambridge (founded 1441), but the Wars of the Roses interfered in its construction, so only the spectacular Perpendicular chapel was built (1448-1515), with fan vaults designed by John Wastell. The same arrangements were used for schools, like Winchester College and Eton College, as for university colleges. The later Middle Ages saw the creation of specialised academic buildings, especially the pendant-vaulted Divinity School in Oxford (1427-83).

Other European examples include Collegio di Spagna in the University of Bologna, built during the 14th and 15th centuries; the Collegium Carolinum of the Charles University in Prague in the Czech Republic (c. 1400); the Escuelas mayores of the University of Salamanca in Spain; and the Collegium Maius of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland.

Military architecture

In the 13th century, the design of the castle evolved in response to contact with the more sophisticated fortifications of the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic world during the Crusades. These new fortifications were more geometric, with a central high tower called a keep (French: donjon) which could be defended even if the curtain walls of the castle were breached. The donjon of the Château de Vincennes, begun by Philip VI of France was a good example. It was 52 m (171 ft) high, and, even though within the moat and walls of the fortress, had its own separate drawbridge to going to higher floors.

Towers, usually round, were placed at the corners and along the walls in the Phillipienne castle, close enough together to support each other. The walls had two levels of walkways on the inside, a crenellated parapet with merlons, and projecting machicolations from which missiles could be dropped on besiegers. The upper walls also had protected protruding balconies, bartizans and bretèches, from which soldiers could see what was happening at the corners or on the ground below. In addition, the towers and walls were pierced with arrowslits, which sometimes took the form of crosses to enable a wider field of fire for archers and crossbowmen.

Many castles were surrounded by moat, often spanned by a drawbridge. The entrance was also protected by a portcullis. The walls at the bottom were often sloping, and protected with earthen barriers. One good surviving example is the Château de Dourdan, near Nemours.

After the end of the Hundred Years War (1337–1453), with improvements in artillery, the castles lost most of their military importance. They remained as symbols of the rank of their noble occupants; the narrow openings in the walls were often widened into the windows of bedchambers and ceremonial halls. The tower of the Château de Vincennes became a part-time royal residence until the Palace of Versailles was completed.

Synagogues

Although Gothic was primarily a Christian style, Jewish communities were present in many European cities during the Middle Ages and they also built their places of worship in the Gothic style. Few Gothic synagogues have survived, because they were often destroyed in connection with persecution of the Jews (e. g. in Bamberg, Nürnberg, Regensburg, Vienna). An exception is the Old New Synagogue in Prague, which was completed around 1270.

Subvarieties

Styles

• Early Gothic
• High Gothic
• Rayonnant
• Flamboyant

Mediterranean styles

• Iberian Gothic
  • Portuguese Gothic
    • Manueline
• Spanish Gothic
  • Castilian Gothic
  • Levantine Gothic
  • Valencian Gothic
  • Catalan Gothic
    • Balearic Gothic
  • Isabelline
  • Plateresque
• Italian Gothic
  • Sicilian Gothic

Northern styles

• French Gothic
  • Classic Gothic
  • Southern French Gothic
  • Plantagenet style
• English Gothic
  • Early English Gothic
  • Decorated Gothic
  • Perpendicular Gothic
• Low Country Gothic
  • Scheldt Gothic
  • Mosan Gothic
  • Brabantine Gothic
• Czech Gothic
• Sondergotik
• Lithuanian Gothic
  • Belarusian Gothic
• Polish Gothic

Chronological subsets

• Romano-Gothic
• Post-Gothic
• Neo-Gothic

Type

• Brick Gothic
• Jettied buildings
• Gothic ecclesiastic architecture
  • Architecture of the medieval cathedrals of England
• Gothic secular architecture
  • Military

See also

• Architectural history
• Architecture of cathedrals and great churches
• Carpenter Gothic
• Collegiate Gothic in North America
• Gothicmed
• Gothic cathedrals and churches
• List of Gothic architecture
• Mudéjar
• Tented roof
• Abbey de Sainte-Marie-au-Bois

From the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia

Gothic Architecture — The term Gothic was first used during the later Renaissance, and as a term of contempt. Says Vasari, "Then arose new architects who after the manner of their barbarous nations erected buildings in that style which we call Gothic", while Evelyn but expresses the mental attitude of his own time when he writes, "The ancient Greek and Roman architecture answered all the perfections required in a faultless and accomplished building" — but the Goths and Vandals destroyed these and "introduced in their stead a certain fantastical and licentious manner of building: congestions of heavy, dark, melancholy, monkish piles, without any just proportion, use or beauty." For the first time, an attempt was made to destroy an instinctive and, so far as Europe was concerned, an almost universal form of art, and to substitute in its place another built up by artificial rules and premeditated theories; it was necessary, therefore, that the ground should be cleared of a once luxuriant growth that still showed signs of vitality, and to effect this the schools of Vignola, Palladio, and Wren were compelled to throw scorn on the art they were determined to discredit. As ignorant of the true habitat of the style as they were of its nature, the Italians of the Renaissance called it the "maniera Tedesca", and since to them the word Goth implied the perfection of barbarism, it is but natural that they should have applied it to a style they desired to destroy. The style ceased, for the particular type of civilization it expressed had come to an end; but the name remained, and when, early in the nineteenth century, the beginnings of a new epoch brought new apologists, the old title was taken over as the only one available, and since then constant efforts have been made to define it more exactly, to give it a new significance, or to substitute in its place a term more expressive of the idea to be conveyed.

The word itself, in its present application, is repugnant to any sense of exact thought; ethnically, the art so described is immediately Franco-Norman in its origins, and between the Arian Goths, on the one hand, and the Catholic Franks and Normans. on the other, lies a racial, religious, and chronological gulf. With the conquest of Italy and Sicily by Justinian (535-553) "the race and name of Ostrogoths perished for ever" (Bryce, "The Holy Roman Empire", III, 29) five centuries before the beginnings of the art that bears their name. Modern scholarship seeks deeper even than racial tendencies for the root impulses of art in any of its forms, and apart from the desirable correction of an historical anachronism it is felt that medieval art (of which Gothic architecture is but one category), since it owes its existence to influences and tendencies stronger than those of blood, demands a name that shall be exact and significant, and indicative of the more just estimation in which it now is held.

But little success has followed any of the attempts at definition. The effort has produced such varying results as the epithets of Vasari and Evelyn, the nebulous or sentimental paraphrases of the early nineteenth century romanticists, the narrow archeological definitions of De Caumont, and the rigid formalities of the more learned logicians and structural specialists, such as MM. Viollet le Duc, Anthyme St-Paul, and Enlart, and Professor Moore. The only scientific attempt is that of which the first was the originator, the last the most scholarly and exact exponent. Concisely stated, the contention of this school is that

the whole scheme of the building is determined by, and its whole strength is made to reside in a finely organized and frankly confessed framework rather than in walls. This framework, made up of piers, arches and buttresses, is freed from every unnecessary incumbrance of wall and is rendered as light in all its parts as is compatible with strength — the stability of the building depending not upon inert massiveness, except in the outermost abutment of active parts whose opposing forces neutralize each other and produce a perfect equilibrium. It is thus a system of balanced thrusts in contradistinction to the ancient system of inert stability. Gothic architecture is such a system carried out in a finely artistic spirit (Charles H. Moore, "Development and Character of Gothic Architecture", I, 8).

This is an admirable statement of the fundamental structural element in Gothic architecture, but, carried away by enthusiasm for the crowning achievement of the human intellect in the domain of construction, those who have most clearly demonstrated its pre- eminence have usually fallen into the error of declaring this one quality to be the touchstone of Gothic architecture, minimizing the importance of all aesthetic considerations, and so denying the name of Gothic to everything where the system of balanced thrusts, ribbed vaulting, and concentrated loads did not consistently appear. Even Professor Moore himself says, "Wherever a framework maintained on the principle of thrust and counter-thrust is wanting, we have not Gothic" (Moore, op. cit., I, 8). The result is that all the medieval architects of Western Europe, with the exception of that produced during the space of a century and a half, and chiefly within the limits of the old Royal Domain of France, is denied the title of Gothic. Of the whole body of English architecture produced between 1066 and 1528 it is said, "The English claim to any share in the original development of Gothic, or to the consideration of the pointed architecture of the Island as properly Gothic at all, must be abandoned" (Moore, op. cit., Preface to first ed., 8), and the same is said of the contemporary architecture of Germany, Italy, and Spain. Logically applied this rule would exclude also all the timber-roofed churches and the civil and military structures erected in France contemporaneously with the cathedrals and (though this point is not pressed) even the west fronts of such admittedly Gothic edifices as the cathedrals of Paris, Amiens, and Reims. As one commentator on Gothic architecture has said, "A definition so restricted carries with it its own condemnations" (Francis Bond, "Gothic Architecture in England ", I, 10).

A still greater argument against the acceptance of this structural definition lies in the fact that while, as Professor Moore declares, "the Gothic monument, thought wonderful as a structural organism, is even more wonderful as a work of art" (op. cit., V, 190), this great artistic element, which for more than three centuries was predominant throughout the greater part of Western Europe, existed quite independently of the supreme structural system, and varies only in minor details of racial bias and of presentation, whether it is found in France or Normandy, Spain or Italy, Germany, Flanders, or Great Britain — this, which is in itself the manifestation of the underlying impulses and the actual accomplishments of the era it connotes, is treated as an accessory to a structural evolution, and is left without a name except the perfunctory title of "Pointed", which is even less descriptive than the word Gothic itself.

The structural definition has failed of general acceptance, for the temper of the time is increasingly impatient of materialistic definitions, and there is a demand for broader interpretations that shall take cognizance of underlying impulses rather than of material manifestations. The fact is recognized that around and beyond the structural aspects of Gothic architecture lie other qualities of equal importance and greater comprehensiveness, and, if the word is still to be used in the general sense in which it always has been employed, viz., as denoting the definite architectural expression of certain peoples acting under definite impulses and within definite limitations of time, a completely evolved structural principle cannot be used as the sole test of orthodoxy, if it excludes the great body of work executed within that period, and which in all other respects has complete uniformity and a consistent significance.

It may be said of Gothic architecture that it is an impulse and a tendency rather than a perfectly rounded accomplishment; aesthetically, it never achieved perfection in any given monument, or group of monuments, nor were its possibilities ever fully worked out except in the category of structural science. Here alone, finality was achieved by the cathedral-builders of the Ile-de-France, but this fact cannot give to their work exclusive claim to the name of Gothic. The art of any given time is the expression of certain racial qualifications modified by inheritance, tradition, and environment, and working themselves out under the control of religious and secular impulses. When these elements are sound and vital, combined in the right proportions, and operating for a sufficient length of time, the result is a definite style in some one or more of the arts. Such a style is Gothic architecture, and it is to this style, regarded in its most inclusive aspect, that the term Gothic is applied by general consent, and in this sense the word is used here.

