all right you guys it's time to get Gothic I included these images from the grotesque figures that are on the top balcony of the Twin Towers at notredam in Paris there's a lot of cathedrals that are called notredam our lady referring to the Virgin Mary and so you need to look to see where that particular Cathedral is at so notam dupi is the main cathedral in the heart of Paris and when you go there and you will and actually this is one of the few places that I have been and the things that we've been looking at my day at notredam was so magical I got there during choir practice and so that you could enter but you couldn't make any noise and to hear the choir singing and it was almost dusk it was an amazing experience I also was able to travel up to these towers where these images are in fact I've got a picture of myself standing right next to the two um grotesques on the right but I can't find that picture it's it obviously very old I was your age when I went but uh to go up to the top of the towers you walk up a spiral staircase that spiral staircase is made out of stone and every step is worn because of the now thousands of tourists but before thousands of priests and monks running up those Towers to ring the bells and it's just such an amazing place and I want to give you an idea of really how Magic the gothic Cathedrals can be so the name Gothic was guess what added after the fact as you move on in the study of art history so many times the names of the periods were named after the fact and our man vasari who's the sort of that that B+ a minus uh painter from the mid Renaissance period who writes the book about the lies of artist he's the one who looks back at Gothic Cathedrals and says it is a monstrous and barbarus style um in fact what these really were were enormous Monumental pieces of architecture made to replicate the holy city of God and we're going to explain more about what that means shortly so let's take a look at what's going on in Gothic France we're going to study gothic art by beginning in its Homeland all right and that would be the geographic region known as France today remember we talked about the invading groups the and the Goths well they came from the region that will be France and that's where the term Gothic came from because the GS and the Goths were these barbarians but what's really happening now are several interesting factors that help us place the cathedrals in context we've got some interesting um things that happen including a slow population increase with the hiccup of the uh plague of the black death which is going to take a quarter of the population towards the end of the gothic period and into the protor Renaissance period we have growth of urban centers because now we've got of course more and more Surplus agriculture people who are um going to be morphing now from the feudal system to a guild trade economy and then the cathedral is going to be the religious Center and every city is going to want to have a cathedral that is more fabulous than the city next door and so it's going to force a kind of competition this is also the time of the Hundred Years War where Eng land and France are constantly after one another so as you walk away from our study of Gothic architecture I want you to have achiev achieved the following learning objectives to understand the role of architecture in the development of the cohesive Gothic style so architecture is is what is going to drive Gothic style in other mediums I'm going to want you to establish why it began in France and I want you to be able to visually recognize the difference between an early High ronat and late Gothic style and hopefully that will become clear to you as we look at some of the different churches in question and to be able to explain those the three significant architectural innovations that we find in Gothic Cathedrals so France French gothic church gothic church architecture can be divided into these four categories that I just mentioned to you believe it or not they made 80 of these Grand structures in a period of about a hundred years very few people would live long enough to see a cathedral to completion so the person who were the The Originators of the project the early building consultants and stonemasons would often um they they would not live to see it be completely made sometimes these styles are referred to with a two uh sets of terms you see there in red the Opus modum referring to Modern work and the Opus francen or French work because the gothic period has its roots here in France then this is why they are considering it to be a turn away from the Roman style the Romanesque style this is also a time where universities are developing where Cathedrals are located so it makes them places of learning okay a role that monasteries used to have is now being turned over to the cathedral itself so the age of the great Gothic Cathedrals ranges a approximately 1100 to 1250 CE again architecture is going to dictate Gothic style we will take a look at just a very few secular buildings because it's all about religious architecture the term Cathedral is based on the Latin term cathedral which means seat so a cathedral is the seat or home of the bishop not every church is a cathedral only the church where the bishop is Affiliated is known as that so we also see secular buildings that include castles palaces hospitals Guild halls and a change of rural Romanesque monasteries now is going to go away and the gothic Cosmopolitan style is going to come forward Society wise we've got uh as I mentioned before the Surplus agriculture uh and now importantly a change to a monetary economy so we've got coin well you know we had coin during the Roman period but that only existed throughout the Roman Empire now coin is going to a allow people to invest to profit to trade versus a strict barter economy the Latin will be spoken in church but the vernacular of the region will take over so you're going to have French Regional versions of French same thing in Italian same same thing in the Germanic region as well France acquires Flanders Brugge tours amen o and Normandy