11 - Architecture

Summary

the fourteenth century saw the triumphant expansion of Gothic architecture from a largely French into a wholly European phenomenon. Gothic became the dominant visual language of Christendom, and in the process underwent a transformation of almost everything that it had meant in the first century of its life. Conceived as the theological and liturgical handmaiden of a small and homogeneous circle of European higher clergy, it now emerged, revitalised but fragmented, as the architecture of a socially diverse patronage, much of it lay rather than ecclesiastical. In the hands of kings, princes, the higher nobility, a prosperous bourgeoisie and the ‘popular’ orders of the friars, Gothic proliferated into new, more secular, genres, promoted in part by the expectations of this new clientèle. If the ‘great church’ – the basilican cathedral and monastic church – dominated the first one hundred years of Gothic, the chapel, the castle-palace, the city and its public buildings were now, for the first time, recognized as the principal architectural challenges of the later Middle Ages. In turn, these new classes of patron altered the geography of medieval art. The architectural hegemony enjoyed by Paris and northern France in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries came to be disputed by centres of patronage hitherto on the fringes of the Gothic world – Naples, Florence, Cologne, London, Barcelona, Prague and Marienburg – many of them new capitals of lay government. Such shifts in the balance of artistic power had profound consequences for the history of architectural style.