Gothic Decoration and Motif of Churches,
Cathedrals and Monasteries :
Altarpiece : An individual or group of panels or screens located near or on the altar. Annulet : A circular finishing found on pillars or piers, sometimes decorated with carvings.
Archivolt : An ornamental molding seen often in arch shaped portals following the lines of the face with sculpted figures.Image at right : Portal archivolt at the Monastery of Batalha, Portugal.
Armatures : Iron framework used within mason-less Rose Windows to support the glass weight. Ball flower : An ornamented ball sculpture surmounted in the petals of a flower featured, most often, repetitively within the hollow of moldings. The ball flower motif began to appear as decoration was more strongly emphasized during the thirteenth century being most widely employed within English structures. Bar tracery : The dominant class of tracery consisting of decorative patterns formed from stone bars. Finer in its size and cut, bar, differentiates itself from other forms of tracery by allowing another feature of a display to dominate such as stained glass within a window frame. Boss (Rib-boss) : Ornamental masonry strips used to conceal the breaks in vault work. Chevron : An ancient design motif used throughout the Mediterranean region consisting, in simplest form, of two diagonal lines which converge to form a wide or narrow V shape; there are, however, many variations of employment. Use of multiple adjorning chevrons forms a zig zag pattern which is found, most commonly, upon arches. The incorporation of chevrons within Christian architecture dates back, at least, to the Romanesque period. Cinquefoil : A five sided design of converging arcs, often used in frame work.
Cornice : A decorative horizontal outcropping serving to crown a wall or column.Image at right : Spire crockets in the English Neo-Gothic style.
Crockets : A distinctive Gothic motif formed of floral and leaf ornamentation. Primarily used on spire and pinnacle sculpture. Cusp : Found within tracery decoration to form the meeting point of foils. Fan vaulting : An intricate form of tracery in which the ribs of a Vault arch out in a concave fan pattern.
Fillet : Delicate adornment strips applied to shafts and archways along the moldings. Finial : An ornamental capping piece placed atop spires.Image at right : Finial details at Milan cathedral, Italy.
Fluting
: Carved vertical hollow groove work sculpted into piers, columns and pillars. Foils : A small arc design used in tracery, often utilized within Rose Windows. Grisaille : A stained glass window incorporating muted tones as opposed to bright colors. Grotesques : A class of decorative sculpture forms often found in or on Gothic structures. A term used broadly for gargoyles, although traditionally a gargoyle serves as a drainage spout for rain water, while a grotesque may function solely as decoration. Lierne vaulting : Vaults containing small decorative rib work not originating from the corners; primarily found in England. Moldings : Carved contours given to piers and columns to exploit optical effects of light. Ogee (ogive) arches : A display, non-supportive, feature formed by the meeting of two double curves; a definitive design element of the later, more decorative, Gothic eras. Pinnacle : A vertical ornament forming the spire of a turret. Predella : A series of small images or carvings at the base of an altarpiece. Quadratura : An intended architectural illusion used to create the sense of a larger room.
Reredos : An elaborate wall carving or screen utilized primarily on or behind the high altar. Spandrels : The semi-triangular space formed by arches and the moldings surrounding them.Image at right : The figure of Christ within a Vesica Pisces motif; Washington national cathedral, U.S.A.
Vesica Pisces : The oval shape created by the intersecting of two equal circles. A ancient symbolic motif of profound significance within many cultures. In Christianity the form represents the sacred body of Christ.“To the Middle Ages art was didactic. All that it was necessary that men should know—the history of the world from the creation, the dogmas of religion, the examples of the saints, the hierarchy of the virtues, the range of the sciences, arts and crafts—all these were taught them by the windows of the church or by the statues in the porch.
The pathetic name of Biblia pauperum given by the printers of the fifteenth century to one of their earliest books, might well have been given to the church. There the simple, the ignorant, all who were named “sancta plebs Dei,” learned through their eyes almost all they knew of their faith. Its great figures, so spiritual in conception, seemed to bear speaking witness to the truth of the Church's teaching. The countless statues, disposed in scholarly design, were a symbol of the marvellous order that through the genius of St. Thomas Aquinas reigned in the world of thought. Through the medium of art the highest conceptions of theologian and scholar penetrated to some extent the minds of even the humblest of the people.