Gothic architecture and Gothic art are the aesthetic expression of that epoch of European history when paganism had been extinguished, the traditions of classical civilization destroyed, the hordes of barbarian invaders beaten back, or Christianized and assimilated; and when the Catholic Church had established itself not only as the sole spiritual power, supreme and almost unquestioned in authority, but also as the arbiter of the destinies of sovereigns and of peoples. During the first five centuries of the Christian Era the Church had been fighting for life, first against a dying imperialism, then against barbarian invasions. The removal of the temporal authority to Constantinople had continued the traditions of civilization where Greek, Roman, and Asiatic elements were fused in a curious alembic one result of which was an architectural style that later, and modified by many peoples, was to serve as the foundation-stone of the Catholic architecture of the West. Here, in the meantime, the condition had become one of complete chaos, but the end of the Dark Ages was at hand, and during the entire period of the sixth century events were occurring which could only have issue in the redemption of the West. The part played in the development of this new civilization by the Order of St. Benedict and by Pope St. Gregory the Great cannot be over estimated: through the former the Catholic Faith became a more living and personal attribute of the people, and began as well to force its way across the frontiers of barbarism, while by its means the long-lost ideals of law and order were in a measure re-established. As for St. Gregory the Great, he may almost be considered the foundation-stone of the new epoch. The redemption of Europe was completed during the four centuries following his death, and largely at the hands of the monks of Cluny and Pope St. Gregory VII (1073-1085), who freed the Church from secular dominion. With the twelfth century were to come the Cistercian reformation, the revivifying and purification of the episcopate and the secular clergy by the canons regular, the development of the great schools founded in the preceding century, the communes, the military orders, and the Crusades; while the thirteenth century, with the aid of Pope Innocent III, Philip Augustus, St. Louis, and the Franciscans and Dominicans, was to raise to the highest point of achievement the spiritual and material potentialities developed in the immediate past.

This is the epoch of Gothic architecture. As we analyse the agencies that together were to make possible a civilization that could blossom only in some pre-eminent art, we find that they fall into certain definite categories. Ethnically the northern blood of the Lombards, Franks, and Norsemen was to furnish the physical vitality of the new epoch. Political the Holy Roman Empire, the Capetian sovereigns of the Franks, and the Dukes of Normandy were to restore that sense of nationality without which creative civilization is impossible, while the papacy, working through the irresistible influence of the monastic orders gave the underlying impulse. Normandy in the eleventh century was simply Cluny in action, and during this period the structural elements in Gothic architecture were brought into being. The twelfth century was that of the Cistercians, Carthusians, and Augustinians, the former infusing into all Europe a religious enthusiasm that clamoured for artistic expression, while by their antagonism to the over-rich art of the elder Benedictines, they turned attention from decoration to plan and form, and construction. The Cluniac and the Cistercian reforms through their own members and the other orders which they brought into being were the mobile and efficient arm of a reforming papacy, and from the day on which St. Benedict promulgated his rule, they became a visible manifestation of law and order. With the thirteenth century, the episcopate and the secular clergy joined in the labour of adequately expressing a united and unquestioned religious faith, and we may say, therefore, that the civilization of the Middle Ages was what the Catholic Faith organized and invincible had made it. We may, therefore, with good reason, substitute for the undescriptive title "Gothic" the name "The Catholic Style" as being exact and reasonably inclusive.

The beginnings of the art that signalized the triumph of Catholic Christianity are to be found in Normandy. Certain elements may be traced back to the Carolingian builders, the Lombards in Italy and the Copts and Syrians of the fourth century, and so to the Greeks of Byzantium. They are but elements however, germs that did not develop until infused with the red blood of the Norsemen and quickened by the spirit of the Cluniac reform. The style developed in Normandy during the eleventh century contained the major part of these elemental norms, which were to be still further fused and co-ordinated by the Franks, raised to final perfection, and transfigured by a spirit which was that of the entire medieval world. Marvellous as was this achievement, that of the Normans was even more remarkable, for in the style they handed on to the Franks was inherent every essential potentiality. At this moment Normandy was the focus of northern vitality and almost, for the moment, the religious centre of Europe. The founding of monasteries was very like a mania and the result a remarkable revival of learning; the Abbeys of Bec, Fécamps, and Jumièges became famous throughout all Europe, drawing to themselves students from every part of the continent; even Cluny herself had in this to take second place. It was a very vigorous and a very widespread civilization, and architectural expression became imperative. Convinced that

she was playing a part and a leading part in the civilization of Europe... Normandy perceived and imitated the architectural progress of nations even far removed from her own borders. At this time there was no other country in Europe that for architectural attainment could compare with Lombardy. Therefore it was to Lombardy that the Normans turned for inspiration for their own buildings. They adopted what was vital in the Lombard style, combined this with what they had already learned from their French neighbours, and added besides a large element of their own national character (Arthur Kingsley Porter, "Mediaeval Architecture", VI, 243, 244).

What are these elements which were borrowed from the Lombards and the Franks, and which were to form the foundations of Gothic architecture? They are, from the former:

• the compound pier and archivolt,

• the alternate system, and

• the ribbed and domed vault.

From the latter (i.e. from the Carolingian remains):

• the modified basilican plan with its triple aisles crossed by a projecting transept, and its three apses. This, the basis of the typical Norman and Gothic plan, was derived directly from the Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem, the date of which is unknown. It may have been built by Constantine, or by Justinian, or at any date between. In any case it is not earlier than A.D. 300, nor later than 550;

• the doubled western towers,

• the lantern or central tower over the crossing, and

• the threefold interior system of arcade, triforium, and clerestory.

It will be seen that the main dispositions of the Gothic plan are derived from Carolingian developments of Byzantine modifications of the early Christian basilica, itself but an adaptation of that of pagan Rome; from the Lombards, however, had been acquired three elements which were to lie at the base of Gothic construction. Many of the most characteristic features of Byzantine, Carolingian, and Lombard architecture had been permanently rejected, showing that the process followed was not one of slavish imitation but rather of conscious selection; the vast possibilities inherent in others had not been appreciated, as for instance the polygonal, domed motive of San Vitale and Aachen surrounded by its vaulted ambulatory, from which the Franks were to evolve the Gothic chevet, while the pointed arch the Normans never used, though they must have known of, or imagined, its existence. The actual steps in the development of what may be called the Gothic order, from the primitive basilica to the full perfection of Chartres, fortunately exist, and we may trace the progress year by year and at the hands of diverse peoples. By the beginning of the tenth century, the available supply of ancient columns having become exhausted, square piers built up of small stones had everywhere taken the place of circular monolithic shafts, but the old basilican system remained intact (except in the polygonal, Carolingian churches), arcades supporting roof-bearing walls pierced by narrow windows, and an enclosing wall independent in its construction and forming aisles covered by lean-to roofs of wood. In Sant' Eustorgio at Milan (c. 900) we find evidences that transverse arches were thrown from each pier of the arcade to the aisle wall, so necessitating the addition of a flat pilaster to each pier to take the spring of the arch. These arches may have been evolved for the purpose of strengthening the fabric, or for ornamental reasons, or in imitation of similar arches in the Carolingian domical churches; but whatever their source the fact remains that they form the first structural step towards the evolution of the Gothic system of construction. Next, transverse arches were thrown across the nave, the first recorded example being the church of SS. Felice e Fortunato at Vicenza, dated 985. Neither for structural nor aesthetic reasons was it necessary that these nave arches should spring from every pier, so every alternate pier was chosen, the intermediate transverse aisle arch being suppressed and the pier, that no longer had a lateral arch to support, reduced in size. To support the great nave arches, pilasters were of course attached to the nave face of the pier, and these, as well as the aisle pilasters, were made semicircular in plan. If we assume, as we may, that in other examples all the transverse arches of the aisle were retained, while only each alternate pier bore a nave arch, we shall have a plan made up of compound piers supporting longitudinal and transverse wall-bearing arches that divide the entire area into squares, large and small, the great square often being four times the area of each aisle square.

The next step for a people on the highway of progress would be the vaulting, in masonry, of these squares, for the wooden roofs were inflammable; moreover the Carolingian builders had constantly so vaulted their smaller square roof areas. The process began at once, and of course with the aisle squares, where the structural problem was simplest. The date is not recorded; no early examples remain in Lombardy, but in Normandy we find, about 1050, churches which possess aisles covered by square, groined vaults, with the transverse arches showing. The next step was of course the vaulting of the great squares of the nave, but before this was attempted the rib vault was devised, and the task rendered structurally more simple. The old transverse aisle arches had given the hint; where an aisle so spanned was to be vaulted, the arches already in place formed a very convenient shelf on which some of the vault stones might rest, and, by so much, a portion of the temporary centering might be dispensed with. Intelligence could not fail to suggest that an expedient useful in the case of the transverse arch might be equally useful in that of the diagonals, which were far more difficult of construction, as well the most liable to give way in the case of ribless, groined vaults. When did this era-making invention take place, and at the hands of what people? Where, we shall probably never know, nor yet the exact date; but it could not have been earlier than 1025, nor later than 1075. San Flaviano at Montefiascone, authentically dated 1032, has aisles with rib vaults which are original and, if so, are the earliest on record, while the nave vault of Sant' Ambrogio at Milan (c.1060) is of fully developed rib construction. "The most rent authorities (such as Venturi, Storia dell' Arte Italiana, 1903, who cites Stiehl, 1898) accept the view hat the vaults are of foreign fashion derived from Burgundy, and were about contemporaneous with the campanile [1129].... It seems that on the evidence we are compelled to suppose that Sant' Ambrogio derived its scheme of construction from Normandy. It may be that the origin of the vault is to be sought for even in England; but there are many reasons for thinking that the seed idea, like so many others, came from the East." (W. R. Lethaby, "Mediaeval Art", IV, 100-111.)

In all probability the Lombards are the originators of this device so pregnant of future possibilities. The new vault, groined, ribbed, and domed, was in a class by itself, apart from anything that had gone before. Particularly did it differ from the Roman vault in that, while the latter had a level crown, obtained by using semicircular lateral and transverse arches and elliptical groin arches (naturally formed by the intersection of two semicircular barrel vaults of equal radius), the "Lombard" vault was constructed with semicircular diagonals, the result being that domical form which was always retained by the Gothic builders of France because of its intrinsic beauty. Finally, the new diagonals suggested new vertical supports in the angles of the pier, and so we obtain the fully developed compound pier, which later, at the hands of the English, was to be carried to such extremes of beauty, and to form a potent factor in the development of the Gothic structural system.

The last step in the working-out of the Gothic vaulting plan remained to be taken - the substitution of oblong for square vaulting areas. This was finally accomplished in the Ile-de-France after various Norman experiments, the evidences of which remain in the vaults of St-Georges de Bocherville and the two great abbeys of Caen. The sexpartite vaulting of the latter, together with that of the five other similarly vaulted Norman churches and of the choir of St-Denis at Paris, has always been an architectural puzzle, since it is manifestly a stage in the development of the oblong quadripartite vault, and yet is found in these cases some years after the latter system is known to have been fully understood in France, and nearly three-quarters of a century later than the vault of Sant' Ambrogio. There is reason to suppose that it is a revival of some of the earlier experiments in the development of the large, oblong, high vault from the small, square, aisle vault. It is conceivable that sexpartite vaults may once have existed in Lombardy and before the quadripartite vault was evolved; this would explain the persistence in Sant' Ambrogio of the vaulting shafts on the intermediate piers, for which no apparent reason exists. The vault of the Abbaye aux Dames may be considered either as a ribbed quadripartite vault of square plan, bisected and strengthened by a transverse arch with solid spandrels, or as a series of transverse arches, one on each pair of nave piers, with the roof spaces filled in by curved surfaces of stone supported on diagonal ribs meeting on the crown of each alternate transverse arch. In the first case would be indicated a fear to trust the stability of so large a quadripartite vault, until experiment proved its efficiency; in the second, a stage in the evolution of the great Sant' Ambrogio vault, all local evidence of which has been lost. The vault of the Abbaye aux Hommes is one more stage in the development; here the vault spaces are curved both from the transverse arch and from the intermediate arch, which so becomes, not an arch — as in the Abbaye aux Dames — but a true vaulting rib. The result is a very strong vaulting system, particularly effective in its light and shade and its line composition, and it does not seem surprising that the Norman builders should have reverted to it from time to time, or that Abbot Suger himself should have borrowed it for his fine new abbey, choosing it for its strength or its beauty in place of the simpler and more open quadripartite vault.

