Gothic

Gothic. Architectural style, properly called Pointed, that evolved in Europe (starting with France) from the late C12 until C16, even lingering until C17 and C18 in some places (e.g. Oxford and certain provincial areas). As its correct name suggests, it is the architecture of the pointed arch, pointed rib-vaults, piers with clusters of shafts, deep buttresses (some of the flying type), window-tracery, pinnacles, spires, battlements, and a soaring verticality. While Ancient Egyptian and Greek architecture is columnar and trabeated, Gothic is arcuated, giving an impression of dynamic thrust and counter-thrust. Certain elements of Gothic church architecture, such as the triforium, clerestorey, and Orders found in doorways, had developed in Romanesque architecture. Pointed rib-vaults had been used in Burgundy and Durham, while half-arches or half-barrel-vaults used as buttresses were exploited by English and French Romanesque builders. Fully developed Gothic, however, was not a matter of eclectic motifs being gathered together: it was a remarkably coherent style of logical arcuated forms in which forces were expressed and resisted, and non-structural walls were dissolved into huge areas of glazed window.

First Pointed (Early English) Gothic was used from the end of C12 to the end of C13, though most of its characteristics were present in the lower part of the chevet of the Abbey Church of St-Denis, near Paris (c.1135–44). Windows were first of all lancets, but later contained elementary tracery of the plate type (see tracery), then got larger, divided into lights by means of Geometrical bar-tracery. Once First Pointed evolved with Geometrical tracery it became known as Middle Pointed. Second Pointed work of C14 saw an ever-increasing invention in bar-tracery of the Curvilinear, Flowing, and Reticulated type, where the possibilities of the ogee form were fully exploited in canopies, tracery, and niches, culminating in the Flamboyant style (from c.1375) of the Continent. Second Pointed was relatively short-lived in England, and was superseded by Perpendicular (or Third Pointed) from c.1332, although the two styles overlapped for some time. On the Continent, however (where Perpendicular Gothic was unknown), lace-like patterns of tracery evolved, and churches of great height were erected with highly complex vaulting, as at the Church of St Barbara, Kutná Hora, Bohemia (1512). The Gothic style embraced a complete system of dynamic structure with developed geometries and daring experiments with stone, especially in the final flowering of Flamboyant in Central Europe. Although Gothic was superseded by a revival of interest in the language of Classicism from the Renaissance period, it enjoyed a widespread and scholarly revival in C19. See also gothic revival.

Bibliography

Branner (1965);
Colvin (1999);
Frankl (1960, 2000);
Grodecki (1986);
H. Osborne (1970);
J. Parker (1850);
Rickman (1848);
Toman (ed.) (1998);
Viollet-le-Duc (1875);