We continue the epic history of Western architecture by tracing how medieval builders and their patrons revived the art of building in stone once more, and used it to craft monumental edifices into intimate, atmospheric spaces in the Romanesque age, before reaching for the heavens with soaring Gothic vaults and spires, and then returning once more to earth with the simple, balanced dignity of the Renaissance.
See the first part of the series here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwCuQLuajn8
Image of the unrealized plan of Beauvais Cathedral courtesy of Myles Zhang, https://www.myleszhang.org/2021/12/25/beauvais-cathedral/
Please support this podcast to help keep these lectures coming! – https://www.patreon.com/user?u=5530632
See the video of this lecture here: https://youtube.com/live/qgzvVd6oNUM
hello everyone this is Sam of historian splaining this past Friday I held a live video lecture the second part of my series on the history of Western architecture this part was on the high Middle Ages to the early Renaissance and I plan to pick up the thread and continue that Series in future talking about the Renaissance in the Baroque age and on up to modern architecture but in the meantime I’m going to focus mainly on continuing my audio lecture series on the origins of the first world war so you may have heard the first two installments on the Ottoman Empire in Serbia the next one will be on Austria Hungary but I also plan to produce a patron only bonus specifically focusing on Bosnia which was not a combatant country in the war because it was not independent it was annexed by Austria Hungary Before the War Began but nonetheless it was a critical Crucible where the central European world of Austria and Hungary and the habsburgs met the Slavic world of Eastern Europe and it was really the critical site where the War Began if you start from that pivotal moment of the assassination of the arch duuk in Saro which Unleashed this tremendous War so if you want to hear that special segment for patrons about the history and complex dynamics of Bosnia and all of my other Patron only lectures including my last myth of the month on culture then please go to the link to my patreon page and sign up at any level even if it’s just a dollar but right now I will share with you the audio track of my lecture on part two of the history of Western architecture so if you want to see the visuals you can follow the link to the YouTube page but you may find the audio helpful or Illuminating as well on its own thank [Music] you okay welcome back everyone this is Sam a jetti of historian splaining and this will be the second part of our grand survey of Western architecture this is part two from the high Middle Ages to the Renaissance and if you watched the first part uh you may know that we left off basically talking about the carolan period and the sort of flowering of a very rich eclectic style of Western architecture under the rule of Charlemagne and his immediate successors in the carolingian Empire and that was followed then by a period of relative fragmentation disorder poverty the carolingian Empire broke apart into pieces Europe was subjected to Decades of Viking raids that rained down destruction on much of the continent so there was a period of relative quesence with very little new building and practically no building in stone but eventually with the return to some degree of order stability prosperity in the late 900s there then was a a new flowering a Reawakening of monumental architecture and so I’m going to hopefully cover from that point all the way through to the beginnings of the Renaissance in the 1400s so we’re talking about almost 500 years here of architecture which is a lot less right in terms of chronology than we talked about in the first part where we went right from ancient Egypt on up through the ROM the byzantines and into the Middle Ages but this is going to be a more detailed lecture with a lot more images it might go on a bit longer hopefully if there’s enough time we’ll get all the way to the Renaissance we’ll see but this is going to be more detailed with more images because this is an era of from which there are much more surviving buildings for one thing right there are a lot more medieval and Renaissance buildings still lying around all over Europe then there are ancient Greek or Roman buildings and also the buildings as you’ll see often were very rich and complex and there’s a great deal of significant detail in them and so this is there’s a lot of visual to look at there’s a lot that’s very beautiful and intricate hopefully you’ll enjoy seeing them but it might take a little longer to get through and lastly the last reason is that this is basically my favorite period of architecture so there’s a lot that I really want to say and point out so if we can just look at the slides so it happens this introductory slide is just an image of the Great Hall of Hampton Court Palace in London and it is also a very complex eclectic building with a combination of medieval forms with Renaissance decorative themes so it encapsulates a lot of the things we’re going to talk about but in order to understand it we have to look through the the the meaning of these different styles of architecture and how they came about so if you watched the first lecture you might remember I started off by pointing out some basic themes or axes of variation that we use that I like to use to describe different styles of architecture and I won’t go through them completely again but just to quickly recap there’s verticalis versus horizontalism right do the lines the direction of your building Point upward Towards the Sky do they take off from the landscape or are they horizontal do they reach out to embrace the landscape linearity versus centrality is your building laid out in such a way as to draw the visitor in and forward from front to back along a a single linear Axis or is it centrally organized looking inward towards the central focal point and lastly plainness and simplicity versus richness and ornamentation and what I’m going to argue in this lecture is basically that when we look through the different eras of architecture especially over about the past thousand years you can see a repeating cycle of evolution that I liken to a seasonal cycle of the year so what has happened in at least I would say at least two distinct Cycles is that a new style is conceived that meets the desires the needs of a certain moment and over time that style tends to gain greater richness complexity it’s embellished and you get a new style that is more dramatic more ornate and more verticalist and then that can further evolve into what I would call an an Autumn style which is extremely rich uh extremely intricate and which then eventually reaches a sort of limit right and there’s a reaction in taste back to simp licity balance and I would call that a winter right so what I’m going to try to describe in this lecture if we get through all of it tonight is basically this cycle as it unfolded in the high and late Middle Ages from a spring period of the Romanesque which is defined by strong sturdy exteriors but intimate Interiors then a stylistic summer in the High Gothic which is the most dramatically vertical style and that is rich in ornamentation then the late Gothic which is characterized by complexity intricacy profusion of detail and then a response to the late Gothic which is the early Renaissance and its return to Simplicity balance and understatement so naturally we’ll start with the Romanesque but first I will just check if there are um your comments okay great so I’ll start with the first part naturally enough on the Romanesque which was the first style of the high Middle Ages and just as one example here this is part of the Romanesque Nave of Gloucester cathedral in England built in the early 1100s so as I said there was a period of relative fragmentation disorder poverty through most of the 8 and 900s but finally that started to change really beginning in the 960s and starting in Central Europe especially in Germany and one of the very important developments that happened is that the German King Otto was able to consolidate power and expand German territory around much of Central Europe and also gain the Throne of Italy of what was left of the ostrogothic kingdom of it and he added that onto his domains and formed what he called the Holy Roman Empire and in 962 he was formerly crowned as Holy Roman Emperor so he was the first so-called emperor in Europe since the the fall of the carolingian Empire and this allowed for some degree of Greater stability a return to more long-term travel and trade and naturally one of the things that Otto wanted to glorify his reign in this new Empire was Monumental building and so very soon after his coronation in 962 you start to see Grand new churches and monasteries built basically on the carolan plan looking pretty similar to what we already saw last time from the carolingian age so this is an example here sank ponton in Cologne this is a side view you can see it’s Grand impressive uh but it’s rather blockish right the different parts are basically just rectal linear sort of stuck together and then here we see the interior which looks like more or less a conventional Basilica form right a large Nave with a high ceiling in this case it’s still a wood coffered ceiling some windows in the clear story level and then these side aisles offset by pillars so this would have been a very familiar kind of church form people would have seen for hundreds of years and you can see also it’s even in the interior it’s pretty plain unornamented there are these big almost completely bare White Walls just a few Windows uh the pillars are big and blockish and so while it is Grand and impressive it can look rather uh too plain it can look rather uninteresting even a little forbidding right you can see from the side it looks like it could be like a a military Fortress or Warehouse so there were various problems in shortcomings with this Carolin Jan style that people really wanted to address and to somehow solve so for one thing there were practical problems the need for more abses altars and chapels because worship was changing right Worship in the early Romanesque era around 1000 was different from what people had known three or 400 years earlier there was a much greater and growing Cult of the Saints the desire to make pilgrimages to pray to Saints to see images or relics holy relics of saints and as people were going on these longer Journeys and pilgrimages people wanted to hear Mass whenever they got to a church or an Abbey and so it became customary for priests to say masses several times throughout the day or to have several priests assigned to a church to say many masses so churches were centers of Greater AC ity and just having one single apps like you see here in this church in Spain from the 1000s just having one apps with one altar was no longer enough right churches had to become complexes of many subdivided holy spaces for worship they also just wanted more windows for more light and air right so here’s a view of the same church s s vinent De Cardona and you can see it looks Fortress likee it has very few Windows it could be quite dark in side you know this photo is misleading as so many photographs are because there are artificial lights added in this would have been a very dim space and then also aesthetically people wanted to there was there was ATT tension and people wanted to square the circle on the one hand they wanted great height and Majesty they wanted these buildings to be appropriate to glorify God or the Saints or the king or the emperor but at the same time they didn’t want them to just look monolithic and imposing they wanted the the buildings especially inside to be more intimate more welcoming to have private spaces for prayer and reflection so there were all these tensions and contradictions in what people wanted out of a medieval building and the Romanesque style basically formed out of a series of attempts to solve these problems so here’s one early response a German a distinctively German response which was to create a church more or less on the carolan model right if we look at this one end of St Michaels at hillesheim it looks similar to what we saw at s ponton right like a carolan church but the catch is that it’s now mirror imaged there are two chanels on either end of the church you enter