In the meantime the second great structural problem, that of the abutment of the vault thrusts, had been solved by the Normans. In Roman construction the thrust of barrel vaults had been neutralized by walls of great thickness, that of groin vaults either by the same clumsy expedient or by transverse walls; when the Lombards first threw their transverse arches across narrow aisles, they added shallow exterior pilaster-strips at the point of contact, rather it would seem for decorative than for structural reasons, as the walls already were strong enough to take the slight thrust of the small arches. With the vaulting of the nave the problem became serious; in Sant' Ambrogio they dared not raise the spring of the high vault above the triforium floor, and the thrust of the vault was taken by two massive arches spanning the aisles, one below this floor, the other above, the latter being hidden under the wide, sloping roof of the nave which was continued unbroken to the aisle walls. This was, of course, but the transverse wall of the Romans, pierced by arched openings; the result was unbeautiful, and the task fell to the Normans of devising a better and more scientific method. At their hands the Lombard pilaster-strip became at once a functional buttress instead of a decorative adjunct, while the successive steps in the evolution of the flying buttress remain on record and are peculiarly interesting. In the Abbaye aux Hommes,

the expedient was adopted of constructing half-barrel vaults springing from the aisle walls and abutting against the vaults of the nave beneath the lean-to roof. These were in reality concealed flying buttresses, but they were flying buttresses of bad form; for only a small part of their action met the concentrated action of the vaults that they were designed to stay, the greater part of it operating against the walls between the piers where no abutments were required (Moore, op. cit., I, 12, 13).

In the Abbaye aux Dames these defects were remedied, for all the barrel vault was cut away except that narrow part which abutted against, the spring of the vault. The flying buttress had been invented. As yet it was hidden under the triforium roof and did not declare itself to the eye. but functionally it was complete. The fruit of the Cluniac reform working on Norman blood had been the evolution of the main lines of the Gothic plan (barring the eastern termination, or chevet) together with the development of the Gothic system of vaulting and the Gothic principle of concentrated thrusts met by pier buttresses and flying buttresses. The true "Gothic system" is therefore the product of Normandy. In the meantime what had been done towards the working-out of the other half of the Gothic idea — the discovering anew of the underlying principles of pure beauty, their analysis into the elements of form and composition, proportion, relation and rhythm, line and colour, and chiaroscuro and finally what had been accomplished in the direction of evolving that new quality of form-expression which, differing as it does from any school of the past, gives to Gothic art its peculiar personality? — Nothing, so far as Normandy is concerned, except as regards certain large architectonic qualities first revealed in Jumièges, and, following this, in the Abbeys of Caen and St-Georges de Bocherville. The Abbaye aux Hommes is the norm of all French cathedrals; the Abbaye aux Dames, of the English order; while Jumièges, the first in date, remains one of the most astonishing buildings in history. If it had antecedents, if it came as the culmination of a long and progressive series of experiments in the development of architectonic form, the evidence is forever lost, for, as it now stands, it is isolated, almost preternatural. So far as we know, it had no precursors, and yet here are the majestical ruins of a monastic church larger than any since the time of Constantine and far in advance, so far as design and development are concerned, of any contemporary structure. Montier en Der, an abbey of Haute-Marne, built by Abbots Adso and Berenger (960, 998), is the only recorded structure which bears the least kinship to Jumièges, and the difference between the two separated by only fifty years — is that between barbarism and civilization. All that was good in Lombard architecture has been assimilated, and in addition we find fixed for the whole Gothic period those lofty and monumental proportions, that masterly setting out of plan, the powerful grouping of lofty towers, the final organism of arcaded triforium, and clerestory that together were to set the type of Gothic architecture for its entire term and endure unchanged, though infinitely perfected, so long as the Christian civilization of the Middle Ages remained operative. After Jumièges the abbeys of Caen were easy, and, given a continuation of cultural conditions, Amiens and Lincoln inevitable.

During the latter half of the eleventh century these cultural conditions ceased in Normandy. After the death of William the Conqueror the duchy fell on evil times, and the working out to its logical and supreme conclusion of the great style fell into other hands, viz., those of the French of the old Royal Domain and of the transplanted Normans in England. In France the eleventh century had been marked by royal inefficiency, unchecked feudal tyranny, episcopal insubordination to papal control, indifference to the Cluniac reform, and general anarchy. By the middle of the century Cluny had done its immediate work and had begun to lapse from its lofty ideals, but others were to take its place and do its work, and in 1075 St. Robert of Molesme founded in Burgundy the first house of that Cistercian Order which was to play in the twelfth century the part that Cluny had played in the eleventh. The preliminary fight that was to clear the ground in France began with the Council of Reims called by Pope Leo IX (1049-1054), when the sovereign pontiff and the monastic orders made common cause against the simony, secularism, and independence of the French episcopate. The contest was carried on simultaneously with the even greater fight against the empire, and, as there, the victory remained with the papacy. With the close of the eleventh century conditions in France had become such that the torch that fell from the hands of the decadent Norman could be caught by the crescent Frank and carried on without a pause.

During the first half of the twelfth century the outburst of architectural vigour in the Ile-de-France is very remarkable. Soissons, Amiens, and Beauvais became simultaneously centres of activity, and the rib vault makes its appearance at the same time in many places.

During the first phase of the transition, 1100-40, the builders struggled to master the rib vault in its simpler problems: they learned to construct it on square and on oblong plans and even over the awkward curves of ambulatory aisles, but their experiments were always on a small scale. During the second phase (1140-80) the problem of vaulting great naves was attacked; the evolution centres in the peculiar development which the genius of the French builders gave to the concealed flying buttress and to the sexpartite vault, both borrowed from Normandy (Porter, op. cit., II, 54).

The semicircular ambulatory of Morienval (c. 1122), with its vaulting supported on ribs curved in plan, and the church of St-Etienne at Beauvais (c. 1130), of which Professor Moore says that with the exception of St-Louis of Poissy it is "the only Romanesque structure extant on the soil of France that was unmistakably designed for ribbed, groined vaulting over both nave and aisles", are valuable landmarks in the development. The second task of the French builders was simplified by the introduction of the pointed arch. As in the case of the ribbed vault, there is no means of knowing the exact source from whence this was derived. It had been in use in the East for nearly a thousand years before it appeared in the West; it was established in the South France as an effective and economical contour for barrel vaults by the year 1050, whence it migrated to Burgundy and so to Berry (where it appears in 1110), but always in connection with vaults rather than arches. The earliest structural pointed arch recorded in France is in the ambulatory of Morienval, referred to above, and is dated 1122. This form, so pregnant of structural and artistic possibilities, may have been brought from the Holy Land by returning pilgrims, or it may have been independently evolved. Whatever its source, its advantages were so great from a practical standpoint that it is hard to believe that the races that had produced Sant' Ambrogio and Jumièges should not have worked out independently the idea of the pointed arch. Its two great virtues are its slight thrust as compared with the round arch, and its infinite possibilities of variation in height. The elliptical diagonals of the Romans did not commend themselves to the builders of the North, and the doming that resulted from the uniform use of semicircular arches, while not offensive in the case of square areas, became impossible where oblong spaces were to be covered, the expedient of stilting the longitudinal arches not yet having suggested itself. With the pointed arch in use, all difficulties disappeared. Once introduced it became in a few years the universal form, and its beauty was such that it immediately won its way against the round arch for the spanning of all voids. Almost coincidentally with the acceptance of the pointed arch came the device of stilting, the transverse arches of Bury (c. 1125) being so treated. This would seem to indicate that to the Gothic builders the value of the pointed arch lay rather in its comparatively small thrust and in its intrinsic beauty than in the facility with which it might be used for obtaining level crowns in oblong vaulting areas. This stilting of the longitudinal arches was from the beginning almost invariable in France; structurally, it concentrated the vault thrust on a comparatively narrow vertical line, where it could be easily handled by the flying buttress; it permitted the largest possible window area in the clerestory, while the composition of lines and the delicately waved or twisted surfaces were so beautiful in themselves that, once discovered, they could not be abandoned by the logical and beauty-loving Franks.

The structural and aesthetic advance was now headlong in its impetuosity. A few years after Bury, St-Germer de Fly was built, the date assigned by Professor Moore being about, 1130. Here we find a building almost as surprising as Jumièges; for if the date quoted above is correct, the church has no prototype, no promising stages of experiment. The vaulting, both of the ambulatory and of the apse, is stilted and has its full complement of ribs, the shafting throughout is finely articulated, the dimensions are stately, the proportions just and effective, while the easterly termination is a perfectly developed apse with rudimentary chapels — a chevet in posse. The flying buttresses are still concealed under the triforium roof, and outwardly the building has no Gothic character whatever; but the Gothic organism is practically complete.

With Abbot Suger's St-Denis, the easterly termination of which is of original construction and is dated 1140, we come to what is almost the fully developed Gothic plan, order and system, together With the true chevet of double apsidal aisles and chapels. This last feature, perhaps the most brilliant in conception and splendid in effect of the several parts of a Gothic church, may have been derived either from the triapsidal termination of the Carolingian basilican church, or from the polygonal domed structures of the same epoch. Transitional forms are found throughout the eleventh century, and the development from such a plan as that of St. Generou, on the one hand, or Aachen, on the other, to St-Denis presupposes only that degree of inventive force and overflowing vitality which, as a matter of fact, existed during the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

With the chevet as fully developed as it now appears in St-Denis, there remains only the gradual perfection and refinement of the structural system and the giving it that quality of distinctive beauty in every aspect that was to be the very flowering of the Catholic civilization of the Middle Ages. From the middle of the twelfth century both processes went on apace and simultaneously. Noyon followed immediately, and here, it is maintained, the flying buttress for the first time emerged through the roof, displaying in logical fashion the system of construction, and at the same time bringing the abutment above the springing of the vault, where the greatest thrust actually occurred, while permitting the lowering of the triforium roof so that the clerestory window might be given great height and brought into better proportion with the arcade and triforium. Senlis, of the same date, exhibits a great advance in mechanical skill and logical exactitude, with an innovation that commands less admiration — the substitution of cylindrical columns for the intermediate piers on the caps of which rest the shafts of the intermediate ribs of the sexpartite vault. Continued in Notre-Dame, Paris, this clever but unconvincing, device proved to be but an experimental form, and was abandoned as unsatisfactory in the greatest monuments of French Gothic, such Chartres, Reims, Bourges, and Amiens, where recourse was had to the specifically Gothic compound pier, with the shafts of the transverse ribs, at least, of the vault brought frankly and firmly down to the pavement.

