The Gothic Revival

Stephen Carver

A shorter version of this piece was first published in the Routledge Encyclopedia of
the Romantic Era, edited by Chris Murray (2003). An illustrated version is also
available at: https://ainsworthandfriends.wordpress.com/2016/04/16/the-gothic-
revival/

During the Renaissance, ‘Gothic’ became a pejorative label for all things barbarous.
In a model of history probably first posited by Petrach and developed and
disseminated by Italian Renaissance Humanists, it was believed that there were two
epochs of cultural excellence, the Classical and their own. These were separated by a
terrible period of ignorance and barbarism, the Dark and Middle Ages. The Germanic
invaders, the Goths, were held to be largely responsible for this culturally catastrophic
interregnum. François Rabelais employed the term ‘Gothic’ to describe a vulgar
literary style, not reflecting Greek and Latin scholarship, and the most influential
condemnation of all things Gothic can be found in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the
Architects, Painters and Sculptures (1550), in which medieval architecture is simply
designated ‘German’ and rejected as mean, disorderly, over-decorative and poorly
constructed, the antithesis of the now universally accepted Classical style. By the
early-seventeenth century, the use of the term ‘German’ was discarded in this context
(Germany having long since embraced the Classical ideal), scholars instead
employing the adjective ‘Gothic’ in their polemics.

It was the British, always out of step with their European neighbours, that laid the
foundations of a cultural re-evaluation which would later spread to the continent.
Parliamentarians, quoting Tacitus, argued that representative government was in fact
not a product of Classical antiquity, but of the German tribes; the ‘Gothic polity’
therefore represented free institutions and was opposed to tyranny and privilege. In
art, the true Gothic revival began in England with a gradual shift in the crucial,
Classicist-dominated, concept of Nature, as writers (influenced by the new vogue for
landscape gardening), began to champion irregularity and variety as ‘natural,’ an idea

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eventually coming under the banner of the ‘picturesque.’ The related aesthetic concept
of the (non-Classical) Sublime in opposition to the (Classically) Beautiful suggested
that Nature in its highest (Sublime) form was free of the constraints of the Classical.
This trend towards aesthetic relativism in England resulted in the pre-Romantic
‘Gothic mood’ which is most famously characterized by the fiction of Horace
Walpole, most notable The Castle of Otranto (1764), and the ornamental papier-
mâché decoration of Strawberry Hill, his country seat in Twickenham. This style went
on to dominate nineteenth century Victorian architecture through the work of such
influential figures as the prolific Sir George Gilbert Scott, his pupil George Edmund
Street, the High-Churchman William Butterfield, Charles Barry, and the obsessive
genius Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin. Among many fine examples, the most
familiar is probably Barry’s re-designed Palace of Westminster (which had been
destroyed by fire in 1834), which was specifically inspired by the Perpendicular
Gothic style, Pugin assisting.

In 1751, William Warburton, later Bishop of Gloucester, had argued (without a shred
of evidence), that the Goths had worshipped in sacred groves, thus developing an
organic style for their shrines, giving them the appearance of an avenue of trees. This
analogy was developed by Goethe in his Von deuscher Baukunst (1772), which
records his response to seeing Strasbourg Cathedral, a building he likens to a ‘tree of
God.’ This was as a Romantic manifesto to German Gothicists, but Goethe had been
more interested in the cathedral’s architect, Erwin von Steinbach (c. 1244 – 1318),
than in its relationship to medieval Christian tradition. This wider aspect of Gothic
architecture was soon explored by, among others, Wilhelm Heinse, who described
Milan Cathedral as ‘the most glorious symbol of the Christian religion I have ever
seen,’ and by Friedrich Wilhelm Schlegal, who also propagated the belief that Gothic
architecture was a tangible expression of the Infinite (Schlegal, like Pugin, was a
converted Roman Catholic). In 1835, Johannes Wetter laid out the true principles of
the Gothic structural system for the first time in his guide to Mainz Cathedral. The
German enthusiasm for such architecture led to Cologne Cathedral being completed
according to the original thirteenth century plans in 1842, the king of Prussia laying
the foundation stone.