But the meaning of these profound works gradually became obscure. New generations, with a different conception of the world, no longer understood them, and from the second half of the sixteenth century mediaeval art became an enigma. Symbolism, the soul of Gothic art, was dead.
The Church was ashamed of the once beloved legends, in which for so many centuries Christianity had been nurtured. The council of Trent marks the end of the old artistic tradition, and we know from a book full of the spirit of the council, that the writer—Molanus the theologian—had lost the key to the art of the Middle Ages.”
—Emile Mâle,The Gothic Image - Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century, 1913
“We are reminded that after all we must of necessity look on the great churches of the Middle Age with other eyes than those who built or first worshipped in them; that there is something verily worth having, and a just equivalent for something else lost, in the mere effect of time, and that the salt of all aesthetic study is in the question,—What, precisely what, is this to me? You and I, perhaps, should not care much for the mural colouring of a medieval church, could we see it as it was; might think it crude, and in the way. What little remains of it at Amiens has parted, indeed, in the course of ages, with its shrillness and its coarse grain. And in this matter certainly, in view of Gothic polychrome, our difference from the people of the thirteenth century is radical. We have, as it was very unlikely they should have, a curiosity, a very pleasurable curiosity, in the mere working of the stone they built with, and in the minute facts of their construction, which their colouring, and the layer of plaster it involved, disguised or hid. We may think that in architecture stone is the most beautiful of all things. Modern hands have replaced the colour on some of the tombs here—the effigies, the tabernacles above—skilfully as may be, and have but deprived them of their dignity. Medieval colouring, in fact, must have improved steadily, as it decayed, almost till there came to be no question of colour at all. In architecture, close as it is to men's lives and their history, the visible result of time is a large factor in the realised aesthetic value, and what a true architect will in due measure always trust to.”
—Walter Pater, Notre-Dame d'Amiens, 1894
“Alone at some distance from the wasting walls of a disused abbey I found half sunken in the grass the grey and goggle-eyed visage of one of those graven monsters that made the ornamental water-spouts in the cathedrals of the Middle Ages. It lay there, scoured by ancient rains or striped by recent fungus, but still looking like the head of some huge dragon slain by a primeval hero. And as I looked at it, I thought of the meaning of the grotesque, and passed into some symbolic reverie of the three great stages of art.
The Old Greeks summoned godlike things to worship their god. The medieval Christians summoned all things to worship theirs, dwarfs and pelicans, monkeys and madmen. The modern realists summon all these million creatures to worship their god; and then have no god for them to worship. Paganism was in art a pure beauty; that was the dawn. Christianity was a beauty created by controlling a million monsters of ugliness; and that in my belief was the zenith and the noon. Modern art and science practically mean having the million monsters and being unable to control them; and I will venture to call that the disruption and the decay.”
—G. K. Chesterton,On Gargoyles, 1909
Bibliography
The Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture,Matthew Holbeche Bloxam, London, D. Bogue (1846)
Dictionnaire raisonné de l'architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle,Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, Paris (1858-68)
Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres, Henry Adams, New York (1904) Gothic Painting, J. Dupont & C. Gnudi, Skira, Geneva (1954) The Gothic Cathedral, Otto von Simson, Pantheon, NY (1956) The Gothic, Paul Frankl , Princeton Univ. Press (1960) The Cathedral Builders, Jean Gimpel, Grove Press, NY (1961) Gothic Architecture, Robert Branner, G. Braziller, NY (1961) High Gothic, Hans Jantzen, Pantheon, NY (1962) History of Medieval Art I, II, III, Georges Duby, Skira, Geneva (1966-67) The Medieval Architect, J. H. Harvey, Pantheon, London (1972) The Age of the Cathedrals, Art and Society 980-1420, Georges Duby, London (1981) French Gothic Architecture of the 12th
and 13th Centuries,
J. Bony, Berkeley (1983) The Gothic Cathedral, Christopher Wilson, Thames & Hudson (1990) The Art of Gothic, Könemann Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, (1999)Development & Production Credits
Primary Text : Rhey Cedron — Theme Editor : Nicole MarchStructural Design & Project Direction : Rhey Cedron
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