The cathedral of Paris was begun in 1163 with the choir, and completed in 1235 with the raising of the western towers. From East to West there is a steady growth in certainty of touch, in structural efficiency, and in the expression through beauty of form and line of the culminating civilization of medievalism. The interior order exhibits the defects of the imperfectly organized Norman system, particularly in the lofty, vaulted triforium or gallery, so great in size that there is no rhythm in the relationship of arcade, triforium and clerestory, together with the columnar scheme of Sens and Noyon (the imposing of the vault shafts on the caps of plain cylindrical columns), which must be regarded as falling back from the perfect articulation of the true Gothic system. The plan, however, is nobly developed, the general relations of height and breadth fine to a degree, while in the west front (1210-35) Gothic design reaches, perhaps, the highest point it ever achieved so far as classical simplicity, power, and proportion are concerned. The seed of Jumièges has developed into full fruition. The façade of Notre-Dame must rank as one of the few entirely perfect architectural accomplishments of man. With the cathedral of Paris, also, the new art shows itself in all its wonderful inclusiveness; design, as apart from constructive science, appears full flood in the entire treatment of the exterior; the Lombard rose window has been evolved to its final point; decorative detail, both in design and in placing, has become sure and perfectly competent; while sculpture, stained glass, and, we know from records, painting have all forged forward to a point at least even with the sister art of architecture. In sculpture especially the advance has been amazing. For many generations it was held that the restoration of sculpture as a fine art was due to Italy, and specifically to Niccolo Pisano, but as a matter of fact the task was accomplished in France a century before his time. The revival began in the South, where Byzantine remains were numerous and the tradition still lingered. At Clermont-Ferrand, by the end of the eleventh century, a school of competent sculptors had been developed; Toulouse and Moissac followed suit, and by 1140 the Ile-de-France was producing works which show "a grace and mastery of design, a truth and tenderness of sentiment, and a fineness and precision of chiselling that are unparalleled in any other schools save those of ancient Greece and of Italy in the fifteenth century" (Moore, op. cit., XIII, 366). The sculptures of St-Denis, of Chartres, of Senlis, and of Paris are perfect examples of sculpture beyond criticism in itself and exquisitely adapted to its architectonic function; the statue of Our Lady in the portal of the north transept of Paris may be placed for comparison side by side with the masterpieces of Hellenic sculpture and lose nothing by the test. Of stained glass enough remains here and elsewhere to show how marvellous was the wholly new art brought into being by the genius of medievalism; and that the painting and guilding of all the interior surfaces was on a scale of equal perfection, we are compelled to believe. As the cathedrals and churches now remain to us — much of the glass destroyed by savage iconoclasm and brutality, every trace of colour vanished from the walls, while the original altars themselves have been swept away together with their gorgeous hangings and decorations (monstrosities like that of Chartres, for instance, taking their places); shrines, screens, and tombs, all wonderfully wrought and glorious in colour and gold, shattered and cast into the rubbish heap — they can give but an inadequate idea at best of the nature of that Christian art which in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries came as the result of a fusion of all the arts, each one of which had been raised to the highest point of efficiency. Of the lost colour of Gothic art Mr. Prior says,

We can readily be assured that nothing of crudity found place in the colour scheme of the Middle Ages — for have we not their illuminated manuscripts in evidence? For its pure and delicate harmony, a page of a thirteenth or fourteenth century manuscript may compete with the work of the greatest masters of colour that the world has known, and we cannot doubt that the same mastery of brilliant and harmonious tints was shown in the colour scheme of cathedral painting (op. cit., Introd., 19).

Some hint of what has been lost may be obtained from the faded frescoes of Cimabue and the painters of Siena, as they may be seen to-day at Assisi and Florence and Siena itself. The defects of Paris are almost wholly absent in Chartres, which is the most nearly perfect of all Gothic cathedrals both in conception and in the details of its working out. It is unquestionably the noblest interior in Christendom, even though the lower portions of its choir have been ruined by the most aggressive vandalism known to the eighteenth century. Its relations of dimension are of the same final and classical type as are those of the west front of Paris, while it stands at that middle point of achievement when the defects of the Norman system had been eliminated, and those of the too exuberant vitality of the thirteenth century had not yet appeared. As has been said above, Gothic architecture is an impulse and a tendency rather than a perfectly rounded accomplishment; the element of personality entered into it as into no other of the great styles, and it was therefore subject not only to dazzling flights of spontaneous genius, but also to the misguided imaginings of daring innovators. The noble calm of the Paris facade was followed by the nervous complexity and lack of relation of Laon. Only five years after this same masterpiece of Notre-Dame was achieved, the flying buttresses of the chevet were reconstructed, and in place of the original fine simplicity and logic of the system of doubled arcs, announcing perfectly the fundamental plan, were substituted the present daring and superb, but illogical and ungainly arches soaring from the outer abutments across both aisles sheer to the spring of the high vault. Similarly, when Amiens was built, the just proportions of Chartres were sacrificed to the pride of structural ability, and a faultless harmony of parts and proportions yielded to wire drawn elegance and awe-inspiring altitudes, destined a little later, in Beauvais, to be the Nemesis of Gothic art. Finally, the system of concentrated loads, which made possible a structure of masonry that was but a skeleton, supporting vaults of stone and filled in by walls of glass, was so tempting to the sense of daring and to the inevitable logic of the French genius that it led to a recklessness in the reductions of solids to a minimum that, however much it may have justified itself structurally, however marvellous may have been the results it made possible in the line of glowing and translucent walls of Apocalyptic colour, must be considered as falling away from the justice and the grandeur of a classically architectonic scheme such as that of Chartres.

It was the Logic of the Parisian that brought to his Gothic both its extreme excellence and its decay: the science of vault construction fell in with his bent. The idea once having attracted him, his logical faculty compelled him to follow it to the end. His vaults rose higher and higher; his poise and counterpoise, his linkage of thrust and strain grew more complicated and daring, until material mass disappeared from his design and his cathedrals were chain-works of articulated stone pegged to the ground by pinnacles (Edward S. Prior, "A History of Gothic Art in England", I, 9).

The fact must not be ignored, that even in the culminating monuments of the thirteenth century in France the mania for skeleton construction led to unfortunate subterfuges. The reduction of masonry was carried beyond a possible minimum, and its insufficiency was supplemented by hidden bars, ties, and chains of iron.

The windows were sub-divided by strong grates of wrought-iron, some of the horizontal bars of which ran on through the piers continuously. At the Sainte Chapelle a chain was imbedded in the walls right round the building, and the stone vaulting ribs were reinforced by curved bands of iron placed on each side and bolted to them (W.R. Lethaby, "Mediaeval Art", VII, 161).

In spite of these errors of a too perfect mastery of the art of building, the great group of cathedrals that followed during the thirteenth century in France must always remain the crowning glory of Catholic architecture. Bourges, Reims, and Amiens, with the numberless other examples of a perfected art, from the Channel to the Pyrenees, the Alps to the sea, form the greatest cycle of buildings in a definite and highly developed style that has ever been produced by man, and is the most salient exposition in history of human capacity for evolving a material perfection with absolute beauty and spiritual significance, all under the control and by the impulse of a dominant and undivided religious faith. There are three abstruse subjects connected with the nature and growth of Gothic architecture on which much has been written, yet nothing thus far that may be considered finally conclusive:

• the Commacini, or seventh-century guild of masons;

• the "structural refinements" to which Professor Goodyear has devoted so much study;

• the application of certain mystical numbers, and their relations to the solution of the problem of proportion.

Of the Commacini, whose name first appeals in a mid-fifth-century document, Mr. Lethaby says,

It is generally held by scholars that the word does not refer to a centre at Como, but should be understood as signifying an association or guild of masons, and that the Magistri Commacini heard of in the seventh century were of no small importance. It does seem probable, however, that the expansion of N. Italian art over many parts of Europe, which appears to have taken place in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, may be traced to the fact that in Italy the guilds had privileges which made members free to travel at a time when Western masons were attached to manors or monasteries (W. R. Lethaby, "Mediaeval Art", IV, 114).

Professor Goodyear may be assumed to have proved that the irregularities in plan, the variations in spacing, the inclination of walls, and all the other manifold peculiarities of medieval building are in many ways premeditated, and not the result of negligence or accident. The aesthetic excuse he makes less obvious, however, nor has he yet established any general law which holds as consistently as do those governing architectural refinements in Greek architecture. The mystical deductions as to the persistence of certain numerical laws, the occult properties of numbers, and the angle called the "pi pitch" from the time of the builders of the pyramids, all of which are supposed to express certain fundamental laws governing the universe, and to have been transmitted from father to son for thousands of years, until they appear as the controlling principles of Gothic proportion, and the setting out of Gothic plans, may be found in "Ideal Metronomy" by the Rev. H. G. Wood (Boston, 1909). When the chevet of Le Mans was finished, in 1254, the beginnings recorded in Jumièges two centuries before had worked themselves out to a point beyond which further wholesome development was impossible. The Franks had perfected what the Normans had initiated; the structural scheme inherent in Jumièges had progressed step by step to its conclusion; the great architectural harmonies of form and proportion and dimension, the mysterious and evocative powers of subtile and rhythmical relationship, had already achieved their highest fruition in Chartres and Reims, while an entirely new category of art, no sign of which had been accorded to the Normans, had by the Franks been brought again into being, viz., that of absolute beauty in decoration, whether in stone or glass or pigment, whether in itself as isolated detail or in regard to its placing and disposition. Moreover, this latter manifestation of art was in terms radically different to anything that had gone before, although the principles were identified with those of all great art: "In breadth of design, ordination of parts and measured recurrence of structural and ornamental elements, the Gothic artist obeyed, though in different form, the same primary laws that had governed the ancient Greek" (Moore, op. cit., I, 22). The same was true of his sense of abstract and concrete beauty; in the contours of his mouldings, the carving of his caps and crockets, bosses and spandrels, the development of his decorative compositions of mass and line, and light and shade, he fell in no respect behind his brothers of Greece, while he exceeded those of Byzantium. The forms were different, wholly his own and original, but the essential spirit was the same.

In the meantime Gothic architecture had been following a parallel course of development in England, borrowing directly from Normandy and France, assimilating what it so acquired, and giving to all a distinctly national character that tended from year to year further to separate English Gothic from any other, both structurally and artistically. No sooner was the Conquest effected in 1066, than the building of Norman abbeys, cathedrals, and churches was put in hand. Actually the introduction of Norman Romanesque occurred sixteen years earlier, viz., in 1050, when St. Edward the Confessor began the building of Canterbury. The earliest work differs in no essential particular from that of Normandy, except as regards size, which in many cases was astonishing; not only were the abbeys often far larger than anything in Normandy, they were the greatest buildings in Europe. Winchester and St. Paul's were more than double the ground area of the Abbaye aux Hommes, while the London cathedral and Bury St. Edmund's were each a fourth larger even than the gigantic Cluny itself. From the first the English peculiarity of great length combined with comparatively narrow nave (30-35 feet in clear span) is conspicuous. As the Norman buildings were destroyed, and rebuilt under Gothic influence the original setting out was generally adhered to, and Gothic naves are seldom found of a width greater than that of the Norman. Very early, also, occurs the typical deep English choir, Canterbury in 1096, having one nine bays in depth. This excessive length of the eastern arm was due quite as much to practical considerations, as to those of beauty. Religion was popular in England for some centuries after the Conquest, and great quantities of worshippers had to be provided for. In Spain the choir of monks or secular clergy thrust itself through the nave half way to the west doors; in France it usually took in at least the crossing; the cathedrals of the Ile-de- France were secular and the very wide choirs easily accommodated the few canons. In England, however, the numbers of the monks and canons was so great, and so many of the cathedrals were monastic in their foundation, that enormously long choirs were necessary for the seating, in their narrow width, of those permanently attached to each church.