finally from England after the Hundred Years War this is going to increase nationalism both with the French public and with the British as well Germany remains a series of small independent city states grouped in that large kind of amorphous category known as the Holy Roman Empire German kings have limited power because there is a set of electors who choose them now you're going to see shifting alliances with the Pope okay there's going to be jocking for position with the monarchs of France and England and the pope as to who is the most important that's going to be something that carries forward advancements in Weaponry is going to allow the um early monarchs to grab vest amount of land and they're going to need people to manage that land those are going to be the vassels and the vassals are going to collect taxes those taxes in turn are going to support the uh Waring infrastructure of the Army and the Navy and they're also going to support the building programs of the different monarchs so the feudal system will come to the end at the period uh at the end of the gothic period and we'll have a larger middle class now that's going to transfer to the Guild system more for the middle class the first structure that we're going to look at is s Deni it is the um primary breakthrough structure in Gothic architecture it was designed in part by the Abbot who was in charge Abbott suer understand at the early Gothic period there is no such thing as an architect there is the person who is commissioning the building which is usually the church and there is a set of Artisans glass Artisans stone masons who are going to work in concert with the person who has the commissioning ideas to come up with what the great plan is going to be S Deni is just outside of Paris and it was sort of the official worship site of the French court and that's part of the reason there was time and money to create what goes on here it is also the pilgrimage site for the shrine of s Deni so the church supports the king the king supports the church and so as we dive into song Den let's discuss why why Paris okay and why France there was no uh local development of strong Romanesque taste in this region so they were open to Innovations and international influences uh efforts the French King to make themselves appear Superior to other monarchs is never a problem and that's part of what's going to drive this machine so the fact that the uh French monarchy wants to look Superior and then within the French society each major town is going to want to have a cathedral more fabulous than the last so it is Abbott suer who's going to oversee the rebuilding of the Romanesque abbey church which was damaged by a fire remember we talked about in the end of the Romanesque period the rep placement of uh wood Timber roof lines for those that were Stone and much more impermeable to Flame a very important part of Innovations that's going to continue on here as well so look for a strong association between the ABY and the French monarchy because of its proximity to Paris strengthening the relationship between the church and the King Sani who this uh church is named after was a patron saint of France and had strong it was a real person who really lived with strong ties to Charlemagne and he was a fellow who crowned both Charlemagne and his father pepen before him so you can see that there is this strong affiliation with with monarchy here this becomes then the ultimate pilgrimage church and that is part of suer su's um role as well we're going to note a lot of elongated forms that look quite different from what we saw during the Romanesque and Innovations in Windows so this is the region there's Paris right there and this is our church in question all right so in the upper right hand corner you have a photograph of how the church looks today part of what helps you um visually memorize these structures is to by looking at the facade you notice that the facade today does not look like the facade at the time the building was was originally constructed uh you can see here that the left Tower was disassembled first the cap was taken off and then the tower was taken off so it is not symmetrical so the West facade then in the upper right as it looks today and in the uh upper left as it looked before it was dismantled in the isometric drawing here you notice that some of the Innovations including the use of flying buttresses we're going to talk about them in detail and show show you some schematics to emphas how the engineering was done there here is the plan view with this nicely Illustrated little uh text at the bottom that tells you where everything is so for example uh the uh re the reliquary for S Deni the patron saint who the church is named after is right here in the center of the apps here's the ambulatory so that hasn't changed so the changes you're going to see are uh uh narrowing and widening of the Nave uh again doubling of aisles and some important things that you can't really point out here in this plan view what you've got here in the apps of this church is seven wedge shaped radiating forms that come from the center of the apps so this is right where the altar is where I just showed you here number 10 right here and now now of course these are implied lines so the radiating chapels that we saw in the Romanesque architecture which is almost like a little niche now are going to be reduced so that they are undulations in the wall of the church they can also have these relics in front of them but they aren't set back and they are filled with glass which changed things very much here uh the side chapels merge to form a second ambulatory so there is the first ambulatory and then the second ambulatory and you see you know these images they just don't do it justice it's very hard to understand what you're looking at but you can get the sensation of the height because of the gothic arch of the light because of the addition of many more windows so this is the uh vaulting system of the ambulatory uh and where the radiating radiating chapels um interplay here is the rib Vault and here are the groin vaults as