The Gothic Quest (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE GOTHIC ASCENDENCY 7"HAT, in exact terms, do we mean by " this phrase, "The Gothic Ascendency?" We realize, of course, that after a certain date a particular form of architectural design came most conspicuously into being, in a few years superseding the rough, round-arched style that had halted along with rather indeterminate results through several centuries. We know that this new and radical mode of building became popular almost instantly, quickly discredited all that had gone before, was accepted by all the nations of Europe, and for three centuries was the only recognized mode of architectural expression, changing constantly, it is true, developing always, taking on varied qualities and aspects in accordance with the ethnic traditions and racial temper of the several peoples that accepted it, yet remaining always a definite style in spite of its mutations, an easily recognized type, whether it is reflected in the green Venetian lagoons or in the ripples of the English rivers; whether it dominates the level fields of the He de France or becomes one with the crags of the Rhine. Now what does this signify, this sudden and victorious advent of a style apparently without traceable ancestry? for in its structrual methods, its schemes of composition, the development of its detail, the genius of its ornamentation, it is utterly unlike anything that had gone before, confessing in its ancestry far less kinship with the Norman, Romanesque, and Lombard it had discomfited and destroyed, than was so easily traceable between Greek and Egyptian, Byzantine and Roman, for example. Hitherto each recognized new style had been but a development, an elaboration of some immediate prototype, tinged by new blood perhaps, but essentially the same. Even the adoption of the arch by the Rom...