The great abbeys and cathedrals were seldom vaulted, being covered by timber roofs of low pitch, except as regards their easily vaulted aisles. Barrel vaults were occasionally used, groin vaults in innumerable cases; the groin vault with ribs first occurs in Durham in 1093, an astonishing date, since the earliest ribbed vault claimed for France is in the diminutive church of Rhuis, a structure the date of which is unknown, but is placed at about 1100. The earliest known rib vault is claimed by Rivoira to be that of San Flaviano, in Umbria, but there is some doubt as to whether this is the original vault of a church known to have been built in 1032. San Nazzaro Maggiore, at Milan, has an authentic rib vault of 1075, and it appears therefore that the choir vault of Durham is earlier than any certain example in France, however small, and that it was built within twenty years of the first dated rib vault in Lombardy. The vaults of Durham nave are pointed and ribbed, and are not later than 1128, six years after the pointed arch appears in the little French church of Morienval.

No further development towards Gothic in England until the middle of the twelfth century. Great abbeys in the fully developed Norman style, such as Kirkstall and Fountains, Malmesbury, Peterborough, Norwich, and Ely were reared all over England, but the prevailing monastic influence was Benedictine, and this was always architecturally conservative, and at the same time magnificent. Apses with encircling ambulatories were almost invariable, and there was frequently the western transept, as at Bury and Ely. Towards the end of the Norman period the Cluniac influence greatly intensified the native richness in decoration of Benedictine art, and to this we owe in great measure the rich and intricate carving of the late Norman work that persisted down even to the chapel of Our Lady at Glastonbury, built in 1184. Before this date had occurred two events which were to initiate and, in varying degrees, control the growth of Gothic in England: the coming of the Cistercians and the rebuilding of Canterbury choir by William of Sens. The Cistercians always favoured Gothic, over the massive and grandiose Romanesque of the Benedictines and Cluniacs, because of its early austerity and the economies it made possible in building. Regular Canons, also, and for similar reasons, adopted the economical new form, and this double influence was constantly exerted toward structural and artistic simplicity — a fortunate thing for the new style, since it prevented a too early flowering in the richness and luxuriance of beautiful detail.

That William of Sens introduced to England and set before English eyes so much as he could of so much as then existed of French Gothic is quite true, but it does not appear that his was the first Gothic done in England, or that it had a wide or lasting influence. Mr. Bond divides the local adaptation of Gothic into three schools — that of the West, the North, and the South — giving to the former priority in time. He says:

The first complete Gothic of England commences not with the choir of Lincoln, but of Wells, as begun by Reginald FitzBohun who was bishop from 1174 to 1191.... It was in the West of England that the art of Gothic vaulting was first mastered; first, so far as we know, at Worcester; and it was in the West, first apparently at Wells, that every arch was pointed, and the semicircular arch exterminated (op. cit., VII, 105).

This development was underway at Worcester, Dore, Wells, Shrewsbury, and Glastonbury, to name only a few of the examples quoted, by the time the work at Canterbury passed from the hands of William of Sens to those of William the Englishman, and there is little evidence that it had any particular effect on the progress already begun. In the North, Lincoln choir followed close after Canterbury and was manifestly influenced by it in many ways, but as Mr. Bond says, "it is equally plain that the obligation is almost wholly to the English and not to the French part of that design" (op. cit., VII, 111-12), for not all of Canterbury choir is French, even in the case of the work of William of Sens himself; the slender shafts of Purbeck marble, the springing of the vault ribs from the level of the triforium caps rather than from the string course above, the penetrations of the clerestory, the elaborately compound angle piers, with their ring of detached columns, are all English, and it precisely these features St. Hugh copied at Lincoln. Neither does there appear in the retro-choir of Chichester, begun about the time William of Sens went back to France, any evidence that his work had established a dominating precedent; here the work is of a distinctively native cast, the columns of the arcade in particular being original to a degree and of the most distinguished beauty. The exotic element in Canterbury proved to be but an episode and English Gothic went on developing itself after its own independent fashion. The choir of Lincoln exerted far greater influence and became the general model for all parts of England. In some cases an attempt, and a successful one, was made to dispense with the vault entirely, as at Hexham, Tynemouth, and Whitby, where in each instance the timber roof of the Anglo-Norman abbey was retained, and the chief attention was devoted to refining and improving the detail and composition of the wall design, where extremely beautiful results were obtained, as at Whitby, by the strictly English elaboration of the arch mouldings and the profiling of the pier sections. The flying buttress also was slow of acceptance and never, indeed, became the striking feature it was in all the buildings of thirteenth-century France. The English cared little for logic and less for structural brilliancy, or even consistency; the goals they aimed at were beauty in all its forms, individual expression, novelty, originality — qualities they not seldom achieved at the expense of structural integrity. The Gothic of France was singularly consistent; it rapidly developed into a classical system from which no radical departures were made and into which the element of individual initiative hardly ever entered, once the body of laws and precedents had been established. The Gothic of England never possessed any such canon either of logic or of taste. Every bishop, abbot, or master-builder strove to outdo his fellows, to strike out some new and dazzling masterpiece, and if, as a result, the medieval building of England failed of the finality, the certainty, and the uniformity of that of France, it achieved a variety and personality far in advance of anything to be found across the channel. The second importation of French ideas, in the shape of Westminster Abbey, was apparently as helpless to change the English character as Canterbury choir had been; here also the French setting out, the chevet, the structural system, were overlaid with English qualities.

We may readily make the fullest allowance for French influence at Westminster, for so entirely is it translated into the terms of English detail that the result is triumphantly English. It is a remarkable thing indeed, that this church, which was so much influenced by French facts, should, in spirit, be one of the most English of English buildings (Lethaby: "Westminster Abbey and the King's Craftsmen", V, 125).

French "facts" were apparently as helpless to control the general building of a people as they had been to restrain English workmen in their detail, and after the great abbey was finished in all its beauty England went on as before. By this time the stylistic quality of English Gothic had been pretty well fixed in such works as Beverley choir and transepts; Christ Church and St. Patrick's, Dublin; Ely, presbytery, Southwell choir, Netley and Rievaulx Abbeys, together with the "Nine Altars" of Durham and Fountains, all completed between the years 1225 and 1250, the peculiar qualities of English work had taken on a definite and very beautiful form. This is the period usually denominated "Early English", and, it shows no particular advance in structural development, it records a notable change in point of design; nearly all the attention of the builders seems devoted to solving the problems of beauty in form and line, in detail and composition — this chiefly in the interior treatment. The relations of the arcade, triforium, and clerestory, the varying designs of the latter with their subtile arrangements of slender shafts and delicate lancets; the beautiful pier sections and moulding profiles, together with the sculpture of capitals, bosses, crockets, and terminals — varying as between the many sub-schools of the four main architectural provinces, yet always marked by a quality of pure beauty seldom attained even in the Ile-de-France — all are significant of a distinctively national artistic development, even though it follows lines other than those that held across the Channel. Coincidentally with the building of Westminster went on such works as the retro- choir of Exeter, the nave of Lichfield, and Tintern Abbey, wherein are the first signs of change from Early English to Geometrical. This process was continued up to the end of the century, and in the works of its last quarter are to be found the highest attainments of English art. Carlisle choir and east front, Peterborough and Pershore choirs, and St. Mary's Abbey, York, are all expressed in a type of art that rises to the level of the highest attainments of man. The exquisite line-composition of Pershore and of York Abbeys, the refinement combined with masculine strength, the swift, steel-like curves of the moulding profiles, the perfected beauty of the carved foliage, together with the masterly arrangement of the lines and spaces of light, the hollows and depths of shade — all work together to build up a masterly art. Much of the product of this time has perished, and even of York Abbey, which seems to represented the high-water mark of pure English design, nothing remains except a shattered aisle wall, a crossing pier, and a few piles of marble fragments. Though at the beginning of the nineteenth century the greater portion of the fabric was intact, about 1820 it was sold to speculators to be burned into lime.

During the first half of the fourteenth century architectural progress was cumulative, reaching its apogee during the reign of Edward III. The fine simplicity and almost Hellenic feeling for line visible in the work of the preceding half century, and that gives it a place in this respect in advance of any other Gothic work of any time or people, has yielded to decorative richness, the multiplication of ornament and detail, and an intricate composition of light and shade. The incomparable carving of Lincoln and Wells, York Abbey, West Walton, and Llandaff, architectural yet with all the qualities of form that are found in the noblest sculpture, yields first to the lovely, but naturalistic, type of Southwell chapter house, then to the globular forms, the bulbous modelling, and the effete curves of Patrington, Heckington, and the fourteenth-century tombs of Beverley and Ely. Curvilinear window tracery, in all its suave grace, has taken the place of the fine and vigorous forms as of Netley, advanced a stage beyond the prototypes of France. Finally, the brilliantly articulated lierne vaulting, with its intermediate ribs emphasizing the verticality of the composition and carrying out to completion in the roof the fine drawing of multiple piers and moulded arches, is swerving towards the unjustifiable type that came just before the fan vault, i.e., the criss-crossing of a network of purely decorative ribs over the vault-surfaces in violation of structural principle.

Decadence and perfect achievement go hand in hand — Exeter nave, the finest English interior remaining intact, on the one hand, Wells presbytery, on the other. But whatever the weaknesses that were showing themselves, they entered little into the make-up of the great parish churches, which represent, more than the episcopal and monastic structures, the genius of the period. This was one of the three great epochs of such parish architecture in England, and it is not to be forgotten that the true qualities of English Gothic art reveal themselves quite as fully in the minor as in the major buildings of this country. For a full century, i.e. from 1350 until 1450, the history of English Gothic is largely a history of parish church-building. The Black Death, which in 1349 smote the land with a pestilence that cut its population almost in halves, was followed by the War of the Roses, and the peace and prosperity of Edward III did not wholly return until the accession of Henry VII. During this long period, however, the trend of stylistic development was wholly changed by the remarkable innovations initiated by Abbot Thokey at Gloucester in 1330, and carried on by William of Wykeham at Winchester from 1380.

The supreme importance of Gloucester in the history of the later Gothic has never been adequately recognized. She turned the current of English architecture in a wholly new direction. But for Gloucester, English Decorated work might well have developed into a Flamboyant as rich and fanciful as that of France. But to the remotest corners of the land, to cathedral, abbey church, collegiate and parish church, there was brought the influence of Gloucester by the countless pilgrims to the shrine of Edward the Second in her choir (Bond, op. cit., VII, 134).