in the sides over here and you can look in either direction and there could be different things going on maybe in this apps here a priest might be saying Mass maybe down here there’s a Choir performing a chant right and there are these little side galleries in the transcept there extra abses on the side so it’s becoming more like almost a little city a little church complex rather than just a simple linear church with one apps at the end another other responses were also experimented with in France so this style it seems first emerged possibly in Germany some people argue that St Michael’s hildesheim is the first Romanesque church but either way it’s spread very quickly all throughout the Holy Roman Empire all the way down into Italy and also Westward into France and Spain and French Builders tried out different solutions too like you see here at the abbey church at clun they’ve worked in a bunch of abses and side chapels all around there’s one big main apps here where perhaps the Abbot might perform Mass but then there are all these little side Chambers and nooks and crannies and then another somewhat simpler solution but one that became very popular is this one that you see here at s where you have a basic Basilica like we’ve seen many times before with the Nave and the side Isles but then instead of Simply ending the side Isles continue all the way around behind the chancel so now the chancel instead of just a wall in the back there’s a colonade with pillars and columns and behind it you have this extra space called the ambulatory and then more chanels with little chapels are added in radiating out along the ambulatory and that’s what you see here in the photo of senten you see the the the back of the church right the East end with the the big ambulatory and then these radiating side chapels so all of these were ways to articulate and subdivide the space so different things could be going on and so that you could also create a feeling of of intimacy even within this huge Monumental Stone Church and this is just an image of what I think of as a typical Romanesque interior space in maybe my favorite Romanesque building which is St Bartholomew the great in London and this is a a so-called Norman style Romanesque church because the English Associated this style with the Normans but basically what you see here on the left this is the main chancel with the altar right so normally Mass would go on here but then there’s this side aisle which just rather than ending it continues it curves around into the ambulatory and then they’re a little more private often quiet sort of semioccluded side chapels like we see right here this is a lady Chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary so you might go here to make prayers and to venerate St Mary so and you can see there’s a sense of of privacy of semi-paralyzed for the aesthetic issue Romanesque buildings did depend on enormous thick sturdy vertical stone walls which allowed you to build a large capacious building but they could look quite imposing like we saw so they the builders developed various methods to break up these massive vertical masses and to make them look more approachable to have a sort of finer human scale texture so here’s an example here this is is a typical elevation or side wall along a Romanesque Nave and there’s the little arcade here right that sets off the side aisle and then above that a gallery with another little arcade and then finally the clear story on top and you can see on each level the details become lighter more delicate almost as if the building is gradually lifting off into the air and then this is a facade of a Romanesque Church nraam l in potier in France and what’s interesting here is you can see basically the same technique repeated again right we have this big heavy sturdy looking arcade at the base around over the entrance way then vertical bands with little sculpted figures and then a little blind a so-called blind arcade meaning an arcade that doesn’t actually go through to anything it’s purely decorative as basically mimicking the elevated Gallery right and then another one on top of that mimicking the clear story so that sort of sense of of Tears delicately stacked Rising one on top of the other is then repeated in the exterior facade like it looks inside the church and then of course as I said there’s the question of just how do you get more windows in to allow in more light and air and the basic Romanesque method of doing that was simply taking a wall whether it’s flat or curved and adding in buttresses and heavy engaged buttresses this is a very typical Romanesque building here the Abbey of Le in Normandy and you can see that here these vertical buttresses which then strengthen and stabilize the wall so that then you can in between you can break through and add in Windows so this is the typical look of a Romanesque building and then this is an example over here from Germany and you can see what they’ve done here is again a typical Romanesque Motif that repeats over and over again you put in buttresses and then in between you put in a double arched window Bay so rather than just having a big arch that looks sort of heavy blockish functional instead you add in a slender column in the middle dividing it in two making it look lighter more delicate more intimate and that becomes really the Hallmark of Romanesque building of all kinds and it spreads out into all forms and media so these are examples of Romanesque houses in towns in Italy and Croatia and you can see they’re they’re sturdy they’re blockish they’re tall just like a typical Romanesque building but they’ve broken in little window Bays including these little double window Bays with this slender columns that typical Motif and then again here you see a tall narrow house in Croatia same Motif here with the double window Bay and then also this is uh a a preserved example of a wooden CED wooden porch which you would have seen on many Romanesque houses all around Europe same thing in castles this is one of the reasons why people often look at Romanesque churches and say they look fortress-like or castle-like is because the same techniques then were carried over into castles and this is a typical Norman esque Castle the White Tower of the Tower of London built by William the Conqueror in the 1080s and you see here these engaged buttresses running all the way up the height of the building and then this blind arcade sort of dividing the facade and then these little uh double window Bays set in towards the top and again the same technique of putting in the sort of heavier sturdier elements at the bottom and then the lighter more delicate details towards the top and these same sort of techniques then were repeated in arguably the the Masterpiece of Romanesque castle building which is Dover Castle built by Henry II in the late 1100s and Dober Castle is a really interesting example of architecture that is both decorative and functional it is an actual real Fortress that was built to overlook and protect the harbor of Dover which is a major point where foreign enemies would have landed if they tried to invade England but at the same time it was built to look elegant refined Palace like a palace a castle Fit For A King and to make an impressive visual image as a diplomat or a foreign general or a merchant approached the harbor of Dover so Romanesque really permeated all kinds of buildings and here is one very rare surviving example the Great Hall of oakam Castle in central England which also was built in the 1180s and there probably were many great Halls like this at that time all around England but this is a rare example that survives and you can see again it’s built to look tall sturdy steep pitched roof big heavy buttresses strengthening it but then it is lightened with these decorative double window bays and if you look inside it’s almost like a basilica right but but more open uh wider and uh like a meeting Hall you would have had a central Hearth and then a board or a table where the Lord might have sat and received guests or received his servant his tenants and uh just a wood frame simple wood frame roof which is what most buildings at this time still would have had and it happens that there’s this massive collection of horseshoes because the family of oakam Castle was named defer which can it’s sort of a double on Tandra it sounds like fer the Horseshoe maker so they had a custom that whenever a a high status guest came to the Great Hall they had to give a gift of a horseshoe and we’re just fortunate that this great hall and its particular horseshoe collection happens to survive and this is a one very rare example of a Romanesque Civic building right not built under the sponsorship of a king or an emperor or the church but for a city Republic Mona in Italy and it’s late Romanesque so you can see it has this long uh you know gentle symmetrical arcade with the typical Romanesque half circle arches and then over it there is this row of window Bays which look again like fairly typical Romanesque window Bays except that now they’re triple instead of double so it’s getting a little more embellished a little more complex as you get into the late Romanesque era but of course the vast majority of surviving Romanesque buildings are ecclesiastical built for worship and especially for pilgrimages Romanesque sort of became the accepted Style pilgrimage churches and this is a very important example uh the abbey church of sanis in France because it is one of the earliest surviving Romanesque Stone Vault buildings so these earlier Romanesque buildings we’ve been looking at almost all still had wooden roofs which could do the trick but you know aesthetically they didn’t look as unified they contrasted with the stone walls they also had to be repaired and replaced so it was around the mid 1000s that Builders rediscovered the techniques of Building Stone vaults Stone tunnel or uh Barrel vaults and this was a very important early example and you can see it allows for a much grander more soaring building and it creates a feeling of more Unity you can see the sheer vertical lines going up the walls and then continuing right over the Vault and back down and this was would have also been very good for acoustics right the sounds of chant the sounds of prayer would echo in a grand vaated building like this and then all of these techniques the arcades the elevated galleries the buttresses the stone vaults all of these techniques then were mobilized in the late 1000s with the sort of ultimate flowering of Romanesque building which is seen most of all in two pilgrimage churches that were built around the same time on almost the same plan plan and the first one by a very by a hair was this one San to tulus in tulus France which was a pilgrimage site because it was on the route for pilgrimage on foot down through France into Spain to go to Santiago de compostella with the tomb of St James and so very shortly after the builders in Spain built a grand Cathedral at Santiago on the same basic model as sand to to lose uh just slightly bigger but what sna had that that that Santiago did not is you can see here in the center at the Crossing they put in four huge very sturdy peers which could hold up the weight of a tower and this was very useful for a pilgrimage church because it made the church visible for miles around for pilgrims approaching who might be coming from all directions so this is really the first Monumental Romanesque Masterpiece sand tulus and you can see it’s dramatically tall vertical imposing and yet they’ve worked in all of these elements to sort of break up the tremendous facade and to make it look less imposing more approachable they’ve worked in these subtle horizontal bands in the masonry uh these gentle half circle arches these gentle curves of the apps and transpsoas chapels and even in the enormous Tower they’ve broken it into these little tiers each with its little arcade growing thinner and lighter as you go to make the whole thing look uh lighter less towering really even though it is a tower so this is a sort of careful Balancing Act of verticalis and horizontalism and this is the interior with the grand sweeping Stone tunnel Vault and the heavy side pillars which nonetheless they’ve made to look a little lighter by adding in these sort of false engaged circular pillars along the sides and these again these subtle horizontal bands and then this is just a scene from the interior