No other country, however, committed itself to Gothic with the passion of the British.
The hallmark of German architectural historicism, for example, was actually the

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‘Rundbogenstil’ or ‘round-arched style,’ rather than the Gothic pointed. This derived
from a synthesis of early-Christian, Byzantine, German, and Italian Romanesque and
Renaissance styles. Germany was one of the first countries to get the past out of its
system, and was an early exponent of Functionalism (although Gothic style remains in
Expressionism). French architecture largely resisted Gothic style in the eighteenth
century, turning instead to Classicism (which can be seen in the work of her great
architect Ange-Jacques Gabriel), and neo-Classicism, signalling a new attitude to
antiquity where a Roman regularity of style was combined with the structural
lightness of Gothic, perfectly represented by Jacques Germain Soufflot’s Panthéon in
Paris (built between 1757 and 1790), with a Wren-inspired dome resting upon Gothic
piers. By the end of the eighteenth century, a new generation of architects had moved
towards radical experimentation inspired by Classicism and the theories of Piranesi.
There was a certain Romanticism in the jardin anglais, such as the Bagatelle by
François-Joseph Bélanger (1778), but the trend was rather neo-Gothic, with the
Gothic and the Classical interacting throughout the nineteenth century. The chapel of
Louis XVIII at Dreux, for example, was originally Classical (1816 – 22), but when it
was enlarged in 1832 it went Gothic. The most committed French Gothicist was
Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, who analysed the style in his Dictionnaire
raisonné de l’architecture François (1854 – 68). Viollet-le-Duc saw the Gothic as the
product of a secular civilization succeeding the religious domination of the Middle
Ages, based on rational construction employing the system of rib vault, flying buttress
and buttress. The ribs are a skeleton, and its influence is apparent in the Eiffel Tower
and in the work of Baron Victor Horta in Brussels. His theories also inspired some
inconclusive Medieval revivalism in Russia.

Finally, in the thoroughly Grecian United States, Gothic had some effect on Church
design. Notable Gothic churches include Grace Church, New York (designed by
James Renwick and built in 1846), the Church of the Holy Trinity, Brooklyn (Richard
Upjohn, 1841 – 46), and the Episcopalian Cathedral, Washington (designed by
George Frederick Bodley in 1907 and finally completed in 1990). ‘Carpenter’s
Gothic,’ an eighteenth century English term is also applied to nineteenth century
American wooden buildings with exterior Gothic motifs. Other significant
international examples of the Gothic Revival are the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
(Petrus Josephus Hubertus Cuypers, 1877 – 85), the Vienna Town Hall (Friedrich von

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Schmidt, 1872 – 83) and the Houses of Parliament, Budapest (Imre Steindl, 1839 –
1902).

By the end of the nineteenth century advances in technology led to Art Nouveau, an
attempt to integrate old and new, but as the age of European empire collapsed into the
crisis of belief, and therefore representation, that followed the industrial carnage of
the First World War, less became more in art, design and architecture. The Romantic
excesses of the Victorian era thus gave way to the utility and experiment of
Modernism, and a new generation of architects who would disdain the over-
ornamentation of the Gothic.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Clark, Kenneth. The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste. London:
Constable & Co., 1928.

Condit, C.W. American Building Art: The Nineteenth Century. New York, 1960.

Ferriday, P. ed. Victorian Architecture. London, 1963.

Fitch, J.M. American Building. 2 vols. New York, 1966-72.

Giedion, S. Spätbarocker und Romantischer Klassizismus. Munich, 1922.

—. Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition. 4th ed. Harvard:
University Press, 1963.

Hamlin, T. Greek Revival Architecture in America. New York, 1944.

Hautecoeur, L. Histoire de l’architecture classique en France, vols 5, 6, and 7. Paris,

Hitchcock, H.R. Achitecture: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. London, 1958; 2nd
ed. 1963.

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Hitchcock, H.R. Early Victorian Architecture in Britain. 2 vols. New Haven and
London, 1954.

Hughes, Robert. American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America. New York,
1997.

Jordy, W. American Buildings and their Architects. Garden City, 1972.

Kimball, Domestic Architecture of the American Colonies and of the early Republic.
New York, 1922.

Macaulay, James. The Gothic Revival 1745 – 1845. London: Blackie, 1975.

Morrison, Hugh. Early American Architecture. New York, 1952.

Murray, Peter, Murray, Linda. The Oxford Companion to Christian Art and
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Muthesius, S. The High Victorian Movement in Architecture. London, 1972.

Pevsner, Nikolaus. An Outline of European Architecture. 7th ed London: Penguin,

—. Pioneers of Modern Design. 2nd ed. London: Penguin, 1991.

—. Some Architectural Writers of the Nineteenth Century. Oxford, 1972.

Pugin, Austus Welby Northmore. Contrasts; or, A Parallel Between the Noble
Edifices of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, and Similar Buildings of the
Present Day; shewing the Present Decay of Taste: Accompanied by appropriate Text.
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Rosenau, H. ed. Boulée’s Treatise on Architecture. London, 1953.

Stanton, Phoebe. Pugin. London: Thames and Hudson, 1971.

Watkin, David. English Architecture. London: Thames and Hudson, 1978.

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