Western Civilizations: Their History & Their Culture (Nineteenth Edition) (Vol. 1) by Joshua Cole & Carol Symes

Author:Joshua Cole & Carol Symes [Cole, Joshua]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2017-07-01T04:00:00+00:00

ROMANESQUE AND GOTHIC. Some distinguishing features of the Romanesque and Gothic styles are shown in these two churches, both dedicated to the Virgin Mary and built within a century of one another. On the left is the west front of the Church of Notre-Dame-la-Grande in Poitiers, the ancestral domain of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Constructed between 1135 and 1145, it featured rounded arches, strong stone walls, massive supporting pillars, and small windows. On the right is the cathedral of Notre-Dame at Reims in Champagne, built between 1220 and 1299.

Here, the emphasis on stolid horizontal registers is replaced by soaring vertical lines. The gabled portals, pointed arches, and bristling pinnacles all accentuate the height of this structure, while the multitude of stained-glass windows—chiefly the enormous rose window—flood the vast interior with colored light.

As the term suggests, Romanesque buildings use the

gothic was actually intended to be derogatory, the name for

basic elements of public architecture under the Roman

art forms that Renaissance artists—who favored Roman

Empire: the rounded arch, massive stone walls, and sturdy

models—considered barbaric (see Chapter 12). They would

supporting columns. These features convey regularity and

have been still more shocked to learn that cathedrals were

stability, and they also made churches places of refuge that

among the fi rst monuments targeted for destruction dur-

could be fortifi ed and defended in troubled times. By con-

ing the Reformation, the revolutions of the eighteenth and

trast, the structural elements of Gothic architecture are the

nineteenth centuries, and the wars of the twentieth. One

pointed arch, groined and ribbed vaulting, and the fl ying

of the prime examples of Gothic architecture, the cathe-

buttress, an external support that strengthened the much

dral dedicated to the Virgin Mary at Reims (shown above),

thinner stone walls and enormous stained-glass windows,

was largely destroyed during World War I; what visitors see

whose light illuminated elaborate decorative programs that

today is a reconstruction.

made the cathedral a microcosm of the medieval world and

an encyclopedia of medieval knowledge.

These new Gothic cathedrals were not buildings that

could be defended in wartime and, it was thought, would

CONCLUSION

never have to be. They were manifestations of urban pride,

expressions of practical and intellectual genius, and sym-

A century ago, the American historian Charles Homer

bols of a triumphant and confi dent Church. Their builders

Haskins described the intellectual, religious, and cul-

would have been dismayed to learn that the modern term

tural changes of this era as the “Renaissance of the twelfth

C o n clu s i o n | 321

century” and the beginning of western Europe’s enduring to those in power through a never-ending “war on heresy.”

cultural prestige. A generation later, his student Joseph

Bartlett views this era as the key phase in a brutal process

Strayer located the “medieval origins of the modern state”

of “conquest and colonization” visible in the eastern expan-

in this same period and, with them, modern ideas of

sion of the Holy Roman Empire, the Norman conquest of

national sovereignty and identity. In recent decades, the

England, the growth of papal power, the Crusades, and

British historians R. I. Moore and Robert Bartlett have also

other movements.

argued that this era marks the beginning of the modern

Common to all of these paradigms is a recognition that

world—but not in positive ways.

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