My favourite historiographic apercu on "Gothic" is that it comes from
the Italian "goffo" whence also comes the English word "goofy". It
was initially intended, and to a certain extent still is, a reductive
catch-all term that includes so much -- until the early 19th century,
it also included Romanesque -- that it is only useful in the most
general sense. Much pointless ink has been spilled trying to
differentiate exactly the differences between Romanesque and Gothic,
but as I tell my students, such a posteriori terms are only useful
if one uses them as the convenience terms they are: once one tries to
invest them with any essential significance per se, one is talking
simply about words and not about medieval architecture. I believe it
was Jean Bony who first characterized the early Gothic of the
Ile-de-France as a combination of Norman and Burgundian regional
features and hence (lacking a great deal of building much prior to
Saint-Denis, Saint-Germain-des-Pres, Montmartre, etc.) as the
Romanesque of the Ile-de-France. In any case, Romanesque is rather
more a whole series of regional traditions than a homogeneous style,
and despite the phenomenon of Rayonnant, there is a huge amount of
regionalism in Gothic as well. Rather than simply looking at formal
details, one way of characterizing this combined phase of medieval
architecture is to consider economic and institutional factors: the
sky-rocketing economy of Europe from the 11th century onwards, the
growth of monasticism, then of episcopal structures, then court
patronage, the rise of cities, improved communications, the rise
of "professionalism", even the developing birth of "nations".
Another way of looking at it is in terms of technique, and there is
still a lot of work to do on this, despite work as varied as that of
John Fitchen, Robert Mark, Robert Suckale, Wolfgang Scholler, and
Roland Bechsmann. In general, it is the usually huge size of
Romanesque and Gothic churches that most distinguishes them from what
went before. As to what came after, that embroils one immediately in
another sticky semantic quagmire: Renaissance; what one makes of this
still seems to depend greatly on how literally one takes the polemics
of north Italian humanists of the later 15th century. One medieval
architectural historian I know, in fact, claims that the Renaissance
was purely a local phenomenon! Sorry if all this does not actually
resolve much.
Happy New Year!
Jim Bugslag
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