PS28 Late Gothic Architecture c. 1380-c. 1550 11:00am - 1:10pm Friday, 1st May, 2020 Location Salon B, 2nd Floor Track Track 5 Session Chair Carol Herselle Krinsky
All session times are in US PACIFIC DAYLIGHT TIME (PDT).
11:05 - 11:25am
PS28 Non quomodo sed quid: The Duomo of Milan and Europe
Erik Gustafson George Mason University, Fairfax, USA
Abstract
Since the publication of James Ackerman’s deeply influential article, “Ars Sine Scientia Nihil Est,” (1949), scholarly discussion of Milan’s cathedral has been dominated by analyses of the geometrical design systems employed in the building’s construction. The building has served as the shibboleth of Italy’s participation in European Gothic architecture, grandfathered into the European mainstream by the guidance of German masters including the Parler family. That the cathedral’s elevation consisted of a high nave arcade with a small triforium and clerestory simply confirmed the Milanese as poorly understanding the proper canon and formal expectations of Gothic architecture, despite assistance from the north. This paper seeks to shift the discourse to an intentional participation in the international visual discourse of civic identity produced through monumental architecture, setting Milan between contemporary monuments in the Kingdom of Aragon and northern Europe. This reading sets aside the design-based paradigm that has underwritten much twentieth-century Gothic historiography. I will show that Milan’s ducal and episcopal patrons incorporated formal elements from around the Mediterranean and across the Alps to situate the city at the fulcrum of international politics and prestige. Cathedrals such as those of Barcelona and Palma de Mallorca established the high nave arcade with diminished triforium and clerestory as emblematic of the Kingdom of Aragon. Milan’s Cathedral is therefore a monument combining the interior Aragonese elevation with the exterior tracery language of Parler-family monuments in Germany, and the traditional Lombard architectural syntax to produce a building visually claiming a central place in contemporary European architecture and culture. Milan was not nothing without science; it was everything with art, read on its own terms. 11:25 - 11:45am
PS28 Filippo Brunelleschi's Dome and the Statics of Jordanus de Nemore
Danilo Udovički-Selb University of Texas at Austin, Austin, USA
Abstract
Leon Battista Alberti wrote about Brunelleschi’s dome that it is “…an achievement which, if I am not mistaken, was believed to be impossible in our time even as, among the ancients, it may have been unknown and unheard-of.” This immediately raises a question: How and where did a jeweler named Filippo Brunelleschi find the knowledge that allowed him to build a complex structure, seemingly effortlessly? The answer may lie in the thirteenth century codex Elementa super demonstrationem ponderum by Jordanus de Nemore, written in Strasbourg. This a compendium of all the knowledge of statics that cathedral builders accumulated over two hundred years. Copies found their way to Amiens, a scholarly center akin to that at the cathedral of Chartres. Jordanus demonstrated the conditions of equilibrium of unequal weights on planes inclined at various angles, long before the idea was re-established by Simon Stevin and later by Galileo. In other words, the codex reveals that the engineers of the Renascence (Gothics) understood the concept of vectors---something still unknown in quattrocento Florence. If one understands how loads are distributed in a structure, one can understand its conditions of stability, i.e. what would keep the dome in balance while it grew unsupported by impossible scaffoldings. A copy of that codex, used by no one else in Florence, was found after Brunelleschi’s death in the Badia Fiorentina where he had formerly worked. The “dome” is not even a dome but as Salvatore Di Pasquale puts it succinctly, “a synthesis of flying buttresses.” The paper engages further in formal and phenomenological analysis of Brunelleschi’s two churches, showing that he applied the building methods and spatial concepts of transalpine architects to an architectural language derived from Florence’s own medieval classicism. 11:45am - 12:05pm
PS28 Architectural Fantasy in Fouquet’s Grandes Chroniques de France
Maile Hutterer University of Oregon, Eugene, USA
Abstract