The manifest tendencies of the Decorated — not, it must be confessed, of the most promising kind — were terminated and instead a new progress was instituted toward development of what we now know as Perpendicular the first style of architecture that can properly be called "English". Hitherto English Gothic has been rather a lovely overlaying of Continental principles by a distinctively racial decoration and a certain fine fastidiousness of design, with minor modifications of plan and system that left the foundations intact, so far as they had been apprehended and assimilated. Now was to come a perfectly independent manifestation in which system, design, and decoration were all new and all exclusively English. The adoption of the French scheme of a structural framework, the walls being no longer of masonry, but of glass set in a thin scaffolding of stone mullions, was at last adopted, but its working-out bore almost no relation whatever to the French method. Before the architectural revolution there were signs that sense of proportion and composition was decaying, as for example in the Lady Chapel of Ely (1321), which has almost no architectonic qualities to commend it, but, whether William of Wykeham or profounder psychological influences are responsible, the fact remains that the danger was averted, and England recalled to sounder principles, which resulted in a new life in Gothic that persisted until Henry VIII and the regents under Edward VI brought the whole epoch of medieval civilization to an end and surrendered an unwilling people to the Reformation. Winchester nave and York choir; Westminster Hall, King's College Chapel, Cambridge, and St. George's Windsor; Sherborne and Malvern, the choir vault of Oxford cathedral and the chapel of Henry VII at Westminster, together with the major part of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges, the great central towers of many of the cathedrals and abbeys, and, finally, parish churches of all sizes and almost without number, are indicative of the surprising new life in art and therefore of the strength of the sound Catholic civilization of England. The beauty of the new style, its structural integrity, and its fecund variety are worthy of high admiration. What it lacked of the majesty of form and the serene reserve of an earlier time is almost made up for by a fineness of line, a richness of design without opulence, and a splendour of colour that find few antecedents in history, while the fan vault takes its place as one of the very great inventions of architecture. "In these splendid vaultings of the fifteenth century we have indeed the last work of English monastic art" (Prior, op. cit., VII, 95). Step by step, from her point of departure from the Gothic of France, England had worked out to the full her own form of Gothic artistic expression. French precedents sat lightly upon her, and she was not favourably disposed to coercion. In plan the Norman and Burgundian type had been adhered to, and instead of that concentration which had produced in France a parallelogram with one end semicircular, there had been an expansion which resulted in the episcopal or archiepiscopal cross plans of Lincoln, Beverley, and Salisbury — long, narrow naves, equally long choirs, widely-spreading, aisled transepts, and frequently choir transepts as well, with a deep Lady Chapel prolonging the main axis still further to the east. The plan of a French cathedral such as Paris or Amiens announces its ordonance but indifferently; that of an English cathedral, exactly. Outwardly, the former is hardly more than a mountainous mass without composition; vast and awe-inspiring, but without emphasis or variety, except in regard to its western front when taken by itself. The latter — with its long, lateral façade, it building-up by successive planes, both horizontal and vertical, its Lady Chapel, choir, central tower, and west towers, its bold transepts, porches, and chapels — becomes an elaborate yet monumental composition of brilliant and infinitely varied light and shade. With the exception of Hales, Lincoln, and Beaulieu (now destroyed), Tewkesbury, and Westminster, the chevet gained no hold in England, nor did the apsidal termination widely commend itself; instead, the square east end became the established type, and when to this was added a retro-choir with a still lower Lady Chapel still further to the east, the result was an independent architectural scheme equally admirable to that complex glory of the French chevet.

Mr. Prior advances the interesting theory that the square east end was a fixed feature of both Saxon and Celtic church-buildings, that it was taken to Burgundy by St. Stephen Harding, the Englishman, who had been a monk of Sherborne in Dorset, where the old national tradition had survived the Norman invasion, and that it came back with the Cistercians, who, by their sheer dynamic force, were able to impose it at last on Benedictine abbey and secular cathedral alike, so bringing an originally local device to its own again. He says further:

In this matter the Canterbury choir of William of Sens was a survival rather than a pattern for English use. By the end of the twelfth century the small Keltic sanctuary had imposed itself on the choirs of our great Norman churches still more decisively than it had in the basilican introduction of St. Augustine (A History of Gothic Art in England, II, 79).

In height, as related to breadth, the earlier and more reserved French relations were never exceeded, while they were often discounted; until Tudor times the elimination of the wall in favour of skeleton construction combined with glass screens, found little following, and a grave and conservative relationship was preserved between solids and voids. The central tower, the culmination and concentration of the composition, was almost invariable, while the west front was usually subordinated to the design as a whole. The elaborate articulation of piers and archivolts, until both became compositions of fine lines of light and shade, was carried further in England than elsewhere, and the introduction of tiercerons, or accessory vault ribs, with the ridge ribs to receive them, was in keeping with an instinct that felt the subtle beauty of these multiplied lines. The logical sense, that demanded the grounding of every downward thrust of vault rib either at the pavement or on the abacus of the pier or column caps, was not operative, and in most cases the vault shafts were stopped on corbels above the level of nave capitals. From the Cistercian aversion to ornament, and perhaps also in part from the use of turned shafts of dark marble applied to the piers and bonded in by stone rings or bronze dowels, came the turned and moulded cap with the circular abacus. In its polygonal chapter houses England developed a brilliant conception all its own, and almost the same might be said of the parish church, while in the designing of tombs, chantries, reredoses, choir-screens, and chancel-fittings of wood, the delicate fancy of the English had full play in the creation of a mass of exquisite sculpture and joinery that has no counterpart elsewhere. If logic and consistency are the note of French Gothic, personality and daring are those of the Gothic of England. The west fronts of Peterborough, Bury St. Edmunds, Wells, Ely, and Lincoln; the chapter houses of York, Salisbury, Lincoln, and Westminster; the octagon of Ely, the fan vaulting of Gloucester, Sherborne, Oxford, and Westminster — all are examples of a vitality of impulse, a fertility in conception, a soaring imagination, and a cheerful disregard of scholastic precedent that give English Gothic a quality of its own as important in the make-up of the art expression of Catholic Europe during the Middle Ages as is the masterly and final structural achievement of the Ile-de-France. Outside France and England the racial adaptations of the Gothic impulse are much less vital and distinctive. Wales early evolved a school which had great influence in the development of style in the West of England, but it soon became merged therein and did not long preserve its identity: Ireland shows in its minor monastic work peculiar and very individual qualities. In Scotland French influence was more pronounced than in the South, and the Norman of Jedburgh and Kelso, the Gothic of Dryburgh, Melrose, and Edinburgh deserve more careful study than has yet been given them. In all essential particulars, however, they are of the English school, and show no radical departures from the type established in the South by the Benedictines, Cluniacs, Cistercians, Augustinians, and Friars. In Germany the Gothic expression was slow in establishing itself, few evidences appearing before the Gothic style had reached perfection in France and England.

A reason for this, may perhaps be found in the fact that Germany in the twelfth century possessed a Romanesque architecture which, especially in the important churches along the Rhine, was of a very admirable character and was well suited to the tastes of the German people (Moore, op. cit., VII, 237).

Another reason may also be discovered in the further fact that the pressure of Cistercian influence during its great formative period was towards France and England rather than in the direction of Germany, wile the impulse of creative civilization in the twelfth century was from Norman and Frankish rather than Teutonic blood. When, about the middle of the thirteenth century, French architects began the construction of the cathedral of Cologne after the exaggerated manner of Beauvais, they might almost have claimed that theirs was the first Gothic structure in Germany. Pointed arches and ribbed vaults had appeared sporadically in some of the larger churches at the end of the twelfth century, such as Worms, Mainz, and Bamberg, but the lateral arches are not stilted, and so far as proportion, design, exterior treatment and detail are concerned, these churches are strictly of the Rhenish Romanesque type, as are indeed, awkwardly, the internally more Gothic Magdeburg and Limburg, St. Gereon, Cologne, and the Liebfrauenkirche, Trier, the first completed in 1227, the second begun in the same year, are churches of novel plan, each apparently having resulted from an effort, to turn a French chevet into a church by repeating its design, so producing a plan approximating a circle, and harking back in an indeterminate sort of way to the polygonal, domed churches of Charlemagne; in both cases French schemes and forms have been used rather superficially and with little appreciation. Cologne remains, in spite of these examples, the first church in Germany that is strictly Gothic in its idea and its setting out, but even here its detail and ornament are German rather than French. It had a considerable influence on the superficial development of style, and towards the end of the century such works as St. Elizabeth, Marburg, and the cathedrals of Strasburg and Freiburg show the spreading of a style that had come too late to reach any very complete fruition. Until the end of the Middle Ages, when curious fantasies in design and decoration gave to German Gothic a certain unquestioned individuality, the contributions to the development of this phase of art were not notable; the most conspicuous is the Hallenbau scheme which consists in raising one or more aisles on either side of the nave to an equal height therewith, or rather in building a great hall roofed with level vaulting supported on rows of slender shafts dividing it in aisles. Lübeck has five of these churches, others no less than seven. The Hallenbau church, whatever its width, was usually covered by one enormous roof, and the result, both internally and externally, is as far as possible from the Gothic idea of a logical assemblage of parts, each bearing a just and beautiful proportion to the others, all interrelated and forming a highly articulated organism, the exterior of which announced explicitly every structural form of plan and ordonance. The "open-work" spire, such as that of Freiburg, is a German development of a Flamboyant idea, which had much aesthetically to commend it, its lacelike surfaces being often treated with great effectiveness. Flemish Gothic is distinctly a sub-school of that of France rather than of Germany. The nave of Tournai, built in 1060 is still Rhenish Romanesque, though pointed arches and certain Burgundian qualities are creeping in; its proportions, however, partake of the finer feeling of the Franks, even though its general conception is Rhenish. During the first half of the thirteenth century such thoroughly strong and refined examples of true Gothic as St. Martin, Ypres, St. Bavon and St. Michael, Ghent, appear, widely divided in the quality from the halting efforts of Germany proper. The civic work of Flanders is perhaps its most distinctively national creation, and the Cloth Hall, Ypres, with the great group of fourteenth-century town halls — Bruges, Brussels, Louvain, Oudenarde, Alost, and Ghent — while excessive in their flamboyant detail, yet retain the essential elements of fine composition and vigorous design.

In Italy the introduction of Gothic forms was as long delayed as in Germany, while, so far as native work is concerned, the fundamental principles of Gothic construction were never accepted at all. It was essentially a northern art, and in Italy neither the mental disposition of the people nor the spiritual and temporal conditions put a premium on ideas in themselves racially foreign. Nevertheless, once introduced, they produced in many cases very beautiful results, particularly in decoration and design, and Italian Gothic certainly contributes valuable elements to the total of medieval art. During the eleventh century one school after another had come into existence in almost every part of Italy, all based more or less on some local modification of the primitive basilican idea, yet varying in different directions as the peculiar influences of each section might direct. In Torcello, Murano, and Venice these were naturally Byzantine, more or less modified by the variations at Ravenna. In Sicily, Byzantine influence was mingled with strains from Mohammedan sources and with a strong influence brought in by King Roger and his Norman followers. Pisa and Florence worked on their own lines with some slight Lombardic admixture, while those portions of the peninsula under Lombard control developed their vital and inspiring style from the persisting Carolingian tradition. The abstract beauty much of this Italian product of the eleventh century is very pronounced, St. Mark's at Venice, San Miniato at Florence, Cefalu, Monreale, and the Capella Palatina in Sicily; Troja, Toscanella, San Michele at Pavia, San Zeno at Verona — all possess elements of great art, but no one of the styles indicated by any of these buildings was destined to a final working-out under cultural conditions that made such a result inevitable. Development during the twelfth century was almost wholly local in its extent and decorative in its scope, and it was not until the coming of the Cistercians, with their Gothic of Burgundy, at the opening of the thirteenth century, that the incipient or reminiscent local modes were extinguished, and an attempt made at a general unification of style.

