Once the crusaders returned home, what Wren called the “sharp-heeled arch” began to appear over new church doorways, and minarets became models for cathedral bell towers and spires. Wren supposed that it was during the Crusades (from 1096 to 1291) that Western Europeans fighting against the expansion of Islamic states in the Middle East first glimpsed the pointed arches, ribbed roofs, domes, rose windows, and minaret towers that were typical of religious buildings and palace complexes across large swaths of the Islamic East. “Saracen” was the term used in medieval Europe to group together Arab Muslims. Wren explicitly dismissed the irrational, asymmetrical “Gothick,” which he argued would be better called “Saracenic.” It is rational and ordered, a mathematical wonder. The west front entrance portico was made of 12 Greek columns below and eight above, framed by symmetrical towers. Paul’s Cathedral, after the medieval Gothic church was destroyed in the 1666 Great Fire, he chose to design it in neo-classical style. When architect Christopher Wren officially won the commission in 1673 to rebuild London’s most iconic building, St. Yet elsewhere, even at the height of the Victorian Gothic Revival, it was clear to many that the Gothic had traveled from the East. After fire destroyed the Palace of Westminster in 1834, it was inevitably rebuilt in the Gothic style. Nineteenth-century architect John Carter considered the word Gothic “a barbarous appellation” and argued that it should simply be called “English.” In the midst of a long war with revolutionary France, Carter declared the Gothic “our National Architecture,” rooted in centuries of tradition. Photograph by Angelo Hornak, Corbis/Getty Images Gothic Revival architecture of the Victorian era rekindled elements of this medieval style. Right: Dating from 1245, Westminster Abbey is one of the world’s most well-known Gothic buildings. ( These are some of Europe’s most extraordinary cathedrals.) Rekindling elements from the greatest medieval cathedrals in Europe, such as London’s Westminster Abbey and Paris’s Notre Dame, Gothic Revival architecture defined the imperial might of Victorian England.
In Britain, it was only in the revival of this medieval style of architecture that it started to be called “Gothic.” The Revivalists no longer dismissed the Gothic as a crude or barbarous form, and instead repurposed it as a national, patriotic style.īy knowing this deeper history of some of Europe’s most iconic buildings, travelers can approach these well-known attractions with new eyes and can appreciate that the “East-West divide” isn’t as deep as we are often led to think. ( Three years after a devastating fire, Notre Dame rises again.)īut from early in the 19th century, these contributions were forgotten, and Gothic became celebrated as an intrinsically Northern European style.
0 kommentar(er)
