Chapter 18 Age of Great Cathedrals—Gothic Art
Theme: Height and Light
Big Ideas: Time of turmoil (hundred years’ war between England and France); Black
Death (plague); Great Schism (opposing popes ruling in Rome and Avignon); Time of
change (shift in intellectual and religious life from Monasteries in countryside to
pilgrimage churches in cities); Urban Gothic Centers (Cathedrals, Universities, Royal
Courts that focused on chivalry and romance tales); Modern nations begin to take shape;
Scholasticism (dialectical reasoning and an attempt to reconcile Christian theology with
classical and late antiquity philosophy).
Terms:
Abbot Suger
Armature
Rose window
Lancets
Moralized bibles
Chevet
pointed arch
flying buttress
Aristotelean philosophy
scholasticism
Ile-de-France
Rayonnant
Flamboyant
pieta
fan vaults
rib vault
lux nova
triforium
S-Curve
ogee arches
Giorgio Vasari- father of Art History; lived 1511-1574. Used Gothic as a term of ridicule
to describe late medieval art and architecture as monstrous and barbaric, suggesting it
was invented by Goths.
Lorenzo Ghiberti- lived 1378-1455. characterized Middle Ages as a period of decline. He
placed Greco-Roman art on a pedestal and blamed Goths for the downfall of the Roman
Empire.