of Santiago de compostella with the same basic idea right on the same basic plan but in this case they’ve just added in little classical Roman style uh pillar capitals to give it a little again a little look of delicacy and lightness rather than just being completely heavy and imposing so the Romanesque really started in sort of Central West Europe arguably first in Germany and then very quickly developed and advanced in France and Spain as it branched out from there it took on different forms and variations in different countries kind of distinct Regional flavors and possibly the most unique and distinctive is the Italian Roman and this is the most dramatic example here the uh the Basilica of San Minato in Florence and the basic shape you can see is just a typical Basilica just like you would have seen in an early Christian building but they’ve added on this decorative facade again to sort of break it up to make it look lighter they’ve put in these engaged slender pillars this gentle half circular arcade and obviously the Italian Romanesque is the most most reminiscent of actual Roman buildings right one of the secrets about Romanesque is that it’s not really all that Romanesque but the the exception is in Italy where they had Italian Villas and temples and bathouses still sitting around and they borrowed that sort of decorative pattern in and in this case they’ve recreated it in subtle inlay of different colored stones like this green this deep green is called serpentino marble this is another very a on Italian Romanesque from a little later the Cathedral of Pisa which again it’s a massive imposing building but with these gentle uh engaged pillars and arcades and then this very unusual blind arcade on the front facade which stands just a few feet out from the actual building and looks almost like Grill work or lattice work adding sort of depth and lightness to the facade and then that Motif is repeated on the Bell Tower the compan here off to the side which is of course world famous today mainly because it leans uh but nonetheless the Leaning Tower of Pisa is a great example of Italian Romanesque architecture it also made its way gradually into Eastern Europe you can see fairly straightforward examples here uh the Cathedral Church of Tomb in Poland is basically on the German plan right the entrance way is not at the the front end here as we would think of it but in the side and you have chanels and chapels on either end and these flanking uh square based Towers same basic idea here at the abbey church of St George in Hungary but with a little more ornamentation worked in right so it makes its way Eastward and then interestingly you may know I recently posted a lecture about Serbia made me very interested in the architecture of Serbia and this is in early instance of a Serbian Orthodox Monastery from the 1100s studin which is an interesting example of hybrid of the Byzantine style where you would have a simple Greek cross and then a dome over the Crossing with Romanesque details like you see these double Bay these double window bays and uh this is this is one of the ways that that Western and Byzantine could could cross fertilize and here it’s happening in Eastern Europe in Serbia which had a lot of close dealings and interactions with Constantinople but there’s also a distinct Regional style in the west that did something similar which is the Romanesque style of aquatan in Southwestern France and this is San FR imp from about the same time and you can see this is um almost like a normal Roman church if you ignore the roof and this sort of forest of Domes and cupas all over it which clearly also is borrowing from the Byzantine style which by this point people in Southwest France would have encountered through travels to Constantinople and to the holy land during the Crusades so you’re getting more and more of these Eastern ideas from the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic world coming into Europe partly because of the Crusades and this is just a look uh from above at San FR with these you can see here more clearly the five domes one over the crossing and then four others on each of the four arms of the church so again very much like a Byzantine form but with Romanesque details and then in Germany there there was all kinds of evolution of the German Romanesque and over time they built more and more massive Monumental Romanesque cathedrals but they kept the same basic plan and layout so here you see the biggest Romanesque building in the world which is the Cathedral of Shire and it is tremendously tall these four huge belfrey Towers uh a dome over one of the transcept crossings but the layout again is double-ended symmetrical just like St Michael’s at hild time this is what it looks like inside you have this huge soaring towering Nave with these transverse arches stabilizing it and then if you look at the elevation to the side you can see what they’re doing is they have these main heavier pillars which support the transverse arches and then in between they have these lighter pillars that divide into two archways so you get your double again your double window Bay and in order to push those windows as far up as possible to extend them all the way up they’ve broken into the sides of the Vault so it’s now no longer a simple tunnel Vault it has what’s called groin vaulting where you have these side arches intersecting with the transverse arches creating these separate bays and that’s one way to get your more window space and get it up higher and in England these same basic techniques then were were more or less copied and a lot of English Norman Romanesque churches look pretty standard like similar to what you’d see all around Europe but a very important innovation that the English experimented with was ribbing and this kind of changed the game because now you could instead of just having a tunnel or a barrel you could actually break up the weight and pressure of the Vault and concentrate it on specific lines and then Channel it down to the pillars so this allowed you to shape the Vault and almost sculpt it into all kinds of forms if you understood the geometry by which the ribbing would hold up the weight and stabilize it and it creates such an effect that there are many places where uh bombs or you falling uh construction equipment have broken through panels of a Romanesque vault or a Gothic Vault for that matter and completely wrecked it but it remained intact because the ribbing stayed in place right so the two each one the ribbing and the the masonry panels support each other and one can actually stand up and stabilize even without the other and this technique of ribbing and all these other techniques I’ve been talking about were all then mobilized to build the really the the biggest and most impressive Romanesque Masterpiece of England which is Durham Cathedral so you can see here they’ve managed to create again a a vault these two flanking square based Towers flanking the East the west entranceway and then a massive tower on the crossing as well and in order to be able to do that they had to really finally design plan and stabilize the whole structure and this is what it looks like inside you have this groin vaulting right allowing for a higher row of Windows even above the clear story you have these sturdy pillars but they have sort of lightened them by adding in subtle ornamentation in different patterns that becomes typical of English and French later Romanesque and they’ve sort of broken the big pillars into little slender pieces with these sculpted engaged columns and then this is the crossing right you have these these huge sort of Bund bundled columns as they call them even though really they’re it’s all just one structure it’s just one big peer so you have these four peers and then above it you can look up into the tower and that lets in light and a feeling of Greater openness and airiness so the last element that I’ll talk about in Romanesque that really uh makes completes the effect and makes it possible for Romanesque building to feel intimate approachable welcoming even as it is so heavy and monolithic is small scale ornamentation often small figures and forms just about at eye level which can then Engage The Eye of the visitor and interact with or even distract from the massiveness of the structure around them so there’s a balancing of large and small and the real laboratory where people developed these techniques of ornamentation was monastic cloysters so this is an early Romanesque Cloister of Santo Domingo deos in Spain which sort of became the Prototype where you have this uh galleried Square Cloister with uh Apartments cells chapels around it and then enclosing a square garden called a Paradise Garden within and then you have this colonade supporting the gallery and these sculpted capitals and they they had a sort of profuse of different figures and forms that the artists could experiment with and they’re often very creative so here are slightly later Romanesque cloysters this is at sanjan and larano in Rome and you can see they’re experimenting with intertwined pillar forms spiral forms and this is masak in France where again you have these sculpted capitals and then at the corner pillars they also have relief sculptures of Saints or biblical scenes and these are examples of how this practice this whole art form of Romanesque capitals could then carry over from the cloysters into churches palaces so these are two examples from the ABY Church of sanoa which we saw earlier and this one it seems like maybe warriors with with shields and helmets and then this one it looks like maybe this represents a fortress and possibly these are like Defenders peing over the edge of the Fortress a lot of these figures are really mysterious we we don’t know why they were sculpted or what they might represent perhaps they were sort of they served a function of encoding stories events in a story that you could tell as you brought a pilgrim visitor into the church these are some more examples I gathered uh two guys who seem to be maybe fighting pulling each other’s beards and then on the corners are these sort of bearded grotesque monster figures this is another human scene this might be someone playing music a music IAL instrument this seems to be maybe someone doing naked acrobatics then these two figures maybe having sex maybe wrestling hard to say right there’s a lot of Whimsy and fantasy here and a lot of it we just we just don’t know what to make of them but they were clearly an important part of the embellishment of a Romanesque building here are a couple with uh sort of monster winged figures these are sort of sphinx-like figures or maybe uh siren figures with human heads and then lastly these are sort of dragon figures which you see often and here they seem to be issuing out of the mouth of a human mask and then I love this one this is my favorite you see these two dragon figures and then if you look at the corner their heads meet up into one and they seem to be eating a human does it represent something does it have some theological or folcloric meaning is it just for fun we really don’t know but again it creates this something very engaging and human in the Romanesque building and then sort of The piesta raisi Stance is um is tonum relief sculptures which would be in the archway over a doorway and this again is at the abbey church of sanoa and we see here in the center right over the middle of the door is a seated Christ judging the good and the evil and he has his right hand lifted up to these folks who are you know Saints monks maybe patrons who help pay for the church Church St Peter with his keys and then he has his left hand uh pointing downward towards the evil who are damned and are being sort of uh arrested by demons and various evil creatures and then fed into the mouth of some monster into hell where you have presumably the devil so again there’s a lot of Whimsy a lot of fantasy creativity and it tells a story and then lastly there are some surviving Romanesque fresco paintings not very many uh and there are some points where clear it’s clear that there were some but they faded away or they were destroyed at some point but a really dramatic surviving example is the frescos in the Crypt of the Abbey of San isidoro in Spain from the early 1100s which are very vibrant and Rich and have scenes of of Christ and the gospels and Saints as well as just geometric decorative patterns