![]() The sanctuary was the threshold to heaven. The Middle Ages lived in the presence of the supernatural, which impressed itself upon every aspect of human life. The cathedral was the house of God, this term understood not as a pale commonplace but as fearful reality. Through light and space, architects aimed, Von Simpson argues, to reflect God in stone: In The Gothic Cathedral, Otto Georg Von Simson writes that the defining features of Gothic architecture are not its feats of engineering - vaulted ceilings, pointed arches, flying buttresses - or its soaring height, but its “two aspects…without precedent and parallel: the use of light and the unique relationship between structure and appearance” (2020, ). The name stuck, without its necessarily pejorative connotation. As the Renaissance aimed to revive classical ideals, Gothic acquired a new meaning: Giorgio Vasari deemed medieval architecture “Gothic,” meaning to debase the style as un-Roman and un-Enlightened. This ornate, dramatic, and asymmetrical style of art and architecture, seen in the famous Notre Dame de Paris, was distinct from the symmetrical, ordered classical style exemplified by the Roman Pantheon. Stereotyped as a time of intellectual decline, the reality of the early Middle Ages was more complex: in fact, the Visigoths developed a code of law with comparatively progressive attitudes toward the rights of women and the practice of religion.Īs Christianity spread across medieval Europe, cathedrals appeared across the continent in a style that sought to capture the magnificence of God for an illiterate public. ![]() The rise of the Goths is often considered the beginning of the “Dark Ages,” a misleading term for the period between the “fall” of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance. “Gothic” originally referenced tribes (Visigoths in the west, Ostrogoths in the east) most famous for invading Rome. All these things are, in fact, Gothic, a term with a varied yet related collection of meanings. Trying to identify the original ‘Goths’, meanwhile, can lead either to an ancient barbarian race or to a rock music subculture of the 1980s” (2012). As Nick Groom notes in The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction, “Type ‘Gothic’ into Google and you get over 250 million hits: images of ecclesiastical architecture, websites devoted to ‘bone-chilling’ literature, and opportunities to purchase alternative footwear….
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