they join so remember long ago back in Rome we talked about two barrel vaults of 45 degree angles become a groin Vault you can hardly see the groin Vault because of all the detail this is 100% unreinforced stone masonry building and if that doesn't scare you it should so there is some design flexibility here that will allow any shape imaginable within the ambulatory because of the innovations that we're going to see this one happens to be a nice wedge shaped that does a semicircle but they also see examples of trapezoids and pentagons so there's a lot of geometry in um the art of this period as well now you get the idea here Su was quoted as saying Harmony is all the s is the source of all Beauty and that's what he wants here he wants a harmonious structure where all the independent Parts work in concert with each other Harmony the relationship of the parts to the whole For the First Time The Pilgrimage choir plan the pointed Arch the ribbed groin Vault gives us the sense of light light in both senses of the word lightweight visually because of these elongated forms and because now we've got more glass than we do stone slim columns made possible by this extreme vaulting system the apps of this Chapel is full of light windows are no longer little slits cut into thick walls as we saw with a Romanesque in fact you don't even see a wall it appears to be solid glass but of course these are all Stone members that help support the glass that you see the heaviest supports and the structures are on the exterior you don't see them inside this is one of the other great advantages with uh the flying buttress system is that the support structures are outside and helps you attain this full of light in the other sense of the word because of the use of stained glass and this Mystic reflective nature that you see going on here suer called it miraculous light that floods the choir through the most sacred stained glass he referred to it as the light Divine evidence of the spirit of God God and this is the whole point the point of these buildings was to leave you a struck When you entered them and I think that that were very successful in that here so a medieval architect whoever was the leader of the project okay so don't think of a medieval architect in the same construct as you would today a collaboration between the patron the Builder the master builder each Cathedral would require several hundred stone masons several thousand laborers and they came up with technological advancements that they had discovered through Warfare and they apply them with construction techniques for example the development of of a crane system for lifting heavy building materials they attached a series of ropes and pulleys to what is in effect a hamster wheel and two men would get inside the wheel and start walking forward and it would slowly slowly lift these heavy ston Stones up higher and higher as each level was completed they could move this wheel system somewhere else so here again is the the photograph of the West facade um Norman uh Norman Romanesque influence here you can see it it's just a little bit heavier and blockier in the front and if you were to match this image up with uh the notredam in Paris you would see what I'm mean um you could a clear interest by in Abu suer in the sculpture program making sure that the portals one two three are filled with sculpture sadly the tremo in the center portal would have had an image of s Den it would have been right here but this part of the door system was enlarged and that tremo was removed which is very unfortunate here metal doors melted down by an agry mob during the French Revolution so the original intent of the facade that you see there in the small image on the left is gone okay this is a peer buttress here so there's four one 2 3 4 and you can see how it looks like it's an Engaged column right those are generally decorative but these really do have a weightbearing aspect to them there's the close of the portal again and you see we've got a sculpture program in the tonum notice that we're using two different colors of stone here that helps make the entrance more distinctive set apart from the white stone that you see otherwise this is a schematic that shows you the narrative these become very simple to read with a little bit of practice the Christ centered in a mandora uh surrounded by angels in the arch of olds okay the dove the Holy Spirit okay the way to represent that is through the use of a bird rather than through the image of God himself and then suer is even included in a little tiny sculptural tribute there one of the interesting artifacts that comes from s Deni is the virsion je de evu this is a image of the Virgin Mary it is silver that has been guilt in gold um so rather than than gold leaf it is applied in more of a liquid kind of form this is going to show this early connection with an interest in fine metal work remember the um early Christian Bible covers that were made with metal uh the Sutton who purse clip those kinds of things so there's always an interest in the artistic possibilities of metal more importantly look we're finally getting back an interesting naturalistic depiction now it isn't going to be Universal but we see the hints of it here look at that S curve that she stands in see her head goes one way her shoulders another her hips in another so very sophisticated rendering here sophisticated drapery treatment as well and look at the connection between the Christ child and his mother the baby gesturing out to touch his mother's lips here she is holding the flu Dee which is the symbol of French royalty and that's right there that's what this is 1 two three symbol of the French royalty also I make that point again about how interesting it is to look at these works of art from another angle because this is not as attractive a sculpture as it is when you look at it from this direction she's standing on a platform here with different enameled scenes of her life and of the Life of Christ This is a diagram that we're going to refer to several times and what it is is it's showing you the evolution of the