scroll work patterns clearly inspired a lot by Roman frescos and this was important here because the Crypt of San isidoro was the burial place of the tombs of the kings of asuras in Northern Spain so you wanted it to be somehow impressive and engaging despite the fact that basically it’s just a basement and again this would have been very dim right this is the lower level of the building there would have only been some candle light it would have been quite intimate uh and frankly hard to appreciate right the richness and the vibrancy of these frescos and that’s part of why eventually Builders moved beyond the Romanesque style and mustered new techniques of building taller and lighter with more windows to make a a more impressive more Airy and more lit building but before I go on to that I’ll take a look at if there are uh comments okay I’ve seen all these architectural elements before but I haven’t paused to consider and understand them that looks like the alhamra was their Romanesque in the Muslim world or or a Cloister um there well there was there was Arabian and Middle Eastern influence in Romanesque but not nearly as much as in the next era which we’re going to talk about next which is is the gothic okay let me see okay part two summer oh let me see the time okay so this is a view looking up into the Vault of the choir of the abbey church of sandon which is in France just outside Paris and and this is the birthplace of Gothic right the gothic style has a more distinct specific time and place where it was conceived and if it had a single inventor it’s at least its uh its sort of intellectual father was the Abbot of sanon Abbot Su who Not only was the Abbot of this very old Rich prestigious monastery but also was a minister more or less an unofficial prime minister to the king of France and there was a traditional relationship between sandine and the French crown and sandine actually again was the burial place of French Kings of the cape Dynasty like San isidoro in Spain so so Abbot Su wanted to glorify the French Crown to show the close relationship and Alliance between the French church and the monarchy and to do so by basically breaking the bounds of Romanesque buildings and showing something more brilliant more bright more enthralling than the sort of enclosed intimate spaces of Romanesque building and you can see he with his the Builders of the building they were able to bring about something very striking and new so the abbey church of sandan at least the choir as it was built in 1144 to 45 brought together certain distinct elements that had already been tried out before in Romanesque they were not totally new but they had never been put together before and they had never been pushed to such an extreme degree this was really a daring Enterprise testing the limits and the boundaries of what stone could do so one of these is pointed arches so people often say well the difference between Romanesque and Gothic is the Romanesque has half circle arches and the gothic has pointed arches and that’s not quite true there are Romanesque buildings with pointed arches but in the gothic they’re used to a much more extreme degree and they’re used both for decorative purposes to make the whole look of the building more vertical right and to to draw and uh almost push the eye upward towards heaven and also structurally a pointed Arch can bear more weight without buckling as long as it is narrow right it it may not be able to open up as wide and Broad a space as a rounded half circle Arch but as long as it’s narrow enough it can reach higher and bear more weight so if you’re trying to build a vault or Tower as high as you possibly can you’re likely to base it on pointed arches another is ribbing we saw ribbing like in the English Cathedrals at Gloucester and Durham but it’s used much more extensively in the gothic and it not only is used to reinforce the Vault but to give it a sort of sculptural shape a look of of undulation right and you’ll see how how that happens in in Grand Roman Gothic vaults the third one is flying buttresses uh but before I talk about flying buttresses I’ll point out this is another view of the abbey church of sandine and you can see these elements of the pointed arches one pointing up towards the next towards the next right basically leading the eye up to the ceiling the ribbing that then sort of Springs out almost like branches out of a tree right out of the the the pillars out into the groin vating of the Vault and down here you see this is one of the Effigy tombs of one of the French Kings right so this is in appropriately soaring bright and ring building to house the memorials of the kings of France and then lastly as I said flying buttresses which stand outside the Nave or the aisles of the church and serve to stabilize the whole structure so that you can build taller but without blocking the light out of the windows so these are some early examples of flying buttresses on Gothic buildings they could sit on the ground and stabilize directly from the ground or they could stand upon the walls of the side aisles and then lean into and so buttress and stabilize the Nave and this is most frequent in in Gothic buildings so you can see here this is a diagram right so you can have an extremely tall Nave The Vault might be reasonably stable but the pressure of the weight of the Vault pushes down and because it is arched at the bases it pushes outward right this is the problem with vaults and domes of all kinds is that they might be somewhat stable but they push outward at the base and something has to be there to absorb that outward pressure so it doesn’t collapse outward and so in a Gothic building you put in these flying buttresses which then absorb that weight Channel it down to the ground and here you can see in in later Gothic buildings they become decorative right they become thin sculpted and the idea is that if you reduce them into this sort of light thin tracery form you’re letting in as much light as possible to shine right through into those windows right the whole goal is to bring as much sunlight as possible in to illuminate the interior of the building so this is an example of what could be done in a Gothic Vault uh fairly quickly after the completion of sandine so that was the initial sort of announcement of the new style and then it spread around France first very quickly within just a few years uh abbots Bishops City incorporations Dukes started putting money into building Grand new buildings in this new style and they didn’t call it Gothic they just called it the new style and when it spread abroad Beyond France they simply Called It the French style right Gothic is actually originally a term of abuse that Renaissance designers applied to this style saying it was sort of barbar iic um superstitious undignified but at this time it was simply called the French style and you can see that this is an example at Ruan you can see the soaring vertical pillars right that with these uh sculpted bands that then run uninterrupted all the way up past the gallery past this little row called the torium past the clear story all the way right up springing into the Vault so that there is nothing uh breaking this vertical sweep right a Romanesque Builder might have said this looks too big too imposing but the idea of the gothic is that it should be enthralling right and the the building should look as if it is leaping upward from Earth to Heavens right uniting connecting Earth and Heaven and in a sense lifting the soul up into the air into the celestial spheres the gothic Builders also experimented with Central designs right they started to break away from just this simple uh linear orientation from entrance way to chancel and they became interested in adding in circular or octagonal elements that looked more inward towards the central focal point and this is a famous example the Temple Church in London which was built for the Knights Templar and the Knights Templar of course they their headquarters was at al- axam mosque in Jerusalem they knew of the Dome of the Rock and the Church of the holy Seiler and these other domed buildings in Jerusalem and they brought some of those ideas and plans back with them to Europe also chapter houses became sort of Laboratories for experimentation in central designs and this is uh the chapter house at yorkminster and the chapter house is actually the meeting Hall where the monks or cannons who were uh attached to a particular Cathedral would meet right they would live in a cloy right that colon Square structure but they would then they started to build these chapter houses as meeting halls and they would be oriented centrally towards the central focal point so as you go from Romanesque to Gothic there’s this move towards greater and greater verticalis richer embellishment and ornamentation and more Central uh or at least hybrid Central and linear plans and then as for the ornamentation a lot of that is inspired by Islamic designs that pilgrims would have seen Knights and Warriors and Builders would have seen when they went to the Holy Land uh in the Middle East or to Spain and a great example is these multifoil arches so we’ve seen blind arcades already right in Romanesque and Gothic building but now they’re trying out these sort of complex flowerlike profiles uh purely for decorative effect to engage the eye and even these little intricate uh tile decorations also are mimicking Islamic buildings and then the embellishment with statuary right so now instead of Simply Having little figures carved into Romanesque capitals now you have these full figures of saints and biblical figures also sometimes Kings historical Kings patrons uh rulers who patronized the buildings and this whole new style is invented first at charta at the Royal portal that you see here in charta and then it’s spread all over Europe these elongated sort of surreal figures who again are sort of stretched upward like the form of the building itself right reaching up towards the heavens looking almost as if they’re lifting off into the sky or into the heavens and of course they’re very famous for stained glass and this became a way to bring color uh into these churches so once you had these much bigger taller soaring window Bays that were giving enough light to illuminate the building you then could further embellish with stained glass and the early style involved these figures uh you know these are biblical figures Seth and Adam uh the Coats of Arms of probably patrons who contributed to the cathedral and then later in the 1200s these Arrangements into complex forms like this Rose window which is the famous South transcept Rose window in notam De Pari so that’s some things you would have seen if you looked around you and looked up there also was ornamentation if you looked down this is is an example of a cosmati mosaic floor in Santa Maria in trast in Rome so it was made by a family of Craftsmen in Rome called the katti family and then that was brought to England so English uh patrons brought in katti artists to put in these sort of inlay mosaics like this one in Canterbury this is the famous uh so-called great pavement made by the kadis in Westminster Abbey and these four uh rectangles housed tombs and again you can see the mimicry of Islamic and Middle Eastern motifs so the katti Pavements became very popular in Italy and England not so much in France in France the custom became uh Mosaic labyrinths and this is a surviving example from charta you can see people would have walked along the pathway going through the Labyrinth until they reached the center and it was a sort of meditative practice it seems and the popularity of the labyrinths in France underscores how the cathedrals ultimately were intended to be sort of all encompassed ing enveloping experiences just walking into one looking around seeing the sights the light the colors The Sounds was almost like a meditative experience so this is just an example of a French High Gothic Cathedral there were many that were built in the 11 and 1200s and they tend to be fairly similar they more or less all follow and draw upon uh Sande and on each other so a lot of the features are recognizable if you’ve seen one to some degree you’ve seen them all but just for an example this is the front facade of ram built in the early 1200s you have these elaborate decorative arches the little statuary that you would see as you were entering the rose window The Two Towers