Jean Fouquet’s fifty-one miniatures in his Grandes Chroniques de France (BnF MS Fr. 6465) take place within and in front of a variety of architectural settings, from the royal abbey of Saint-Denis to the battlefield outside the walls of Tunis. Fouquet’s images present an idealized version of the fifteenth century’s built environment. As complements to written descriptions, images of architecture provide important sources for understanding the essential characteristics that an artist or audience required to identify a building or a place. Consequently, they provide particularly useful case studies for illuminating medieval attitudes toward, and expectations of, the built environment. In these creations, artist such as Fouquet translated the aesthetics of late Gothic space onto two-dimensional planes. This paper posits that the process of translation from the conventions of construction to those of an illuminated image maintains an equivalence between the image and the artist’s ideas of building typologies. In this way, the architectural images provide a record of the artist’s response to contemporaneous architectural practice and, perhaps more important, an image that he thought would be readily identifiable to his audience. This record offers insight into the mentalities of medieval viewers, since reactions to medieval material culture are only rarely extant in textual sources. As in Fouquet’s miniatures, in the late Gothic period, manuscripts represented an idealized architectural typology. Indeed, some forms of late Gothic could be thought of as real adaptations of this imaginative process and were thus in a constant state of dialogue between image and stone, aesthetics and structural necessity, innovation and influence. Drawing from images of architecture, such as those in Charles V’s copies of the Grandes Chroniques, I will show the interplay between the influence of the reception of architectural iconography and its adaptation to novel structural forms. 12:05 - 12:25pm
PS28 Late Gothic Planning at Metz Cathedral
Robert Bork University of Iowa, Iowa City, USA
Abstract
In the decades around 1500, the builders of Metz Cathedral succeeded in completing one of the tallest and most impressive Gothic churches in Europe, whose lofty nave was begun in the thirteenth century. The liminal location of Metz between the French and German spheres, however, has prevented its cathedral from becoming a canonical monument in either national tradition of scholarship. Since the late Gothic builders at Metz displayed little interest in the formal pyrotechnics that occupy center stage in scholarly narratives about the French Flamboyant and German Sondergotik design modes, moreover, it has been all too easy to take their achievements for granted. This paper shows how the late Gothic campaigns at Metz reflect both a broad awareness of international influences and a strong commitment to local tradition. Germanic ideas can be seen in the stellar vault of the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament, and in the decorative buttressing of the cathedral’s openwork spire, which closely resembles an unexecuted scheme from Regensburg. The design of the transept frontals depends mostly on local precedents, including the cathedral’s own huge west window, but several details hint more surprisingly at dialog with York. The overall format of the cathedral’s east end recalls the French traditions that informed work on the thirteenth-century nave, but its earliest windows have curvilinear tracery stereotypical of the fifteenth century. The design of the east end was subsequently revised to incorporate windows with more conservative geometrical tracery, and stellar vaults like those of the Chapel. Further insight into this history can be gleaned from geometrical analysis based on a recent LiDAR scan of the cathedral’s fabric, which shows in detail how its late Gothic builders revised and updated their schemes, while taking the design of the nave as their point of departure. 12:25 - 12:45pm
PS28 The Prague Cathedral Royal Oratory; Political Unity Through Organic Form
Alice Klima University of Georgia, Athens, USA
Abstract
Bohemian architecture of the 15th and 16th centuries is known for its extravagant vaults and fantastic sculptural details. Some of the most spectacular designs are elaborate natural forms: vines, tree branches, and myriad vegetal features incorporated into Central European sacred and secular buildings. The Prague Cathedral Royal Oratory, built between 1490 and 1493 for King Vladislav, is one prominent example that in typical Late Gothic Central European fashion transforms a partial 6-pointed star vault into a tree branch pergola composed of intersecting branches tied together at the springers. With remarkable detail the webs are filled with twisting twigs, bark on some branches, other spots partially rotted, and some revealing saw marks. Late Gothic vegetal designs from Bohemia, Saxony, and Bavaria have many possible symbolic meanings, from biblical to the Vitruvian origin of architecture. This paper will suggest that the oratory reflected the local political and religious struggles that shaped the kingdom.
The Bohemian political and religious landscape was divided between Hussite and Catholic sympathizers stemming from the earlier Hussite conflicts. In 1490 when King Vladislav added Hungary to his domain he moved his court to Buda, leaving the local governance and patronage of major monuments to Prague’s powerful and wealthy lords. Hence, the oratory connected to the Prague castle, the historic residence of the Bohemian kings, in addition to representing the king in his absence, also had symbolically to satisfy the nobles, both Hussite and Catholic. This example will illustrate how the elaborate Late Gothic designs in Bohemia were intended to visually unify a divided kingdom.