Apparently the Gothic influence had come too late. The era when architecture was to be the favourite mode for the artistic voicing of a civilization was, at least in the South, nearly at an end; painting and sculpture were to take its place, and therefore the Gothic architecture of Italy was to remain both racially alien and in its nature episodical. In the former class are those churches the designs of which were apparently imported almost bodily from Burgundy by the Cistercian monks, such as Fossanova, Casmari, and San Galgano, all works of great beauty of form and proportion, all vaulted in stone, the two former having fully developed rib vaults with stilted lateral arches in good Gothic form, though in none is the buttress system well developed. A little later come Sant' Andrea, Vercelli (1219-24), said to be the work of an English architect, but manifestly French, with a full system of flying buttresses, San Francesco at Assisi (1228-53), attributed by Vasari to a German architect, but also unmistakably French in its first inspiration, though considerably modified by what may well be local Franciscan influence, and San Francesco at Bologna, of which much the same may be said.

The first really local development of Gothic seems to have been at the hands of the friars, Sta. Croce and Sta. Maria Novella at Florence, dating from the end of the century, varying so widely from any contemporary form of Gothic that their peculiarities must be assigned either to the friars themselves or to the influx of Italian personality. One of the fundamental characteristics of Gothic is a sense of just proportion and a fine relationship of parts, combined with a passion for beauty of line, form, light and shade colour, and their relationships, not invariably achieved but always sought for with a consuming eagerness. These qualities are almost wholly lacking in the churches above named, as well as in the cathedral itself, which partakes of nearly all of their peculiarities. We know that in England, when the Franciscans and Dominicans built their own great, popular churches, while they worked for the same large open spaces and economy of material, they nevertheless regarded these considerations of proportion and pure beauty, therefore the conclusion seems inevitable that it is not to the nature of the Mendicant Orders, but to some incapacity in the race, as it then was, that we owe the radical shortcomings of the work of Arnolfo and his fellows in Italy. The fact remains, however, that the great churches of the friars are the chief offenders. San Giovanni e Paolo and the Frari at Venice, the cathedral of Arezzo, San Petronio, Bologna, and the cathedral of Florence are, with the friars' churches in the city last named, brilliant examples of the lamentable results that may be obtained when the structural and aesthetic laws of a great style are ignored or misunderstood. Siena and Orvieto cathedrals avoid the bald ugliness of this class of work, but in their structure they have no kinship with Gothic, while in respect to their façade the only quality they possess which is Gothic in any degree is a certain sense of beauty in ornament, itself derived from a recurrence to the forms of nature for inspiration, combined with an intense refinement of line and modelling and a blending of the arts of sculpture and colour in a poetic and lovely composition. Perhaps the nearest approach to true Gothic feeling and accomplishment is to be found in the unfinished front of Genoa cathedral; being of the twelfth century, it is sufficiently early to have received something of the first great Gothic impulse, and is a masterpiece of delicate relations and exquisite detail. The best Gothic work in Italy is not ecclesiastical, but secular, and is to be found in the palaces of Venice, Siena, Florence, and Bologna. The Doge's Palace and the innumerable private structures of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in the first-named city have all the qualities of pure beauty of design and detail, as well as the unerring sense of proportion and relationship, that are characteristic of Gothic art, while the forms through which these are expressed are wholly medieval, yet with a complete racial note that raises them almost to the dignity of a national school of Gothic design.

Spain, as a Christian State, was non-existent except as a small area of still unconquered territory near the Pyrenees, until the middle of the thirteenth century, when Ferdinand III, afterwards canonized, united the crowns of Castile and Leon, won back Seville and Cordova, and established the final victory of the Cross over the Crescent in the Iberian Peninsula. Until this time the Gothic spirit had hardly more than crossed the mountains and always as a direct importation from Burgundy and Aquitaine; Salamanca cathedral, St. Vincent of Avila, the cathedrals of Lerida, Tudela, and Tarragona, the Abbey of Verula, and the church of Las Huelgas at Burgos, all built between 1120 and 1180, show a very undeveloped type of early Gothic construction, combined with a rich and imaginative treatment of Southern Romanesque design in the exterior. Salamanca and St. Isidoro at Leon both possess domes or lanterns over the crossing, remarkable in point of structural ingenuity and beauty of design both internally and externally. If the scheme was borrowed from the other side of the Pyrenees, it has been wholly transformed and glorified, and this brilliant innovation, containing such possibilities of development that were never carried further, may justly be attributed to native Spanish genius. No progressive growth occurred, however, during the next fifty years, and it was not until the definitive victories of St. Ferdinand made Spanish nationality possible, and the coming of the Cistercians gave the necessary spiritual impulse, that Gothic architecture in any true sense appeared in Spain, and then as another direct importation from France rather than as a development of the latent racial qualities inherent in Salamanca. Burgos, Barcelona, Toledo, and Leon are closely French in their setting-out and ordonance, but in detail they vary widely from all French precedents. There is a southern richness and romance both in the exterior and interior design and detail of Burgos, for example, as well as in the other Spanish work from the middle of the thirteenth century onward, that gives it a certain personality quite distinct from that of any other school of Gothic. This sumptuousness of detail and colour, and composition of light and shade, enters into every detail; altars and reredoses, the latter often vast in size and of the richest materials; grilles of intricately wrought and chiselled metal; sculptured tombs; stalls of the most elaborate carving; great pictures, tapestries, and statutes innumerable, together with a Flemish type of stained glass in the most brilliant colouring, were lavished on every church; and since Spain has escaped the pillage and destruction of religious revolutions, much of medieval completeness remains, though considerably overlaid with a thick coating of Renaissance, and therefore it is only in Spanish churches that one may obtain some idea of the general effect of a medieval church as it once was before it became subjected to the mishandling of revolutionists, iconoclasts, and restorers.

The end of Gothic architecture and of all Catholic art came with varying degrees of rapidity and at different times as between the several schools of Europe. Generally speaking, its death-knell was sounded when the work of St. Gregory the Great, St. Gregory VII, and Innocent III was temporarily undone, and the French Crown established a temporal control over the papacy. The exile at Avignon, begun in 1305, followed as it was by the Great Schism, broke the links that bound kings and peoples to the hitherto dominant Church, opened the doors of Italy to the influx of the neo-paganism that came from the East with the fall of Constantinople in 1453, permitted the uprising of heresy in all parts of Europe, and made possible the supremacy in Italy of the tyrants of the fourteenth century — Visconti, Sforza, Medici. The Black Death, which scourged all Europe, and the Hundred Years War in France brought down from its high estate the civilization that had flowered at Chartres, and Reims, and Amiens, and when architecture began to recover itself in France after the return of peace, its advance was on lines suggested by the fourteenth century Gothic of England, which had continued to grow rich and fertile, the most vital school of Gothic art of the time. The seeds were sown during the war itself, the chapel of St. John Baptist of the cathedral of Amines, built in 1375, being of a fully developed Flamboyant style. From now on the substitution was complete; whatever building there was, was explicitly Flamboyant; the old logical system, the old breadth and nobility of design, detail always duly subordinated to just composition, were gone almost in a night. Says Enlart:

Ce style, qui est l'exagération et la décadence de l'art gothique, n'apporte presque aucun perfectionnement à l'art de bâtir ou de dessiner, mais seulement un système décoratif très particulier et plus ou moins arbitraire, qui, appliqué sans exception dans les moindres détails, produit beaucoup d'effet et beaucoup d'harmonie d'ensemble ("This style, which is the exaggeration and decadence of Gothic art, adds hardly any perfecting to the art of building or of designing, but only a very peculiar and more or less arbitrary system of decoration, which, when applied with thorough consistency to the minutest details, is very effective and produces a very harmonious general effect." — "Manuel d'archéologie français", I, 586).

The delicate and fantastic beauty of Flamboyant detail is unquestionable, and, as decoration, the lacelike webs of thinness, graceful curving forms, and craftily spotted lights and shades, as they appear in Rouen, Troyes, and Abbeville west fronts and the transepts of Beauvais, in Louviers, Caudebec, Notre-Dame de l'Epine, St. Maclou, Rouen, St-Michel, and St-Germain, Amiens, are amongst the most charming creations of artistic fancy. It must be remembered, however, that it is all strictly a form of decoration, not an architectonic style, nor even a sub-school thereof, unless in such peculiarly admirable examples as the very Troyes ifaçade, the chevet of Mt. St-Michel, and the very wonderful St-Germain at Amiens, the still persisting quality of structural integrity combined with just proportions and a certain unusual restraint in the placing of decoration justify a dignity hardly argued by the unparalleled license of the general output of the Flamboyant period. To a certain extent it is an architectural mystery, for it is an excessive refinement of art appearing after the close of a period of sound and vigorous civilization, in the midst of war and anarchy, contemporaneously with religious degradation, growing side by side with tendencies that in a few years were to bring the civilization it connotes forever to an end. In this it was not alone, however. Similar conditions in Italy surrounded the culmination of the great arts of painting and sculpture, while in England the delicate and exquisite Perpendicular Gothic reached its highest development in the reign of Henry VIII. Says Mr. Porter, in considering this phenomenon:

Thus in the hour of political and economic misfortune, in the midst of the financial ruin and degradation of the Church, was born flamboyant architecture — the last frail blossom of medieval genius. Did this art come into being as a prophetic manifestation of the great national awakening that was to produce Jeanne d'Arc and shake off the English yoke? I should hardly dare affirm it, for the history of architecture ever reflects, rather than presages, economic developments (op. cit., II, X, 368).

One may go further even than this, and say that the flowering of art is always a generation or more later than the causes of its being. Dante and Giotto are the last of the medieval epoch, rather than the forerunners of the Renaissance. Shakespeare is Elizabethan by accident of birth, but essentially he is the fruit of pre-Reformation England. The early Renaissance in Italy is the flowering of medievalism, rather than the germinating seed of the Renaissance, and similarly the poetic, if inorganic, Flamboyant art of France takes its colour not from the downfall of Catholic civilization in fifteenth-century France, but from the better days that preceded the great débâcle. The magic of fifteenth-century art is neither the unwholesome iridescence of decay nor the first brightening towards the dawn of a Renaissance, but the afterglow of a great day, in the brightness of which stood the creative personalities of Sts. Odo of Cluny and Robert of Molesme, Bernard and Norbert, Gregory VII and Innocent III, Philip Augustus, and King Louis IX. Generally speaking, fifteenth-century architecture throughout Europe is secular as opposed to the Cluniac Romanesque and Norman, and the Cistercian Gothic of the three preceding centuries. Perpendicular Gothic in England and its derivative, Tudor, is largely the product of guilds of architects, sculptors, and masons working primarily for great merchants and the friars, the latter being the dominant religious influence of the time. In France and Flanders the Flamboyant style is peculiarly the product of the individualistic architect and the purveyor of artistic luxuries, and during the entire period the best and most significant work is to be sought amongst guild-halls, palaces, castles, manors, and colleges, and in the towers, chapels, tombs and other memorials paid for by the new orders of rich merchants and affluent courtiers.