with this delicate tracery flying buttresses this is looking up into the Vault right these huge soaring uh clear story Windows going up into the groin vaults and this is the plan of the cathedral so you can see here it is still linear right you would still walk into it like a basilica proceed through the crossing and back into the chancel but the transcept you can see has been reduced down to almost nothing right there’s hardly any separation here uh and there are these huge radiating chapels all pointing inward so more and more the the layout of the church is being reoriented towards the center and more and more The Crossing is sort of the center where the worshipper can stand stand or sit and look around himself or herself and see this Grand towering environment all around them so this is just a view down the Nave of Ram with the huge West Rose window again uh these windows have been pushed so high there’s tremendous Bright Light bathing the building and then this is a view of the crossing and you can see here this is the chancel back up in here right with the ambulatory behind it but the altar has been pushed all the way out almost into the crossing so that more and more again the focus is inward right it it has more of the feel of like a temple or a chapel with a central focal point and over here again another Rose window this is the transcept which is very shallow right it doesn’t reach way off like in most older churches and this is the pipe organ so this would have been around the time when pipe organs were first being introduced into churches so there was a very long tradition of coral music and chant but now instrumental music was being introduced into the cathedrals and was more and more part of the experience and this is a lovely sculpture that I love of men playing musical instruments in Santiago de compostella and this one here this two-person instrument is an organistrum or hery Gertie where one person would have cranked uh a wheel which would then uh play against the strings and the other person would turn the pegs to change the notes and it’s a real thing it sounds like something out of George R Martin but it’s real you can see them and it would have created this great resonant sound sound almost like a giant cello which would reverberate all throughout the church so it was the the cathedrals were sites of activity of gathering where you would have been enveloped in sounds in smells in colors it was a whole sensory experience and to go back to ram ram also had a labyrinth uh each Labyrinth was its own different design right and this one was in rem for several hundred years but it was torn out in the 1700s because the bishop didn’t like that kids were playing around on it and making noise so they were trying to kind of crack down right on this sort of almost boisterous noisy active experience of the cathedral but we have these drawings of it looked like and it’s very special because it has these five figures and in the center this is the the bishop who first proposed and sponsored the building of the cathedral and then in the corners are these four figures holding Mason’s tools like a square and a compass and these are believed to depict the different Master Masons the sort of head Builders who were brought in over the years to oversee the building and extension of the cathedral and this is indicative of how by this time in the 1200s more and more people were seeing and taking note of and becoming really fascinated with Builders and with their sort of incredible skills and the sort of secret almost Supernatural seeming knowledge that they brought with them that enabled them to build these extraordinary buildings so you see in medieval manuscripts more and more depictions of Builders at work this is from the book of St albin’s in England you can see uh this person is sculpting a little pillar Capital this person might be dressing small stones or blocks which they’re then uh lifting up by this sort of pulley system and laying to to build the wall this is from the French so-called Morgan Bible uh and this is an example of where you see Masons depicted building the Tower of Babel right which is sort of the the first biblical myth of a great building right and so here this is a a quarryman dressing a stone uh this guy is using his his square right to to square off the corners and then it’s being hauled up by ladder or by this pulley system with a dude in a wheel right and we know that they did use these they would put someone in a wheel to hoist up the stones and build up your wall or your Tower and then these are some later depictions uh these are two female Masons depicted working at a building site in Bach’s book of famous women and we do know from documentary sources that women did sometimes work as stonemasons it was considered an acceptable line of work for women like uh fresco painting or illuminated manuscripts because it was seen as devotional there was a sort of religious devotional aspect to doing this work of building a church or an Abbey uh and then this is a really wonderful illustration too because it shows us the system of scaffolding and ladders that was used used to access and stabilize these buildings as they were being built up and then lastly this is a wonderful example from the world Chronicle of Munich again of Builders supposedly building the Tower of Babel using this pulley system and what’s really wonderful about this one is it shows here at the base of the building the lodge and we know from also from documents that when Masons traveled to a big building site they would Gather in a sort of makeshift wood and thatch structure or shelter called the lodge and that’s where they would do the sort of fine sculpting and chiseling work preparing the stone elements to be put onto the building and the lodge also became a sort of semiofficial institution with its own leaders that would set rules for who was allowed to work as a mason what were the required skills and training and that would sort of manage the Mason’s Affairs almost like a a sort of Quasi official Guild and as for the Mason’s own documents the the vast majority of Masons were illiterate uh and we have no surviving writings from them but one rare exception was a builder named viard onur who worked in France in the 1220s and 30s and his notebook survives and it gives us a little window into the sort of world of a traveling stonemason who was going from sight to site building these magnificent buildings and learning copying mimicking as he went so you can see here this is his drawing of the Tower of laon as a possible sort of inspiration these are his drawings of possible decorative elements like the proportions of a human face then there are scenes of just guys wrestling um floor plans of chancels of churches that could be copied mimicked revised embellished and he also invented different sorts of uh machines like uh cranks uh rains clocks uh water pumps he it seems he was a sort of polymath a kind of medieval Leonardo da Vinci but it just happens that he’s the one medieval Mason for whom we still have his notebook surviving it’s this one window into this world of the Masons and these traveling Masons basically brought uh again they they they became kind of the Apostles of the High Gothic style and they brought it to new kinds of buildings like Civic buildings this is the cloth hall or sort of market and Guild Hall of the cloth merchants in ipra in Flanders and they brought it to different parts of Europe to different lands right somewhat into Eastern Europe not very much not as much as the Romanesque but there are a few examples like the Cathedral of Ria in lva has this sort of Gothic style uh ribbed vating peaked arches but it’s a very subtle right very paired back Gothic also into the east into the Holy Land This is the kns Hall of the cak chaler the kns hospitallers castle in Syria and in some ways it was mimicked and borrowed into different forms in different media like in the North with the great stave churches of Norway which you know are a distinctive style unto themselves but I would say show a lot of influence of the gothic right with the dramatic verticalis the high peak Gables the little Elemental ornamental dragon heads and but all sort of built on top of a basic uh cross plan right so this is uh possibly slightly earlier The borgund Stave church and then this is the biggest one the head all Stave church built maybe around 1200 it went into Spain again not as much you know the main Heartland of Gothic was fra was France and it also was brought into England in Spain there are few like the Cathedral of Leon you can see the plan the outline of it looks more like Romanesque right with the big transcept the two square Towers on either side of the entranceway but it has these Gothic details and inside the Cathedral of Leon it’s very striking and and unique because the the peers The Columns the galleries are all very simplified uh the space is more open and clear so that you can see directly to the windows and the windows are the real emphasis with these rich distinct colors and you can see they have this style where each window has its own dominant color so that you can really appreciate the richness the vibrancy of it and this shows the influence of a developing Gothic style in France and Spain that was called the ronon style where the buildings became structurally simplified again they paired away these things like transcept side Isles made it into just a simple box and here this is a great example sent Chappelle which I would argue personally is The Great Masterpiece of High Gothic in Paris built by King Louis the 9th to house the crown of thorns which was a holy Relic obtained through the Crusades and no flying buttresses just these simple engaged buttresses there’s a crypt lower level where you enter that holds up a lot of the weight of the structure so that then when you go up into the main Chapel it is light Airy there are minimal Stone elements and as much space as possible just for Windows and the windows are in this Rich vibrant deep color uh you feel almost as if you’re uh stepping into a jewel box full of gleaming colored gemstones so this is looking West towards the entrance way and the rose window this is what it looks like the other way that’s the little reliquary where the crown of thorns was housed so that’s the sort of grand focal point that the whole building was built for and then surrounding it are these gleaming deep blue and red windows and these delicately painted Stone peers painted in patterns of red blue and gold and these sort of Rich interacting colors unify the whole Space it’s really of all buildings of ever seen you must see s Chappelle to believe it but again it’s a masterpiece because of its its striking visual effect its warmth its intimacy its vibrancy it is not a big building right compared to the great Gothic Cathedrals it’s just a little narrow Chapel so the Ron style arguably was a response to a sort of growing crisis in the gothic right where so many techniques had been tried out to make the buildings tall soaring dramatic but they were reaching certain limits right so the Ronan style basically says we give up Monumental building we’re turning inwards into something richer uh smaller more intimate meanwhile builders in other places like England and Germany were still reaching further and further upward testing the ultimate limits of Gothic monumentalism so this is Salsbury cathedral in England built in the mid mid 1200s but you can see is a tall impressive building and then over the crossing is this just gigantic Spire reaching up 404 feet still one of the tallest buildings in England today and when it was completed the tallest building in Europe then in Cologne the tower is not as huge as at Salsbury but the Nave itself was started with the choir in 1248 building up to a height of 143 feet in one single soaring room and you know this raises the question at some point does it get too tall is it just too mindboggling too imposing or is it structurally unsound and eventually the builders did reach their limit so at B in France the bishop sponsored the the beginning of another Gothic Cathedral more ambitious than any before and the Nave they started building with the choir at back at the East End here and the Vault reached up 156 feet so even 13 feet higher than cologne and they had built basically the choir and chancel this side of the transcept and then one Bay of the Nave when