The Gothic Cathedral

Description

Awarded the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion by the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain for an outstanding contribution to architectural history The Gothic cathedrals of the Middle Ages are among the world’s supreme architectural achievements. Hundreds of great churches were built between c.1130 and c.1530, all of them representing an investment of money and effort so immense that it is difficult to find a modern parallel. Their architecture ranges through a whole spectrum of styles, including meticulously articulated French Early Gothic, brittle glass- walled Rayonnant, eclectic and densely inventive English Decorated, jaggedly fantastical German late Gothic, and blandly decorous Tuscan. The Gothic Cathedral focuses on the interaction between design and the requirements of patrons, following the creative processes of architects by reconstructing the problems and opportunities which faced them. Christopher Wilson presents the essential facts on such aspects as chronology, structural techniques and stylistic developments; and then goes further, seeing the story as a sequence of choices from which new solutions arose, which, in their turn, gave rise to still more challenges. Illustrated with carefully chosen photographs and specially drawn diagrams, this fresh, perceptive and provocative book has already established itself'as a definitive introduction to the subject. For this paperback edition, the author has incorporated the results of the most recent research and added new bibliographical material. CHRISTOPHER WILSON, a graduate of the Courtauld Institute of Art, is Reader in the History of Art at University College, London. He is the author of many publications on medieval architecture. With 221 illustrations