Cathedrals Of The Twelve Centure Essay Research

town like a marker to be seen from afar.6The architectural needs of the Church were expressed in both physical and iconographicalterms. Like its Romanesque predecessor, the Gothic cathedral was eminently adaptable. It couldbe planned larger or smaller, longer or shorter, with or without transepts and ambulatory,according to the traditions and desires of each community. It had no predetermined proportions ornumber of parts, like the Roman temple or the centrally planned church of the Renaissance. Itssocial and liturgical obligations demanded a main altar at the end of a choir where the chapter andthe various dignitaries would be seated, a number of minor altars, and an area for processionswithin the building.7 There were rarely more than about two hundred persons participating in theservice, even though the smallest Gothic cathedral could easily contain that number. The rest ofthe building simply supplemented this core and provided space for the laity, who were notpermitted to enter the choir or sanctuary. Still, after the middle of the twelfth century, the choirwas usually isolated by a monumental screen that effectively prevented laymen from even seeingthe service, and special devotional books came into use to supply the congregation with suitablesubjects of meditation during mass.8The program of the Gothic church fulfilled iconographical as well as social requirements.The intellectual centers of the Middle Ages had long been associated with the Church, and thetradition of learning that had been preserved in monastic and cathedral schools gave rise touniversities such as Paris and Oxford in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Such anassociation obviously had an effect on the arts, which were still primarily religious in nature.Scholarly clerics, for instance, were appointed to arrange the intricate, theological programs forthe sculpture and the stained glass that decorated the church. The relationship is thought by somehistorians to have been even closer, for scholastic thinking first took shape in Paris early in thetwelfth century, at the very time that Gothic architecture came into being there. It is possible thatarchitects, who were “abstract” thinkers in their own right, may occasionally have absorbed someof the habits of thought of the philosophers. In the absence of written documents, however, itcannot be proved whether these habits were consistently embodied in the design of the buildings.9The Gothic age, as has often been observed, was an age of vision. The supernaturalmanifested itself to the senses. In the religious life of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, thedesire to behold sacred reality with bodily eyes appeared as the dominant theme. Architecturewas designed and experienced as a representation of an ultimate reality.10 The Gothic cathedralwas originated in the religious experience and in the political and even physical realities, oftwelfth-century France. It was described as an illusionistic image of the Celestial City as evokedin the Book of Revelation. The essence of Gothic style was most fully developed in its conquestof space and its creation of a prodigious, visionary scale in the cathedrals of the twelfth century.11 BibliographyBranner, Robert. The Great Ages of World Architecture: Gothic Architecture. New York:George Braziller, 1967. Gimpel, Jean. The Cathedral Builders. New York: Grove Press, 1983. Mitchell, Ann. Great Buildings of the World: Cathedrals of Europe. Feltham: The HamlynPublishing Group, 1968. Panofsky, E. Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism. Latrobe: Faber and Faber Limited, 1951. Simson, Otto von. The Gothic Cathedral. New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1956. Worringer, Wilhelm. Form In Gothic. New York: Alec Tiranti Limited, 1957.