in 1284 The Vault collapsed and this was not a catastrophic collapse you know most Stone buildings can be repaired and they were able eventually to uh repair and keep building but nonetheless it sent a signal right there was a great chilling effect it raised the question of whether maybe they had finally pushed too far right and you can imagine the invocations of the Tower of Babel right you finally reach too far up into the sky so this is roughly what the cathedral might have looked like if it had been completed but they stopped building uh beyond the transcept and in fact never uh completed this Nave uh to this day it’s still only a partial building so you can say with B really uh things had reached a sort of Crisis point and people had to respond in different ways and on the continent in places like France and Spain uh people did continue to build Gothic buildings but after about 1300 they were drastically paired back and simplified and you can see a great example here at jerona cathedral in Spain where initially they started off with the chancel and ambulatory over here in the High Gothic style but then when they continued building later in the 1300s they simply abandoned the side aisles the side chapels everything and they built a Nave in an extremely austere and paired back style and it seems that this uh this sort of drastically simplified austere version of Gothic was inspired by the mendicant houses of The Franciscan and Dominican Friars who went around the cities in the 13 1400s building sort of uh hostels and meeting houses in a very plain style right in keeping with their plain auster lifestyle and this it seems was the first response to the sort of crisis of the gothic after 1300 and so naves like this wide open plain understated these became common in the continent the one place where the builders didn’t accept this but instead kept pushing further with the gothic into greater complexity greater embellishment was in England and so England becomes the birthplace then of the late Gothic the sort of most extravagant most ornate style but before I get into the late Gothic let me take a look um um naked acrobatics um yeah her yeah the hery Gertie uh yeah heyen wrote for the hery Gertie uh yeah also a peasant Gypsy instrument in the northern countries um regarding s Chappelle really interesting work done in BOS country at Bayon yeah yeah boss country is in uh basically North Central or Northeastern Spain would have been along that uh pilgrimage route right where Styles motifs ideas were carried from Central Europe into Spain and back and forth okay right about the late Gothic so the late Gothic begins in England around really in the late 1200s and then really takes off in the 1300s and in England it’s often just called the decorated Gothic so this is an example here the lady Chapel of Westminster Abbey in London and you can see a lot of the elements here the peaked arches the stained glass the statuary are familiar from The High Gothic but they’re kind of uh they’re packed in in a denser busier more dramatic way than we’ve seen before and these new elements have been brought in like these hanging pendants coming down off these fan vaults that are um just not structurally necessary so this is the the difference then between the High Gothic where you would take structurally necessary things like uh peers ribbing flying buttresses and you would sculpt them to make them look decorative in the late Gothic you add in decorative embellishments just for their own sake even if they’re not structurally necessary at all and the the goal is just to create something dazzling and thring and Rich and arguably the big laboratory of the late Gothic people were trying out different things uh you know bringing in uh tracery um steeper peaked arches in the 1200s but then uh elely cathedral in cambridgshire is where the late Gothic sort of reached this Tipping Point and it was because of a structural collapse so originally there was a square a huge Square bell tower on top of the crossing here uh at elely like you would see in Durham but in 1321 it collapsed and whereas when boet collapsed the response was stop building and sort of pull back and rethink in Elie the response was let’s build something new that is not as structurally huge and and heavy that is smaller but that is even more rich and dazzling and so what they did is they basically cut in the corners of the crossing to make it into an octagon and then they built this octagonal Lantern on top of it which looks sort of interesting ornate not necessarily so huge but the real effect is in the interior so if you’re in the crossing and you look up into this octagonal space towards the lantern you see this so you have now these eight huge peers Each of which reaches the top of the Vault and reaches the Vault and splits out into arches and into this sort of spray of ribs called tons most most of which are not necessary structurally they’re just for completing this effect this effect of a sort of radiating uh almost pulsating octagonal form that looks almost like a a plant or a tree something coming to life and then inside it this brightly illuminated eight-sided Lantern such that when you’re looking straight up it can look almost like you’re looking right into the heavens or into right into the eye of the heavens right so there’s this increasing uh richness and complexity and also this increasing attraction towards Central plans that draw the viewer inwards into some sort of dramatic Central focal point so the crossing of elely Cathedral is sort of the announcement of this new style and this new desire to experiment to push to embellish further and further for more and more dramatic effect other lab atories include other chapter houses at different Cathedrals which now uh not only faced inward on a central plan but really re-emphasized and anchored that Central plan with a central pillar which again could break out into these multiple ribs which may or may not be structurally needed but create this sort of dramatic effect of of lifting upwards of reaching and reaching outwards embracing and here this is at the chapter house in Westminster Abbey and you can see they’ve really emphasized the treel likee effect right with these ribs coming out reaching bosses and then branching out and and even they they look like Palm frons right it looks almost like you’re under the shelter of some massive spreading palm tree also lady chapels so the real uh most of the masterpieces of late Gothic are not big Grand Cathedrals right they’re in more intimate spaces that could be built alongside and attached to the cathedrals and a a good uh a good opportunity for that would be adding on a lady Chapel so a king or a duke or or a rich Guild might pay to add on a chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary onto an existing church and they could decorate it in the latest style with this complex tracery these decorated bosses and you can see here in these vaults now not only do you have these sort of spraying fan vaults now you have what are called lean these extra ribs that run in just decorative geometric patterns right connecting one rib to another and intersecting and supporting these little decorative bosses no structural purpose just for fun uh and likewise these little stalls where worshippers might sit uh decorated with these almost lace light uh Lattis OG arches purely for decorative effect not holding anything up so the idea again is is to appear dazzling Rich uh abundant right to almost to recreate the look of uh a verdant forest or a garden but all in stone and to make the stone look somehow alive right moving motion life uh and eventually these techniques then were brought in to rebuilt or redecorated vaults of great Cathedrals so this is exiter Cathedral right these dramatic fan vaults coming out of the pillars and then meeting at these uh learn with decorative bosses and this is the yorkminster uh which you know was originally a monastery now it’s a cathedral and here you have this sort of almost webbing almost spider-like uh spiderweb like webbing of ribs meeting at these uh Gold Leaf cover bosses reflecting and uh lighting up with the sunlight from these massive windows and arguably if you had to pick one place that’s sort of the real uh the the place where High late Gothic really goes over the top is Wells cathedral in England and so I labeled it here Gothic goes mad right so this is a view looking through uh the Retro choir or the sort of uh enclosed space behind the choir to the lady Chapel in Wells and you have again these these pillars that then Branch out almost like trees but there are so many of them they sort of speak to one another like trees in a forest like you’re looking in a forest or an orchard and then this is the crossing of Wells just to see how sort of madcap late Gothic could become uh they built a huge Square tower on top of the crossing and to support it instead of just having big massive heavy peers like you would in any ordinary Gothic building they put in these uh these sort of inverted arches creating a sort of X shape uh and these like circular oculi just like for fun you know and it it it has a stabilizing effect but again not really strictly structurally necessary just creating something interesting mysterious and as for ornament a lot of it is like what we would have seen in Gothic but more more detailed more sculptural right these blind arcades with these decorative peaked OG arches an arch within an arch within an arch sort of cascading one on top of another uh this is the minstrel’s gallery in exiter Cathedral so again these little decorative spires sculpted uh I believe in bronze and then these Angel figures with musical instruments again emphasizing that music would have been coming out right there’s this Association of angels and music and the the singers and performers would have been in this gallery and this is an example of a ceiling boss in in exiter and there would have been all kinds of figures Saints Angels Kings uh but this is a common figure that appears in a lot of Gothic especially late Gothic which is the so-called Green Man which is just a male face with foliage issuing out of the mouth and it might represent something about nature about the Holy Spirit you know which is breath the spirit is breath or maybe the preaching of the Gospel right the sort of Life uh life-giving gospel coming out of the mouth they’re often seen around pulpits places where uh priests and Bishops would have been preaching the gospel and this multiplies and becomes common in all kinds of late Gothic buildings they’re famous of course for tracery this is an example this is the Jesse window in Dorchester Abbey in England which uh the central bar of the window is made to look like a tree branching out and these are the different ancestors or uh different branches of the family tree of Christ right tracing from King David to Christ and again uh Stone being sculpted and shaped to look like a living organism like a tree growing and branching and these motifs then are brought into what’s sometimes been called the cysteine chapel of glass the biggest most most complex single stained glass complex which is the Great East window at yorkminster and you see how again it’s like uh like branches or Vines forming this incredibly intricate lattice work and just a couple of examples of uh of late Gothic masterpieces this is the lady Chapel added on to Westminster Abbey which we saw we saw some of the Interior earlier so this is Westminster Abbey right looking Gothic right finally finished detailed ornate but even that then is overcome by the incredible richness and complexity of the lady Chapel which was added on in the late 1400s under Henry iith and this is what these windows look like inside right a sense of Life motion almost like a fan or a screen unfolding before you opening out these finely detailed scenes and letting in the light into the building there’s there’s this sense of constant motion and lastly what I would consider the greatest Masterpiece of late Gothic is King’s College Chapel Cambridge which again it’s drawing on the ronon style right it’s just a simple rectangle no flying buttresses just engaged buttresses um it looks kind of blockish right the the only thing that strikes you from the outside is that it’s very long with these repeating window Bays um but it can look kind of awkward right from outside but the effect is when you walk walk in what