gothic Nave elevation so remember we've got a plan view an elevation View and a section view in a cathedral elevation you're standing in the center of the church in the Nave all right picture yourself facing the altar now turn 45 degrees either way you're going to be facing the wall of the Nave that is the Nave elevation and so this is the ground level where your feet are and you are probably able to your eyes straight ahead look here and then up up up to the different portions of the cathedral uh the Cathedral at Leon is the oldest the Cathedral at amen is newer and one of the tallest and so this is showing you how they elongate the form how they take the basic elements of the arcade and the gallery and the Clara story and then now they're going to add a triforium a another level that they add in the center here so the aisles are right underneath okay not easy to figure out in this schematic quickly there is Leon we're not going to discuss it in detail we're just going to kind of uh cherry-pick our uh our churches here all right so notredam in Paris since this is the one I know you're going to attend when you go to Paris it is right next to the lou it's right across the send from all the the famous bridges that you see all the time so you just must go and what is so interesting is often you're used to seeing notredam from the front and it has a very blocky facade but the real fascinating stuff is at the back end of the church right so here's the narx where you enter here are the two Twin Towers this is where those grotesques were that I was talking about on the introductory slide and then here are the flying buttresses around the back of the church you see this is one end of the the transcept right the um Pinnacle here over the crossing and so for me notredam is more interesting from the back than it is from the front let's take a look at the Cathedral known as s it's really considered to be the Pinnacle of High Gothic AR architecture just wing it and say sh and you can you can get away with it here this is uh created then in this part of the world closer to the border of what will become Germany this is a land of political stability shot had to be rebuilt after the fires in 119 94 took only 26 years to build this cathedral which is really amazing it was a pilgrimage Church based on the fact that it held a relic the Garment of the Virgin Mary which miraculously survived that fire of 1194 so that tells you how imbued um it it was with this uh miraculous uh Concepts here so this is going to be be a place where pilgrims are going to continue to go uh one of the things I want you to think about especially when you think about shatra is that it's out in the countryside and that if you were a resident of the region you would see this Monument structure no matter where you were it stood out above a rather flat Horizon and gave you this idea that to remind you constantly the presence of the church and the presence of God the Cathedral at shra is a synthesis of aesthetic and Engineering Miracles by this point in time now we begin to have true architects who designing plans and we are going to have their names written down so because of the political stability of this time the Hundred Years War is over there can be more focus on Monumental architecture here is an aerial view of shra this is the main facade and the great signifier of shra is they've got two Pinnacles two towers that do not match everything is very symmetrical until this point of time and then they don't match okay originally they did this one was damaged and was replaced by some simpler than this Gothic Gothic style you could say that this is a traditional cruciform structure right so you've got the transcept crossing the Nave at a 45 degree angle you can also enter this church uh at the uh far ends of the transcept as well and so this church is designed with extra wide aisles and Nave for the massive number of pilgrims that we see here um and this width runs the entire length all the way around the ambulatories at well you as well you see a set of radiating chapels a double ambulatory you can enter here here or here these are the towers that I showed you initially generally uh you entered through the Old West Portal so north south east west they mean this one and when you did you were plunged Into Darkness because this was a a dark space with no windows and then as you stepped out into this portion you were a struck by the exceptional quality of light that you see here intentional drama signifying um you're entering into God's kingdom and that you were leaving the Earthly World Behind so here then is a cutaway to give you an idea of how these flying buttresses work the uh here's the Nave here is the aisle and then these structures here are the buttressing systems now we saw the hints of buttressing in those late Romanesque churches that we looked at previously but now things are really going to be solidified here you notice these little Pinnacles these are not just for show they actually help by adding weight that thrusts straight down and they hold the Pinnacles together uh it's very important that you watch the film The NOA a film on the constructions of the cathedrals that are uh just above um this link on the um on the Moodle page because it really helps demonstrate the construction which is really far beyond uh what we are are capable of because we can't see what's going on so now here is the Nave elevation of shatra showing here the wall as a coherent set of units with your eye moving ever upward so the pointed Arch one of the Hallmarks of Gothic construction the pointed Arch the triforium and then the Clara story now with these matched sets of stain glass windows known as Lancet topped by a rose window so again buttressing visible only outside the church this is the Nave this is the aisle and you can't see any of this the weight from this tremendously heavy roof is being carried down the flying butress and then sent down to the ground and then there is that little pointy Pinnacle that helps hold this all in place this level right here the triforium is the equivalency of this right