c. 1140–1500

Gothic

Around 1140, an abbot near Paris had a church choir built whose walls dissolve into coloured light. From this emerged the Gothic, the style of the great cathedrals. For three centuries it shaped architecture, sculpture, stained glass and manuscript illumination across Europe, and it paved the way for the painting of the Renaissance.

A choir of light

Saint-Denis near Paris, 1144. Abbot Suger consecrated the new choir of his abbey church, the burial place of the French kings. Visitors saw something unheard of: instead of thick walls, slender piers carried a vault of stone ribs, and between them opened large windows of coloured glass. Suger understood light as a reflection of God. His church was meant to lead the faithful from the visible to the invisible.

The Gothic begins with Saint-Denis. In the decades that followed, cathedrals rose in northern France at Chartres, Paris, Reims and Amiens, and later across Europe, from Cologne to Burgos and from Canterbury to Prague.

A name as an insult

Medieval master builders did not speak of the Gothic. The term was coined by writers on art in the Italian Renaissance, above all Giorgio Vasari. They considered the northern style barbaric and associated it with the Goths, who were blamed for the fall of Rome. Only in the 18th and 19th centuries was the Gothic admired again, not least through Goethe’s enthusiasm for Strasbourg Cathedral.

The technology of the cathedrals

Three elements made the new way of building possible: the pointed arch, which directs loads downwards more steeply; the rib vault, which concentrates the weight on a few points; and the flying buttress, which absorbs the lateral thrust outside. Walls could become thinner, spaces higher and windows larger. In the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, consecrated in 1248, the space seems to consist almost entirely of glass.

Cologne Cathedral was begun in 1248. After a pause lasting centuries, it was only completed in 1880, when the 19th century’s enthusiasm for the Middle Ages made it possible to resume building.

Figures that move

On the cathedral portals, sculptures told the story of salvation to people who mostly could not read. The figures increasingly detach themselves from the wall, turn towards each other and acquire individual faces. A high point is the donor figures in Naumburg Cathedral from the mid-13th century. Margravine Uta, drawing up the collar of her cloak, is one of the most famous sculptures of the Middle Ages.

Around 1400 an elegant courtly style with flowing drapery and graceful Madonnas spread across Europe: International Gothic, known in German-speaking lands as the “Soft Style”.

Italy: gold and space

In Italy the Gothic took its own path. Painters worked in tempera on wood, often against a glowing gold ground. In Siena, Duccio created his Maestà between 1308 and 1311, an enthroned Madonna surrounded by saints. In 1333 Simone Martini and Lippo Memmi painted The Annunciation, in which the angel’s greeting runs through the picture in golden letters.

In Florence and Padua, Giotto went further still. In the frescoes of the Arena Chapel in Padua he gave his figures bodies, weight and emotions and placed them in a convincing space. Later generations saw him as the renewer of painting. Giotto thus stands on the threshold between the Gothic and the Renaissance.

Books like jewels

A large part of Gothic painting is found in manuscripts. For the Duke of Berry, the Limbourg brothers painted the Très Riches Heures, a book of hours with calendar pictures showing peasants at work, courtly festivities and castles in brilliant colours. In 1405 the writer Christine de Pizan mentioned a Parisian illuminator named Anastaise, whom she counted among the best of her time. No works can be securely attributed to her.

Late Gothic in the north

In the Holy Roman Empire the Gothic flourished until the early 16th century. In Cologne, Stefan Lochner painted the Altarpiece of the City Patrons around 1442; it now stands in the cathedral. Woodcarvers such as Veit Stoss, with the St Mary’s Altar in Kraków, and Tilman Riemenschneider in Franconia created altarpieces in which crowds of wooden figures seem to come alive.

Why it still matters

The Gothic shaped the image of the European city: its cathedrals still tower over the old towns of Cologne, Strasbourg and Prague. In the 19th century it inspired a revival, the Gothic Revival, from churches to the Houses of Parliament in London. And its altarpieces and manuscripts hold the roots of the painting that came into full flower in the Renaissance and among the Early Netherlandish masters.