do you see this these enormous unfurling fan vaults uh 12 of them repeating one after another the whole length of the chapel and they can look a great deal like like smoke or incense rising up and spreading out the the fine detail on the stone can make the stone almost look lighter than air like it’s just lifting up into the air into the skies these are other views so this is looking from the other direction and you see here the pipe organ so this would have been a place of Music this is where students at Cambridge would have gone to hear Coral music to hear Oregon music uh it would have reflected the sound back and I would say the undulations of these fan vaults along the length of the chapel have a sort of Rhythm to them almost like music it’s like music in stone and here again you see that the theme of the music and the proclamation of the Gospel through music underscored by these Angel figures with their trumpets Standing On Top the pipe organ so I would say this is basically the culmination of late Gothic in England and for the first hundred years or so this was overwhelmingly in English style which only crossed over to the continent very little it took until the late 1400s for it to really start to spread abroad one of the early places it spread of course was Scotland the neighbor to the North and the Great Masterpiece of Scottish late Gothic is Roslin Chapel built by the Sinclair’s of Roslin in the mid 1400s and you can see it again it’s a small intimate Chapel right it’s not a grand soaring tall building it’s not Monumental it’s a small intimate building with this incredibly rich and overwhelming ornamentation again uh alive moving mysterious romantic this is part of why rosn Chapel’s been the center of sort of romantic conspiracy theories for many years right it seems to have this mystery to it and if you look here at the this you know finely sculpted pillar capital above it is this little decorative figure which is uh an angel playing a bagpipe and again underscoring the the music the fact that these buildings were used for Acoustics right they they sort of came alive with music and there are several figures like this around the altar of Roslin Chapel play of figures playing different instruments and certain Scholars have theorized that these sort of weird decorative bosses with these Cube shapes in these little geometric patterns in fact encode musical notes and that there is a musical piece which they call the Roslin motet which they think uh was meant to be played on these instruments that you see represented in the sculptures not everyone is totally convinced but it’s an interesting idea and again it underscores how late Gothic was so deeply intertwined with the medium of music and it made it to the continent uh in the low countries a lot of the wealthy patrons were now no longer the church right again in in Scotland the patron was the Sinclair’s of Roslin in King’s Chapel in Cambridge it was a church building but the main Patron was the was the crown starting with King Henry V 6 and on the continent you see uh Aristocrats and monarchs and this is a depiction of uh from a Flemish book of uh a king enthroned sort of kibitzing watching a stonemason and a carpenter work on his building um but also a lot of them were Civic and Commercial associations like guilds uh you know Weaver guilds merch guilds this is the town hall of Brugge embellished in this elaborate late Gothic style uh built of course by by the city Association of Brugge and in Venice uh the Republic of Venice and the the wealthy mertile families of Venice eventually also adopted late Gothic and the builders there interc combined it hybridized it with Mediterranean Styles like Byzantine and also Islamic and of course the great Monument of Venetian Gothic is the doj’s palace which was built in gradual stages in the 13 and 1400s and you can see it has this lower loia which is open with these broad open arches where citizens could approach enter uh bring business to the Venetian government then above it a a covered Gallery with this elaborate lattice work sort of semi-private where government meetings might have taken place and then the private rooms on the top right with this sort of sheer wall that is just lightened by this delicate pattern in the brick work so this is sort of the the great prototype of the Venetian Gothic right with each successive uh level instead of becoming lighter and more Airy like in a Romanesque building becoming more closed right as you elevate from the public to the private and this template then was used in mansions like the cadoro right where you have this Open Water Gate on the canal with these Bri broad arches and then finer lattice work as you go up into the higher Galleries and then finally this purely decorative almost crenellation along the top along the cornice in France the late Gothic was adapted into what was called the flambo style which means flamboyant showy but also flaming literally flaming and so this is ruong Cathedral you can see with this this Rich intricate decoration these steep uh vertical arches and and spires and this delicate lattice work breaking through it and then this is possibly you know the perfect encapsulation of the flamb Buon style a window in San in Paris which was rebuilt after a fire in the mid 1400s and you can see the sort of intricate tracery of the stonework in the window mimics the look of a fire and hence hence the name flamon it also made its way to some degree into Eastern Europe you can see this is cernus house in Poland which was a fairly typical Town tenament House in a Polish town but it has these uh little Gothic arches Gothic tracery in the windows and these sort of funny uh stepped arches over the facade uh which is a distinctively Eastern European variation on the gothic and then another style called Zander special Gothic Z gotic was developed in the Holy Roman Empire and this is a great example here the stanislav hall in Prague castle where you have this delicate interweaving you know Vine likee or almost flowerlike tracery again not structurally necessary might have added in a little strength or stabilization but basically just for a mysterious moving growing effect and this was adapted then also in Germany uh just to the north of bohemia so this is a great late gothic church towards the end of the Gothic era in Germany the anen Kira in annenburg and you can see again this delicate tracery these sort of floral patterns that seem to be springing growing like Vines out of the pillars and this is a view of the Nave uh where that sort of that that zerotic tracery sort of crowns this open bright Airy uh kind of forest likee chamber in Spain you know they go for decorative effect richness like the late Gothic all over Europe but they do so more with fine tile work and Fresco right in the this more Mediterranean style clearly influenced by by the intricate tile work of Islamic buildings and finally the IM you could say culmination of the late Gothic is in Portugal right so it very late around 1500 it makes its way into Portugal under the patronage of the king Manuel and hence uh the Portuguese late Gothic is called manueline and you can see again it goes for lightness delicacy intricacy but the specific shapes sort of don’t make sense with the geometry of European buildings and it clearly borrows a great deal from Asian art and architecture so by 1500 Portuguese explorers were making their way all the way into the Indian Ocean to India southeast Asia and so ideas and motifs started to make their way back and were interc combined with the late Gothic so you get this sort of extremely rich Fantastical uh monwell line style and the last late Gothic building I’ll talk about this is the Batalia Monastery in central uh Portugal north of Lisbon and this is the heronimus monastery in Lisbon right so under the direct patronage and support of the crown and you can see now uh you know late Gothic being pushed to the ultimate extreme or at every level down to you know tiny tiny uh intricate details everything is sort of encrusted in ornament and again the shapes seem to sort of mimic actual building structures like these arches and again these double bays in the windows but they are clearly not structural they’re almost lace like right it just being kind of draped and woven around the facade of the building creating this sort of ethereal otherworldly effect so that arguably is sort of the ultimate culmination or or you could say the final dead end even of late Gothic before there then is a reaction but before I get into that let me see um comments starred pilgrimage routes so the architecture yeah especially with Romanesque you can see new ideas and motifs just following right along the pilgrimage route it’s like hey these pilgrims in Tulu saw this Grand enthralling Cathedral and then they get to Santiago and it looks dumpy and oldfashioned we we need to keep up with the Joneses right so there was a kind of a you could say almost arteries of ideas and styles traveling around Europe along the pilgrimage routes the number of vaults yeah yes um the number of vaults was often symbolic uh and very often it was 12 when possible like in King’s Chapel at Cambridge it was 12 and you know it speaks to the the 12 apostles the 12 months of the year the 12 signs of the zodiac and often um the the stone Carvers would embellish the buildings with uh symbolic sculptures and images evoking those sets of 12 like the 12 disciples or the 12 Zodiac signs and give a sort of sense of unity to the complex building England really takes things too far a lot of people felt that way that’s part of why the Renaissance happened we’ll just uh we’ll get to that in a moment yeah Wells Cathedral with the bizar inverted arches it can look very modern it looks almost like a weird like late art nuuvo 20th century building but it just shows you how the these late Gothic Builders would try anything uh polyphonic recitals in notredam yeah definitely Acoustics very much were in mind and that’s part of why those Stone vaults were so important um compared to Bach and later recitals um yeah I’ve never appreciated how far off the rails late Gothic went the Renaissance style makes more sense that is exactly what I’m going for um that is exactly the effect I’m trying to get across so think about what the journey we’ve just been through and all these images of these incredibly intricate embellished late Gothic buildings like the honos monastery we see here you’re almost getting sick of it right there you can’t handle you can’t process any more of it and if you were a pilgrim say traveling along to different holy sites around Europe you could get to a point where you’re you’re almost tired like you’re eyes are exhausted from all of this richness and detail and so it’s not surprising that eventually there was a reaction and that’s where the early Renaissance comes from right a return to Simplicity balance openness right this is an example of the courtyard of an early Renaissance Palazo in Italy built uh near Rome for the pope but it’s very much in the early Renaissance style that was just coming out of Florence and you can see it it has the sort of dignity balance openness of Roman style half circle arches very understated ornamentation almost no ornamentation the richness the texture of it really just comes from the subtle grain of the Natural Stone Surfaces right and you can see how a building like this is not designed to Dazzle right like a late Gothic it’s designed to feel Serene almost Placid to welcome the the visitor in and provide a sort of quiet meditative mood um and this is the style that very quickly uh emerged and took off in the 1400s starting in Florence because of its sense of Greater dignity Harmony uh it was seen as a more masculine style right whereas the late Gothic is associated with Lady chapels right in veneration of the Virgin Mary it it signals fertility abundance the early Renaissance style is dignified Placid viewed as masculine right the the style of virtue right virtue virtue manliness so this was a sort of revolutionary reaction right against What was seen as the excess of the late Gothic and it comes about of course in Florence right so Florence was a prosperous growing commercial City largely based on the wool trade in Italy in the 1300s and the Renaissance came relatively late to architecture the Renaissance had already been going on for several Generations in Florence in other fields especially