What Is Gothic Architecture? Pointed Arches, Flying Buttresses and Walls of Light
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In 1144 the abbot of Saint-Denis outside Paris consecrated a new choir for his abbey church and wrote that the whole building shone with a wonderful and uninterrupted light. He had a point. The building he had commissioned replaced thick walls and small windows with thin piers and enormous ones, and the technique spread across Europe in a generation to produce the cathedrals of Chartres, Reims, Cologne, Canterbury and Milan. The style was named Gothic three centuries later as an insult, by Italians who thought it barbaric. The name stuck; the insult did not.
The problem with Romanesque
The churches of the eleventh century were built with round arches and barrel vaults, in the Roman manner, and a round stone vault pushes outward as well as down. To resist the push the walls had to be massive, and windows had to be small holes punched through them, so a Romanesque church is dark, heavy and earthbound, magnificent in the way a fortress is. Its height was limited too: a round arch's height is fixed by its width, so a wider nave meant a lower ceiling unless the walls could be raised to impossible thickness.
Three inventions
The Gothic builders solved the problem with three devices, none of them entirely new but never before combined:
- •The pointed arch: two curves meeting at a point rather than one semicircle, which pushes more downward and less outward, and whose height can be varied independently of its width, so vaults of different spans could meet at the same ceiling
- •The ribbed vault: a skeleton of stone ribs carrying the weight of the ceiling to a few points, with thin panels of masonry filling in between, so the roof no longer needed a wall along its whole length to hold it up
- •The flying buttress: a half-arch outside the building that props the wall at exactly the points where the vault pushes, carrying the thrust over the aisles to a pier standing in the open air
Walls of glass
Together these turned the building into a stone frame. With the weight of the roof carried down ribs and piers and out through buttresses, the walls between the piers carried nothing, and could be opened up almost entirely into windows. At the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, built in the 1240s to house what the king believed to be Christ's crown of thorns, the upper chapel has fifteen windows fifteen metres high with almost no wall between them, and the effect is of standing inside a jewel box. The glass was coloured, telling the Bible and the lives of saints to congregations who could not read, and Chartres alone retains some 2,600 square metres of it from the thirteenth century.
The height rose with the technique. Notre-Dame's vault stands at 33 metres, Chartres at 37, Amiens at 42 and Beauvais, begun in 1225, at 48, the tallest ever attempted; its choir collapsed in 1284 and its central tower in 1573, and the nave was never built. Beauvais is the experiment that found the limit.
Phases and places
The style began in the Ile-de-France around Paris and moved outward, changing as it went. Early Gothic, from about 1140, is still solid, with thick piers and modest windows. High Gothic, from about 1190, is Chartres, Reims and Amiens: vast, tall and confident. Rayonnant, from the 1230s, opened the walls further into radiating patterns of tracery, and Flamboyant, from the late fourteenth century, twisted the tracery into flame-like curves. England developed its own sequence, from the Early English of Salisbury through the Decorated of Exeter to the Perpendicular of King's College Chapel in Cambridge, whose fan vaults are a purely English invention. Germany raised Cologne's twin spires, though only in the nineteenth century to the medieval plans; Italy, unconvinced, kept its walls and painted them.
The buildings were the work of generations. A cathedral typically took a century or more, funded by the bishop, the town and pilgrims, designed by master masons whose names are mostly lost, and built by hundreds of craftsmen with wooden cranes and hand tools. The tracery and carving, the gargoyles that throw rainwater clear of the walls, the sculpted portals with hundreds of figures, were made to be seen by God as much as by people, which is why the carving is as fine at the top of a spire as at eye level.
After the Middle Ages
The Renaissance turned back to Rome and dismissed the style, and Gothic buildings were neglected or remodelled for three centuries. It came back in the nineteenth century as the Gothic Revival, when Romantics found in it everything the industrial age lacked, and it produced the Houses of Parliament in London, thousands of parish churches and the university campuses of America. The fire that destroyed the roof and spire of Notre-Dame in April 2019 and the five-year rebuilding that followed were a reminder of how far the buildings still command loyalty, and how much of the medieval craft had to be relearned to restore them.
The takeaway
Gothic architecture is the style of the medieval cathedrals from about 1140 to 1500, made possible by the pointed arch, the ribbed vault and the flying buttress, which together carried the roof's weight down a stone skeleton and out to external props so that the walls could become windows. It began near Paris, reached its height at Chartres, Reims and Amiens, found its limit at Beauvais, developed regional forms across Europe, and was revived in the nineteenth century.