The end now came rapidly. In Italy Gothic feeling as well as Gothic forms had disappeared altogether by the end of the fifteenth century, the last flicker of the instinctive art of medievalism, as distinguished from the premeditated artifice of the Renaissance, appearing in the work of the Lombardi in Venice, and in such structures as the church of Sta Maria dei Miracoli and the Scuola di San Marco (1480- 95). In France something of Gothic romance and intrinsic beauty continued down to 1550 in the manoirs and châteaux, while in Germany it dragged along a few decades longer in some isolated instances. In Spain the superb central tower of Burgos was built as late as 1567, though already full-fledged Renaissance work was in process in other parts of the Peninsula. In England the sumptuous Perpendicular of the Chapel of Henry VII at Westminster hardened rapidly into the formalities of later Tudor when, and ceased wholly as a definite style when the suppression of the monasteries, the separation of the English Church from the Roman obedience and the imposition of the principles of the dogmatic Reformation of Germany on the English people brought church-building to an end. With the final submission of the English during the reign of Elizabeth to a dogmatic revolution they had not invited, but were powerless to resist, came an influx of German influence that rapidly wiped out the very tradition of Gothic, except in the case of the universities and in that of the minor domestic building, substituting in its place the most unintelligent used classical forms anywhere to be found in the history of the Renaissance. At Oxford and Cambridge the cultural tradition was strong enough to withstand for a century the complete acceptance of the new fashion, and down to the middle of the seventeenth century the elder tradition persisted in such work as St. John's, Cambridge, and Wadham, Oxford, while its compulsion was so strong as to coerce even Inigo Jones into building the fine garden front of St. John's, Oxford, in a style at least reminiscent of what had been universal two centuries before. The same instinctive impulse continued in the case of manors and farmsteads even to a later date, and to this day in certain portions of England the stone-mason, carpenter, and tile layer preserve the old rules and traditions of the craft that have been handed down from father to son for centuries.

From the year 1000 to the year 1500, Catholic Europe had slowly worked out its own form of artistic expression, largely through "the most consummate art of building which the world has achieved" (Prior, "History of Gothic Art in England", I, 7). As paganism had done in Greece, so, and equally, Christianity wrought in the North. Primarily it was an art of church-building and adornment for the Church was the one concrete and unmistakable fact in life. "While all else was unstable and changeful, she, with her unbroken tradition and her uninterrupted services vindicated the principle of order and the moral continuity of the race...... The services of monastic and secular clergy alike, their offices of faith, charity and labour in the field and the hovel, in the school and the hospital as well as in the church were for centuries, the chief witness of the spirit of human brotherhood (Norton, "Historical Studies of Church Building in the Middle Ages", I, 16). Therefore, on the heels of the tenth-century triumph of the Church came the eleventh-century passion for church-building; as says Rudolphus, the monk of Cluny, writing in the midst of it all, "Erat enim instar ac si mundus ipse excutiendo semet, rejecta vetustate, passim candidam ecclesiarum vestem indueret" (It was as if the world, shaking itself and putting off the old things, were putting on the white robe of churches). The old vesture was indeed cast away and the new "white robe of churches" was of other make. The underlying laws of the new style were identical with those of all other great styles, the vision of beauty was no different in any respect, the forms alone were absolutely new. For five centuries the artistic mode of Western Europe went on its way without a pause, one in spirit wherever it was found.

The motives which inspired these great buildings of this period, the principles which underlay their forms, the general character of the forms themselves were in their essential nature the same throughout Western Europe from Italy to England. The differences in the works of different lands are but local and external varieties (Norton, op. cit., I, 10).

This universal mode was universally destroyed, and in the space of a few years. With the opening of the fifteenth century the victory of the Renaissance was definitely assured, while it was brought to its completion just a century later. Of the product of these five centuries of activity comparatively little remains intact. As Mr. Prior says, "Western Europe up to the middle of the sixteenth century might be called a treasure house filled with gems of Gothic genius. The desecrations and revolutions of two centuries wrecked one half, swept Gothic churches clear of their ornaments and then levelled to the ground many of the fabrics which they furnished. Of much that was not actually destroyed, carelessness and neglect and the necessities of rebuilding have since made equal havoc.... At its worst this re-building, re-painting re-carving has been wanton and causeless substitution.... For the next generation to us any direct acquaintance with the great comprehensive Gothic genius, except by means of parodies, will be difficult" (A History of Gothic Art in England, I, 3, 4). Enough remains, however, to enable us to reconstruct, at least in imagination, an unique artistic product of Christian civilization of which it is possible for Professor Norton to say that "it advanced with constant increase of power of expression, of pliability and variety of adaptation, of beauty in design and skill in construction until at last, in the consummate splendour of such a cathedral as that of Our Lady of Chartres or of Amiens, it reached a height of achievement that has never been surpassed" (op. cit., I, 13). Ralph Adams Cram.

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• Renault, Christophe; Lazé, Christophe (2006). Les Styles de l'architecture et du mobilier (in French). Gisserot. ISBN 978-2-87747-465-8.
• Ovid (1851). Riley, Henry T. (ed.). The Fasti, Tristia, Pontic Epistles, Ibis, and Halieuticon of Ovid. H. G. Bohn. p. 216.
• Scott, Robert A. (2003). The Gothic enterprise: a guide to understanding the Medieval cathedral. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-23177-1.
• Stewart, Cecil (1959). History of Architectural Development: Early Christian, Byzantine and Romanesque Architecture. Longman.
• Swaan, Wim (1988). The Gothic Cathedral. Omega Books. ISBN 978-0-907853-48-0.
• Rice, David Talbot (1972). The Appreciation of Byzantine Art. Oxford University Press.
• Texier, Simon (2012). Paris Panorama de l'architecture de l'Antiquité à nos jours (in French). Parigramme. ISBN 978-2-84096-667-8.
• Toman, Rolf (2007). Néoclassicisme et Romantisme. Ulmann. ISBN 978-3-8331-3557-6.
• Vasari, Giorgio (1907). Brown, Gerald Baldwin; Maclehose, Louisa (eds.). Vasari on Technique: Being the Introduction to the Three Arts of Design, Architecture, Sculpture and Painting, Prefixed to the Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects. J. M. Dent & Co.
• Vasari, Giorgio (1991). The Lives of the Artists. Translated with an introduction and notes by J.C. and P. Bondanella. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-953719-8.
• Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène (1868). Dictionnaire raisonné de l'architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle. Édition BANCE.
• Watkin, David (1986). A History of Western Architecture. Barrie and Jenkins. ISBN 0-7126-1279-3.
• Wenzler, Claude (2018). Les cathédrales gothiques: Un défi médiéval (in French). Éditions Ouest-France. ISBN 978-2-7373-7712-9.

Further reading

• Alonso Ruiz, Begoña; Martínez de Aguirre, Javier (2011). "Arquitectura en la Corona de Castilla en torno a 1412". Artigrama (26). ISSN 0213-1498.
• Buttitta, Antonino, ed. (2006). Les Normands en Sicile. Musée de Normandie. ISBN 978-88-7439-328-2.
• Fletcher, Banister; Cruickshank, Dan, Sir Banister Fletcher's a History of Architecture, Architectural Press, 20th edition, 1996 (first published 1896). ISBN 0-7506-2267-9. Cf. Part Two, Chapter 14.
• Bumpus, T. Francis (1928). The Cathedrals and Churches of Belgium. T. Werner Laurie. ISBN 978-1-313-40185-2.
• Ceccarini, Patrizio (2013). La structure fondatrice gothique. Théologie, sciences et architecture au XIIIe siècle à Saint-Denis (tomeI). Vol. I. L'Harmattan Editions Distribution. ISBN 978-2-336-30184-6.
• Ceccarini, Patrizio (2013). Le système architectural gothique. Théologie, sciences et architecture au XIIIe siècle à Saint-Denis. Vol. II. L'Harmattan Editions Distribution. ISBN 978-2-336-30185-3.
• Clifton-Taylor, Alec (1967). The Cathedrals of England. Thames and Hudson. ISBN 978-0-500-18070-9.
• Cram, Ralph Adams (1909). "Gothic Architecture." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 6. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1909.
• Gardner, Helen; Kleiner, Fred S; Mamiya, Christin J. (2004). Gardner's Art Through the Ages. Thomson Wadsworth. ISBN 978-0-15-505090-7.
• Harvey, John (1961). English Cathedrals. Batsford. ASIN B0000CL4S8.
• Huyghe, René, ed. (1963). Larousse Encyclopedia of Byzantine and Medieval Art. Hamlyn. ISBN 978-0-600-02357-9.
• Icher, Francois (1998). Building the Great Cathedrals. Abrams Books. ISBN 978-0-8109-4017-8.
• Simson, Otto Georg (1988). The Gothic cathedral: origins of Gothic architecture and the medieval concept of order. Princeton Univ. P. ISBN 978-0-691-09959-0.
• Glaser, Stephanie, "The Gothic Cathedral and Medievalism", in: Falling into Medievalism, ed. Anne Lair and Richard Utz. Special Issue of UNIversitas: The University of Northern Iowa Journal of Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity, 2.1 (2006). (on the Gothic revival of the 19th century and the depictions of Gothic cathedrals in the Arts)
• Moore, Charles (1890). Development & Character of Gothic Architecture. Macmillan and Co. ISBN 978-1-4102-0763-0.
• Rivière, Rémi; Lavoye, Agnès (2007). La Tour Jean sans Peur, Association des Amis de la tour Jean sans Peur. ISBN 978-2-95164-940-8
• Rudolph, Conrad ed., A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, 2nd ed. (2016)
• Sitwell, Sacheverell (1969), Gothic Europe. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
• Summerson, John (1983). Pelican Books (ed.). Architecture in Britain, 1530–1830. Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-14-056003-9.
• Swaan, Wim (1982). Art and Architecture of the Late Middle Ages. Omega Books. ISBN 978-0-907853-35-0.
• Tatton-Brown, Tim; Crook, John (2002). The English Cathedral. New Holland Publishers. ISBN 978-1-84330-120-2.
• Tonazzi, Pascal (2007) Florilège de Notre-Dame de Paris (anthologie), Editions Arléa, Paris, ISBN 2-86959-795-9
• Wilson, Christopher (2005). The Gothic Cathedral – Architecture of the Great Church. Thames and Hudson. ISBN 978-0-500-27681-5.

External links

• Mapping Gothic France—a project by Columbia University and Vassar College with a database of images, 360° panoramas, texts, charts and historical maps.
• Gothic Architecture—Encyclopædia Britannica
• Holbeche Bloxam, Matthew (1841). Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture, Elucidated by Question and Answer. Gutenberg.org, from Project Gutenberg
• Brandon, Raphael; Brandon, Arthur (1849). An analysis of Gothick architecture: illustrated by a series of upwards of seven hundred examples of doorways, windows, etc., and accompanied with remarks on the several details of an ecclesiastical edifice. Archive.org, from Internet Archive
• Parker, J. H. (1881), A B C of Gothic Architecture. Oxford: Parker & Co.