here a strong pyramid as you recall helps hold everything together the buttressing also helped with wind resistance if you can can imagine what it's like for this huge structure on this open plane if there was a big Windstorm they could be in real trouble so buttressing also served to help hold everything in place it is an aesthetic engineering concept there is the facade so the two unmatched Towers let you know you are at shatra the triple portal triple lancets and an enormous Rose window there's a shot down the Nave oh and just for fun the extra bonus about shatra is its narrative that runs in the stained glass ju see there there are over 180 Windows um located in the clearest story alone this is going to change the quality of light here and it is going to have a very Mystic poetic symbolic feeling and just for fun you can run around and look at the different numbers and see what all we've got going on here so you've got the Life of Christ the life of the Virgin Mary um different stories from from um the evangelists and so these were teaching tools okay remember um the public is still largely illiterate and they're used to hearing the Bible stories oddly um being given to them when the priests speak but now this Church reads like a book this is a closeup then of the lady who known as our lady of the beautiful window notam de I don't know how to say that you know me and my me and my French is not very good so this is the main choir area um stained glass window hundreds and hundreds of tiny pieces of glass held together by lead assembled s similar sarly to a mosaic or jigsaw puzzle the construction process was complicated and there were many different Artisans who came into play there was initially the master designer who designed the entire window concept and transferred that to a paper drawing the paper drawing then would be laid down on a piece of wood and the drawing transferred from the paper to the wood then the glass blower would go to work creating these long colored glass tubes um let's see anywhere from the sides of a roll of a paper towel to something um the diameter of a dinner plate they would blow the tube and then they would cut it and as it cooled it would fall into a flat form then these individual pieces would be cut from the paper the paper would be applied to the colored glass and used as a pattern that they would trace the glazers then would cut those little pieces and then someone would sit and solder these all together finally then they would all be hand painted the facial details I'm going to show you a closeup in a minute um were all hand painted and so because of this process it's going to encourage a kind of abstraction that goes very well with the ideas of of the representation of the human form during the the gothic period there is no attempt for reality okay it's just not going to happen this is from one of the uh a close-up then to show you the rest of the images in this cycle this is a kind of unprecedented planning for something that is a minor art a decorative art if you will and it is in effect a form of a giant geometry project so there's the Holy Spirit there's Mary there's Christ giving a blessing gesture the wedding at Kaa the different uh Miracles um that kind of thing all depicted here like I said this is the kind of stuff that grad students do they sit there for hours and hours this is the best picture I could find to give you an idea of the effect that was caused by these amazing stained glass windows and this light is going to kind of move and flutter as as the day goes by here then a closeup of the Rose window there are are several Rose windows so this is the Rose window and these are the lancets okay each one of them is going to have a a figure from The Bible um maybe one of the Apostles and again they are dactic in nature these are teaching tools to help people learn the stories of the Old and New Testament a schematic again giving you the idea of what's going on also including the Royal Arms of both France and Castile featured here in the lancets see that there is the the flor de Lee and here is the castle Castile okay so France and Spain they're making a little a little homage there with a figure of the Virgin Mary and the Christ child enthroned in the center and so I mentioned this interest in Geometry this is from a Sketchbook of a known artist named Oni court and it shows you how he's using basic geometry to figure out how to depict these different images that need to show up in stained glass windows so he is relating the Sheep here to a rectangle and a triangle uh the eagle to a pentagram uh dividing the human form into these little places now wouldn't it have been interesting if they had known about the Greek Cannon of proportion this is part of the portal structure uh from the West facade okay so side portals main portal with elaborate Stone carving and here is a closeup of just one of the images where we're looking now are right here okay bang bang bang these are the jams and so this is a jam figure this is St Theodore and he is part of a grouping where is where'd he go there he is part of a grouping okay so we're going to focus on Theodore here and you're now going to see a marked Evolution uh from this stiff and rigid form that we're seeing elsewhere and even Elsewhere on this church the um columns sort of take a back seat if you will and he steps out and he's standing on a flat platform that makes sense his other colleagues in sculpture here on the jams you see these little weird scky things it's like these guys are floating they're levitating and they're really not you know that so this is an attempt to show something a little bit more realistic Okay g to go here sorry for all the clicking you notice that he stands with a very slight scurve and just a hint of contraposto you get the slightest hint of his knee pushing out there lots of detail on the Weaponry the chain mail tunic that he's wearing this is an organic body and we haven't seen anything like this since the fall of Rome an idealized portrait um that goes along in keeping with the um the spiritual quest of the Crusades not an ex