literature right and the recovery of of Latin rhetoric and style in in the mode of the Roman writers the Revival of Cicero uh all of this had already been going on for some time in Florence which could seem rather because Florence was a fairly typical medieval city right it would have been tight jumbled packed with very narrow tall mostly Romanesque and Gothic buildings right this is a fresco painting depicting the city in the 1300s you have this romanes baptistry here which had been there since the 1000s but then around it this sort of crowding this is a gothic church with this tall Spire there also would have been fortification Towers belonging to the powerful plutocrat family amilies and this is uh Sanji minano in a medieval town in Italy as it looks today which can give you some sense of what Florence actually would have looked like in the 1300s before the city and the region became stabilized enough that these families didn’t need these towers and the city government was able to suppress the sort of feuding and Street Warfare between the plutocratic families and then finally ordered them to tear their towers down so you get a more sort of dignified open harmonious looking City like we think of today there was late Gothic in Florence it was not a great Center of late Gothic like uh like you would see in England or Germany but there was some that was the style of the 1300s right uh highly verticalist highly ornate richly embellished this is orsan mik in uh in Florence which was the the church sponsored by the different professional guilds like the the dyer Guild the Weaver Guild uh and you this is how guilds and patrons showed off their wealth and their Prestige right was with these sort of lavishly embellished Gothic uh monuments and and uh precious uh objects and artworks but by about 1400 The Taste clearly was starting to shift and people wanted something different and the first Builder if you can even call him that who delivered something new and uh refreshing was filipo Brun aleski who actually was not a stonemason he was not a Master Mason he had not been trained in the art of stone building like the Master Builders who built the Great Cathedrals he was a Goldsmith and in a lot of ways he was he was the first Renaissance architect not only in the sense of his style but also in the sense that he was a Renaissance m man he uh was a polymath he was multi-talented he was seen as a genius who came from outside the field right who was uh who had shown his Brilliance in some other craft in some other art form and others would follow you know uh Donatello was a sculptor uh Michelangelo was a painter uh well Brun eski was a Goldsmith and he uh put forward a plan to redesign and rebuild the uh infants or foundlings hospital or ospital de inen in Florence and this is what uh he built starting in 1419 simple balanced open harmonious uh almost no ornamentation even the little uh relief sculptures you see here in the roundles were not there originally they were put in later but what you have is this wide long open Arcade which is actually where parents or especially women who had given birth to children they couldn’t keep would approach the building and hand them over to the nuns to be taken care of and raised in the hospital right so it’s a place of of offering of transferral and it is designed specifically to look open wide welcoming right facing the city with sort of Simplicity dignity balance it has all those classic qualities of a long horizontalist building right it’s Grand and impressive but not imposing not towering not dazzling and you can see people at the time actually thought of the connection between the wide open colonade of this Loa and open arms almost like the Virgin Mary herself uh opening out and welcoming these children so you can see this is a painting by mikelino from the for 1940s depicting Madonna of the Innocence right the the patroness of the hospital reaching out her arms Sheltering these children being brought to her like the arcade of the loia reaching out uh and later on then in the roundles which used to be empty these sculptures by delar Robia were added in of infant children wrapped in swaddling clothes but posed in these oddly sort of classical Roman poses right and again with their arms outstretched as if greeting and welcoming uh the poor mothers and their infant children being handed over so this building was was designed in this radically different style re not only Reviving the forms and motifs of ancient Roman building but adapting them to give this feeling of openness of Welcome of Harmony and the next big task that he then took up he won the contest to build a dome on top of the cathedral so as I said there was this Romanesque baptistry here that had been there for hundreds of years and it’s um built right on top of the foundations of a Roman Temple of Mars and they decorated it in this Italian Romanesque style right then in the 1300s the city’s growing wealthier they want a bigger more Grand Cathedral they build this Cathedral with a facade with these Gothic elements so it’s this sort of hybrid Romanesque Gothic uh template and then jotto the painter and Builder uh designed this Grand Campanile basically mimicking the the facade but the problem was the crossing of the cathedral if we ignore this view of the Dome that we see here there was nothing there and the problem was what to do with it so this is the form the ground plan of the cathedral and you can see the crossing is this massive open octagon and early on it was thought oh we’ll build a huge multi-tiered Spire like at sanando tulus but in the late 1300s it was decided No it should be a dome that is what will complete the form of the cathedral the problem was no one knew how to build such an enormous Dome to cover this tremendous Crossing and the city held a contest and Bruna lki won the contest even though he didn’t really have a specific plan and he had to scramble and figure out how am I going to do this the obvious answer was well mimic what the Romans did with the pantheon right with that enormous what then was the largest dome standing in Europe at the pantheon but what’s the problem with trying to do that there are multiple problems one of them is that the pantheon Dome is a solid block of Roman concrete and that’s why it’s able to it was it was possible to build it all in one go and have it solidify and hold its shape no one in the 1400s knew the recipe for Roman concrete they couldn’t make anything that strong so they had to somehow build it out of masonry now if they wanted to build it out of stone masonry the problem then was they would have to build scaffolding up through the cathedral and then centering basically a sort of wood substructure so that this the stone masonry could then be built around it and they couldn’t do that because that would require such massive scaffolding that it would require more Timber than existed in all of Tuscany so it was just too big they didn’t they had no way to do it so the only option left was brick so the question was how could you build an enormous octagonal based Dome that would hold up and be stable out of brick so that’s what breski had to figure out and what he after much experimentation and you know fussing around he guessed that what he could do was first build an inner Dome that would be uh made of circular bands one on top of another on top of another so that each band as it went in would hold its shape right would be supported by the rest of the Dome under it then the question was well if the Dome gets too heavy the forces pushing down at the center of the Dome would then be translated down to the base but they would push outward just like at the The Vault of a cathedral right which you have to hold in with flying buttresses if you built this Dome just out of brick the bottom would push outward until it cracked and collapsed so what he figured he could do was build the inner Dome upward but then as he went run successive chains around the sides at four different levels first a massive Stone and iron chain around the base then a wood chain then another Stone and another Stone and that would sort of hold it in like staves of a barrel and stabilize each level as they built upward once they completed the inner Dome then they would cover the chains over with an outer a light thin brick outer Dome with these Stone ribs that would sort of uh ornament and emphasize the gentle curves and the octagonal shape so that’s the method he figured out and it worked and it’s made out of more than four million bricks and when it was completed it was the largest stone Dome I sorry I mean to say when it was completed it was the largest dome in the world even bigger than the pantheon and still to this day it is the largest brick dome in the world and it you can say it not only completes but really crowns uh the the dwomo the cathedral and the whole skyline of Florence now it happens that uh when it was completed the drum around the base was still uncovered and undecorated and later on uh bacho Dano was commissioned to design an ornamental freeze to go around it to cover over those sort of bare stones and bricks around the drum but Michelangelo saw it and disapproved so he gave up and they stopped building it so just this one section is there the rest is still bare and you can see the ends of the crossbars of that stone chain still sticking out right and people seem to not mind they’ve left it that way and this is how it looks right an incredibly brilliant Skyline right this complex ornamented uh almost you know fanatically verticalist Gothic compan and then sort of counterbalancing it and you could say speaking to it this gently curving round Dome and the Dome of the dwo really sort of announced to the world that uh that that Florence was the heart of this new rebirth this Rebirth of new art new learning the Revival of the Ancients and the classics which they you know not only could use to write sort of clever elegant ciceronian speeches but which they could even use to build uh new soaring monuments in a way that no one in the world had seen before and so still really to this day the do bruni’s Dome of the dwomo is the great Monument uh of Florence the symbol of Florence and the symbol of the early Renaissance so uh I think since we’ve gone on a while I think I will stop there and next time we’ll continue on with the career of bonesi his other buildings and how the Renaissance style uh spread and took hold as it was taken up by new Builders new Architects and as um and as it spread Beyond Florence first to Rome and then to other countries and cities all around Europe uh but thank you so much for listening and uh I’m going to look at the comments uh and then uh I also want to give uh acknowledgement and a shout out to thank you to a longtime listener uh Debbie Davidson who I’ve been told is in the hospital so sending good wishes good thoughts uh to Debbie uh but lastly looking at the comments uh founding Hospital looks like a school yeah well uh Civic buildings tend to be on the Renaissance template and the Renaissance style um that’s so that’s sort of imprinted in our minds now right that schools City Halls look uh neoclassical basically but in the 1400s this was something radically different new refreshing um yeah Brun lki guessed you know and uh he was very much on the line and part of the story of what happened is that he was chosen to uh execute this Dome project even though he didn’t have a specific plan and the city said well okay uh we choose Brun aleski but we’re also going to have bruni’s arch rival giberti who was another metal worker uh alongside him as co-director of the project and naturally Bruno lki resented this and so uh he would keep going into the building site and overseeing uh extensions and improvements and giberti would say well I know what to do and kind of interfere until Brun lki just called out sick for like a month and said okay giberti you go ahead see what you can do and gber basically had to give in and say all right Brun leeski is the one who knows what to do here even though he is improvising step by step he’s got the right ideas he can finish it and miraculously he did uh so again thank you uh thank you to Debbie thank you to all my listeners and especially to my patrons uh and hopefully we’ll pick up next time with the Renaissance and especially the high Renaissance and the great Geniuses like uh Michelangelo and brante thank you [Music] [Music] [Music]